Japan Day 9

This day was a train run to Nagoya which was along the same line as we took to get to Himeji. We really weren’t certain what there was to do there but the tourist webpage suggested that they had a lot back when I looked it all up. The train ride was a bit less than 2 hours which was the easiest we’d done to point so at least it had that going for it. We took the 7:36 again and got there by 9:25 or so which gave us a lot of time to see what was there.

First we got to the tourist information center and spoke to a nice lady and picked up a map. Unfortunately a lot of the museum attractions are closed on Monday but at least Nagoya castle was open. She suggested we bus or subway to it but it didn’t look like that bad of a walk, about a half an hour or so, so we chose to walk instead. The first thing you would notice about Nagoya is that it is fairly run down looking. It is clean but the buildings are not new and shiny. I would say it is more of a residential and industrial city than it is the fashion city that is Tokyo. This leads me to finally point out something that disturbs me to no end. There is no trash on the streets in Tokyo all the same as Nagoya. I think in all the cities we’ve visited there have been about 3 pieces of paper on the ground. This is all good and fine, but there are also no trash barrels anywhere. I don’t understand how they manage to do it. I understand that culturally they do not walk around and eat at the same time as an American would, but still people must manufacture trash during the course of the day and then need to throw it out yet it seems like the trash barrels are miles apart.

The walk to Nagoya Castle was around a half an hour and we passed the Nagoya Noh theater which was unfortunately closed. It looked like a nice building though. The castle was not far beyond it. This castle was built by order of Tokugawa Ieyasu who was the fist of the Shogunate. About 20 families put resources into building it. It was established at about 1602. The dominant feature of the castle was the gold dolphin statues at the top of the roof. There are two that are not exact copies. One is male and one is female and the female is a bit smaller than the other. Unfortunately the actual castle and the dolphins were destroyed in 1945 by a bombing raid in World War II. The castle was rebuilt in the 50s or so and due to the style of the day they built the outside to look correct and the inside is more of a museum. The dolphins were reconstructed but I do not believe they are using the same quality of gold. The palace outside the main castle was also destroyed but they haven’t gathered enough money to rebuild that yet. They intend to reconstruct the palace as it stood in the days of Tokugawa Ieyasu. It would like nicer than the imperial palace as far as I can tell.

After the castle we drove to Nagoya Port. There again a lot of the various attractions were closed but not so the Villagio Italia. This was a reconstruction of Venice in Nagoya, complete with a canal and gondolas. Brien didn’t want to ride on the gondolas so we didn’t do that, but we did have a nice pasta dinner and the walked around for a while. It was rather comical to see and I think people will get a kick out of the pictures of it. George and I even posed for a picture with a local to add authenticity to his visiting Italy trip.

From there we since everything was closed and it began to rain we took their subway back to a spot relatively close to the train station and walked the rest of the way back where we headed back to Tokyo. With the rain we took a few less pictures than we would have liked to because we put away the cameras. We walked through an underground mall that was very big to get to the train station and it and the station were very crowded. I assume there is a lot of actual business that goes on in Nagoya so it was busy with regular commuters. The city is gigantic. It took us a half hour cab ride to get from the castle to the port and the subway ride was nearly as long.

All in all it would be better to visit Nagoya on a day other than Monday but I am not sure I would have to go back to see it again. I could easily say I would go back to Kanazawa or Himeji. I am sure I am not being fair to Nagoya but its sheer size is daunting. It was safe and clean but just not so picturesque as Tokyo. It was a good day however and I’m glad we went.