Railway Museum

Is it lame to write a blog post about a place you don’t recommend? I went to the Transportation Museum in Omiya, about 30 minutes north of Ueno, because several Japanese people recommended it to me. To be honest, though, I see so many trains every day in Japan that it just wasn’t very interesting. The other thing was that all the displays seemed to be about the trains themselves rather than the people they carried, the workers, or how they affected society.
There were a lot of excited-looking kids there, but unless you’re a real testu-kichi (railroad geek), I’d give this place a miss.

The museum started off  well with this jinsha, a human operated railway car. The first one was built in 1895, and they operated until 1930.

This beautiful old railway car reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago. I saw a poster for a ride on a steam locomotive and thought it might be interesting. When I got there, though, it was only the locomotive that was old-fashioned. The rest of the cars, which had conveniently been obscured by smoke in the poster, were just regular JR train cars, so I basically just rode on a regular train for an hour.

Japan’s first steam locomotive.

They blow the train’s whistle and rotate it around on an old turntable every day at noon.

The museum is really crowded, far from Tokyo, and expensive (1,000 yen for admission plus 630 yen train　fare from Ueno).

The museum’s English homepage is at: http://www.railway-museum.jp/en/index.html

Tatara Festival in Kawaguchi City, Saitama

Tokyo’s Samba Carnival in Asakusa and the Awaodori Festival in Koenji are amazing spectacles, but they’re also horribly crowded. If you don’t want to be straining to peer over people’s heads, you have to be there at least an hour before things start.
If you don’t mind seeing things on a slightly smaller scale, you can see pretty much the same thing  a few weeks before in a setting where the crowds are much, much thinner.
During the Nagashi Odori part of the festival, which is based on part of the Awaodori Festival, you can pretty much walk around wherever you want. The event gets a little more crowded when the samba dancers come, but it’s nothing compared to the big Tokyo festivals.

Bboy Park 2009

The Bboy park bills itself as Japan’s biggest block party and has been held in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park since 1997. It’s a two-day event with music, dance, and Hip-hop culture.

For me, the endlessly fascinating thing about it is the way the guys transform from aggressive, fluid, Hip-hop street dancers and rappers into ultra-polite Japanese people within seconds. One minute a guy’s doing moves straight out of Harlem and the next he’s stiff and bowing up and down like a salariman.

There was a huge dance competition that went on for most of the day on Saturday that was just amazing.

The festival is held in late August every year. Check Metropolis’ event listings or the Bboy Park Homepage (Japanese only).

Odd sights in a Japanese Graveyard

These graves are all from the Ushiku Joen, the cemetery around the Ushiku Daibutsu.

As far as I know, “One Piece” is a manga about pirates and has nothing to do with volleyball. If anyone has an explanation for this, put it in the comments, please.

An English tombstone tells the world that you’re international, even in death.

Chiba Oyako Sandai Summer Festival

I’ve gone to photograph quite a few of Tokyo’s most famous festivals over the last couple of years, and although they were great, there were times when the huge crowds made them less enjoyable, so this year I decided to go and see some of the more minor ones.
I find that they’re often quite similar to the bigger, more famous ones, just on a slightly smaller scale, and with much smaller crowds. If you want to get decent photos of an event like the Samba Carnival in Asakusa, you really need to get a spot a couple of hours early, but at events like Chiba’s Oyako Sandai Natsu Matsuri, you can pretty much just show up.

In the afternoon, there’s a parade with an awa odori (traditional folk dance), marching bands, and samurai re-enactors.

Next is a demonstration of acrobatic tricks that Edo Period fire fighters used to signal wind direction and the progress of a fire. (See this post for more information.)