Life in the Japanese village of the outback. Japanese village with hundreds of statues
I could sit in one place all month in Japan and remain just as pleased. But I decided: if you are going to travel, then you need to plan everything so that the trip is the most diverse. Therefore, Takayama ended up on my route: firstly, these are mountains, and secondly, these are Gassno's houses. From Takayama, you could go to a few more places, for example, to famous village Shirakawago and the world's largest cable car, but bus routes turned out to be refreshingly expensive. Of course I was aware Japanese prices on trains, they are scary, but there are ways to save money, and there are no ways to save money on buses. A round-trip ticket for the route, which lasts only an hour, costs 5,000 yen. for the sake of cable car, or rather, for the sake of the view from it, I would have paid so much plus about so much for tickets to the road itself, but it was closed for the annual technical inspection for exactly the 5 days that I was in Takayama, literally the same day.
Therefore, I had to be content with walking around Takayama itself and the local village of Gassno, or rather the museum, which was made based on it, gathering all the old houses on one territory. The name "gassno" comes from the word for hands folded in prayer. Those. in Nepalese, you can say that this is the village of Namaste =) The reasons for choosing this form are not religious, it’s just that in this region of Japan there is a lot of snow in winter.
All of these houses were built during the Edo period, meaning they could be between 400 and 150 years old. Wow! Something, of course, was restored, but it's still hard to believe that a simple tree could stand for so long.
Spring, icicles on the roof.
Each house belonged to a family, and so it is called by name. You can wander inside and visit different rooms.
It's mostly very dark in there, and my camera doesn't have a flash, so there's only one photo.
You can wander among the trees and feel like you are in ancient Japan. I additionally catch flashbacks of Indonesia and Batak houses on Lake Toba. All these mountains I have traveled South-East Asia and collected in my mind a collection of what I like best in each country. And then she came to Japan and found all this here. Even my favorite houses improved for winter! There is also a lake, but it is small.
The pure truth about a lot of snow. Outside mid-April, and still how much!
Thatched roofs.
And again icicles on the roofs.
How beautiful it is here!
The structure of the Japanese village is completely preserved. There is a temple at the very top, and old statues of Buddhas in aprons.
And other religious buildings.
There are vegetable gardens.
Wood shed.
Mill.
And a cast-iron kettle ripens on the coals.
If it were not for the lack of people, museum displays and signs on every corner, one could really imagine that he was in the distant past.
You can take a picture in clothes near the cart, and for free, but it’s probably no longer possible to wander around the village in a suit.
Puppet Museum. These dolls were exhibited at the entrance to houses in which there were children-girls, so that they would grow well and be healthy. The doll was supposed to be not one, but a whole set. Dolls for this museum were donated by local residents.
Sudden retro hi-tech. Something souvenir for tourists.
Today I will completely overwhelm you with beauty, because. right after the village, I climbed to the top of the mountain. Up the neat steps.
Okay, I won't exaggerate. And along the road, littered with snow, I had to make my way, and along the forest path.
But in the most dangerous and difficult places there were steps and railings anyway. This is Japanese concern for others and love for details.
Beautiful. And there is a bench to admire this beauty.
Something like this.
Or without extra objects in the frame.
I could still walk along various small tracks to get to a few more temples, but the snow blockages on the road and the total emptiness caused certain doubts in me. Yes, and my sneakers are already wet, despite all the Japanese concern for the neighbor.
I would love to come back here with good shoes, a bike and plenty of time to wander around and ride a lot. The mountains in Japan are no worse than the Himalayas.
It is generally accepted that Japan is the richest country of the winning high-tech and the whole life of a Japanese consists of cool gadgets, erotic comics and anime cartoons. I had the opportunity to spend a day in a traditional Japanese house in a remote (by local standards) village 50 km from the city of Osaka.
Around rice fields, wooded hills, peasant houses and an electric train running every 15 minutes. In such places, life seems to have stopped in the seventies: young people do not want to live in the countryside and move to the city, and the old people are gradually dying. Agriculture has long become unprofitable against the backdrop of a rapidly developing science-intensive industry, a couple of decades will pass and what I will talk about next will turn into the property of history. So, listen and see how ordinary Japanese live in an ordinary village
The station is located about a kilometer from the house of our friends, where I am on my way. As a child, when my grandfather had a garden near Sverdlovsk, I also stomped from the train to the house as a kid. Unless in the Soviet village they didn’t know what asphalt and sewerage were, but here everything is civilized
For the most part, solid rural houses
A small palm-sized venomous monster called a phalanx has been spotted
Pay attention to the fire hatch
The house of our Japanese friends and an unexpected telescope at the entrance
Do you know what these carp flags at the entrance mean? In Japan, there is a holiday, Boys' Day, in honor of which flags are hung in every house where there are boys. The idea is that the carp is strong and can swim against the current, achieving its goal at any cost.
There are traces of a recent earthquake on the wall.
At the entrance, the Japanese take off their shoes. I remember the stupid habit in the same Israel to enter the house from the street without taking off your shoes. And no one cares that there may be children in the house, they crawl on the floor and collect all the dirt and infections on themselves
The kitchen is the living room
The unit above the tap is just titanium that warms the water. Nearby, on the left, a rice cooker is a must-have gadget in any Japanese home, because rice is the main ingredient in any Japanese meal.
On the fridge is a map of shelters where to run in case of earthquakes or floods.
A whole hell of a scheme on how to properly throw away garbage. For example, if you have a pet, some cat and he died, you cannot go and bury him in the forest. You must call the sanitation service, which will take the lifeless body and dispose of it to prevent the spread of infections, and it will cost you 3,000 yen (about $ 30), the corresponding picture in the lower right corner
Schedule, when and what kind of garbage to throw out. For example, you can’t just drag old furniture to the trash can, you have to call the mayor’s office and they will come specially and pick up bulky garbage. Also, not every day you can throw away glass containers, but only 1-2 days a week. Break the rules - you will be fined, and the neighbors will certainly inform you that they say this gaijin (foreigner) threw the glass containers into the paper trash on the wrong day
Do you know what that ancient gadget is downstairs?
Living room, here they sit on the floor, as you understand
The whole house is one common space where sliding doors. If you push everything as far as possible, then you find yourself in one large room. But in the evening the house returns to its original three-room state. Pay attention to the children's railway
In winter, the Japanese warm themselves from a kerosene (!) heater. Temperatures in these places drop to zero degrees and one cannot live without heating, and there is no centralized heat supply
Attic where rabbits live
By the way, rabbits are not for food at all, they are family favorites here.
Do you know what that plaque is on the wall? Who can guess?
Traditional bathroom and sad traces of a recent earthquake
Well, respectively, the restroom
Storage room with washing machines and dryers
Also, on the street there is again a kerosene shower water heater, and a fuel tank a little to the right at the bottom
Small garden in the backyard
Right next to the house, literally five meters away is the train. But you know what? There is noise, but minimal, in Japan these things are strict. Nevertheless, in the morning I heard a train rushing through my dream. The locals have long been accustomed to and do not worry about this
An hour later, I take one of these trains and leave for Kansai Airport in Osaka, Taiwan is waiting for me.
Well, lunch on the road and go
This is what it looks like on average japanese village. Somewhere people live a little richer, somewhere poorer, this is a kind of average level. You probably imagined Japanese life a little differently, but remember the saying "do not confuse tourism with emigration." For example, in the villages there are many empty houses, whose owners have died and they have no heirs. So they stand abandoned for years and decades, no one needs real estate in such places. Here is a neighboring house, whose owners have long been dead
Old letters in the mailbox
moss-covered beer bottles
There are a lot of their own problems here, which the Japanese simply do not like to take out of their society, unlike you and me, who are sick of the whole world complaining about our hard life.
When I read about the fact that something abandoned was found in Japan, I just can’t understand how on such a tiny island where people live almost like in Russia there is a place for something abandoned? For a long time we even discussed with you a whole abandoned island, I don’t know what is happening there now.
But imagine that Japanese photographer Ken Ohki, better known by his pseudonym Yukison, was traveling around Toyama Prefecture and accidentally stumbled upon a creepy collection of human sculptures scattered around the village of Fureai Sekibutsu no Sato. The name of the unusual settlement can be translated as "Village where you can meet Buddhist statues."
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“It seemed to me that I accidentally stumbled upon some kind of forbidden place. Incredible!” Ken posted on Twitter.
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In fact, he stumbled upon the park, which contains about 800 stone statues carved in the likeness of Buddhist deities and close relatives of the park's founder, Mutsuo Furukawa. He expected the park to become popular place for tourists, where people will come to relax. The idea is good, of course, but over time the statues have lost their aura of serenity and peace, and now seem more creepy than soothing.
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After the collapse Soviet Union and the opening of borders, a stream of Russians poured into Japan - both tourists and businessmen transporting old cars. In just a couple of years, the number of Russians living near port cities east coast increased hundreds of times. In this regard, and to popularize the Russian life in 1993, a theme amusement park called the Russian Village was opened near the city of Niigata, in which a church, a hotel, museums, restaurants, a circus and much more were built. The village existed for 10 years, after which the bank financing the project went bankrupt, and with it the village. Currently, what has been preserved on the territory is available for inspection, in particular the Suzdal Cathedral, the Trans-Siberian Museum, stuffed mammoths, books, costumes, postcards, photographs ... audio equipment... The village is located a few kilometers from railway, so they used to get there by car. Immediately after the parking lot, a copy of the Suzdal Cathedral, ticket offices and an attached hotel building, made in a classical architectural style, open up to your eyes. 
The hotel is called small, and three years ago it burned a little, set on fire by some hooligans. As a result, burned out main tower and most of the rooms on the right wing, in which melted TVs look very colorful. 
On the first floor there were administrative offices with now "leaky" racks of audio broadcasts, computer servers and boxes of various pieces of paper, in particular, licensed software from Microsoft. Disks and serial networks - everything is in place. 
Peter the Great, together with his horse, silently looks at what is happening, and we climb the stairs to the surviving rooms - both the usual suite and the wedding suite. In a regular suite, I had the honor to spend the night before exploring the village and I can say with full confidence that the room turned out to be more than worthy! 
Somewhere nearby is a restaurant and a kitchen, but it is not as interesting as the Suzdal Cathedral. Built and painted in 1993, even after almost 20 years, it has not lost the brightness of its colors. And even Taiga skis, not God knows how they got there, do not spoil the impression. 
Outside, the cathedral is no less beautiful, especially in good sunny weather. 
From the cathedral and the hotel there is a covered gallery to the entertainment part of the park. Inside the gallery there are photographs with views of Russia from Chaliapin's house to Lake Baikal. 
The gallery opens onto the first floor of the museum, where visitors were invited to get acquainted with the geography of Russia, its nature and climate. Maps on the walls, layouts on the tables - time and vandals did not spare them, but there is still something to see. 
Leaving the museum, we get to large area, around which there are various buildings - a restaurant, a forestry workshop, the Afanasiev Theater, etc... 
Desolation reigns in the restaurant, the menu is gathering dust on the floor, in the corner, delicious sausages have been smoked for fifteen years already. Judging by the text of the menu, the food was good - dumplings, borsch, pies, but the images of the dishes are very strange. 
There are no spectators in the theater, they are replaced by a mountain of chairs in front of the stage, and sound equipment looking lonely through the eyes of the speakers. 
And on the second floor there is an office that looks like after a sudden search. Books, floppy disks, photographs are scattered mixed with color copiers, laser printers and monitors. 
In the next room - posters and costumes of dubious nationality. Apparently Russians. 
A little to the side, behind the bushes, you can see an amazing mixture of an Easter egg and Orthodox Disneyland, but in fact this is a museum of the Trans-Siberian Railway - the longest railway in the world. The Japanese, for all their love of trains, still have a hard time imagining what it means to travel by train for a week. However, this is not surprising, because their Sinskansen would have passed from Moscow to Vladivostok in just a day and a half, not counting the time of stops. 
On the walls of the museum there are posters describing all the seven days of the journey and the cities that meet, in the center there is a model of the train itself. The locomotive has been gone for a long time, but three cars have been preserved, which is called "in the section", where you can see the internal structure. 
And in order to finally destroy the confidence of the Japanese in the impossibility of a week-long life in the car, in the neighboring rooms there are real compartments, a water boiler and other elements of the interior of the car, and not copies, but real ones. 
To the side of the Trans-Siberian Museum is a small, empty inside, circus and another building, much more interesting. Entering it, we immediately stumble upon the skeleton of a mammoth - the ribs under the ceiling, the skull in the corner. 
And behind the wall hides a real adult stuffed mammoth, on a scale of 100 percent of the original and a small (two meters at the withers) mammoth, which you can climb and ride. 
The last building in the village is a remake - there are ball throwers, as written for golf, but too large for them. 
Zhura-zhura-crane! He flew over a hundred lands. He flew around, went around, Wings, worked his legs. We asked the crane: Where is the best land? He answered, flying: There is no better native land! 
The Japanese village of Nagoro is dying. Of course, it has never been a noisy metropolis, but not so long ago there was a factory there and workers lived with their families. They made a living among amazing beautiful nature. But the factory closed, and the settlement began to empty.
Ayano Tsukimi returned to Nagoro after living in Osaka for a while. When she arrived, the village was already in a sad state. According to the woman, she had nothing to do, so she decided to create a garden. When this venture failed, she made her first scarecrow, reminiscent of her late father.
He was the first of many, many dolls.
To date, she has made over 350 scarecrows. All of them symbolize one of the inhabitants, who died or left. She dresses them up, sews them into suitable facial expressions, and then places them in places that had a special meaning for these people.
Some are relaxing on park benches, and some are sitting in trees, holding guns with which they once hunted. Others fish by the river with rods. Couples sit hand in hand near the houses where they once raised their children.
The buildings of the city are now also inhabited by dolls. The school, closed many years ago, was once filled with students and teachers. Today, at the teacher's table, at the blackboard, covered with lesson materials and assignments, sits a scarecrow.
The dolls are seated at their desks: inanimate children hold pencils, look into open books and make homework. Someone is standing in the corridor, waiting for class, and the director is watching his wards.
Tsukimi soon noticed that her dolls began to attract interest from the public. People came and took pictures of them - sitting in the fields, tending to plants that no longer grew, or watching the fish swim in the river.
Three years after Tsukimi started making these little people, she made one for herself. She says that she is not afraid to die, and knows that if something happens to her, it is unlikely that she will be taken to the nearest hospital in time. But she still cares about her creations.
Dolls in Nagoro are the result of a whole decade of work. Tsukimi says he will continue to make them despite mixed reactions from visitors. But at the same time, the woman is visited by the thought that someday she will be left alone, surrounded only by scarecrows. Unblinking little men, made in memory of the people who once walked the streets.
