Samurai Culture at a Great Sight

4/30

There was absolutely nothing I wanted to see in Sendai and since the cherry blossoms in Kitakami still hadn't bloomed (I'd checked on my way down yesterday), I found a random daytrip in my guidebook.

On my way to the station, I saw these cherry blossom trees, perfectly in bloom, but not a whole orchard of them, the dream I'd pretty much given up on.  They were inside a school yard and the two little girls you can sort of make out were running around trying to catch the petals as they wafted to the ground.  It was really cute, but I didn't want to be creepy so I just took one picture.

Matsushima is another of the "Three Great Sights" in Japan (remember, I visited Miyajima, one of the other two, near Hiroshima?) and it's another place that's extremely popular with Japanese tourists but not really with foreigners (which was why it was so amazing that even though it was the Friday before Golden Week, it wasn't too crowded).  It's basically a town surrounded by tons (about 250) of little islands that dot the ocean like large stepping stones.  One of the islands, Fukuura-jima, has a botanic garden on it while others are renowned for their rock formations. 

From Sendai, it was about 30 minutes on the train to Matsushimakaigan Station (confusingly, that's the stop, not Matsushima Station) and as I walked out there was a Visitor kiosk, manned with people beckoning me over and smiling.  A very helpful woman gave me an English map with descriptions of the different places to visit.

First I went to Godai-do, an old wooden temple that is only opened once every 33 years, last in 2006.  It provided a nice view and I got to walk over a funny bridge that didn't actually pose any threat of falling down, but was very awkward as the slats were too far apart.  Besides that though, it wasn't too exciting.  The botanic garden island was pretty much the same- nice but boring.  The views were lovely, but as with almost anywhere, I think it would have been much more impressive had the sun been shining.

Matsushima really is still a small fishing town and locals were collecting oysters in a very dark, stinky black mud.  I walked on the beach and saw that this island was actually connected by said mud to another of the little islands.  I decided that I really wanted to go to this island, just because.  Very gently, I stepped on the dried or stronger parts of the mud and oyster shells so I didn't fall through the mud and get wet and dirty.

For a while, I did very well, accumulating only a tiny bit of mud.  But then, that's how life is, isn't it?  It's going well, going well, going well, and then you take a wrong step and BAM! you're up to one ankle in muck and you're getting the other foot filthy in an attempt to get the first one out.  One of the shell collectors laughed at me and started talking to me, fairly extensively, in Japanese.  I didn't mind the laughing and laughed back a bit.  I'd known I was taking that risk and it was just kind of fun.  Maybe I was just in a good mood, but I felt happy.

I made it over to the island, only to discover that I could only get about four feet onto the island unless I wanted to swim.  The return to the larger island went much the same way- very good until it wasn't.  It was at about this point, when both shoes were soaked and covered in grime, that I stated to think it hadn't been my best idea ever.  I had to wash my shoes off in the public bathroom sink and then try to wait for them to dry while I played my cell phone game I'd just discovered.  Since it was going to take forever, I knew I had to put them at some point and just deal with the uncomfortableness.  My socks had somehow stayed relatively dry, so I tried to cover them to keep my feet warm.  I covered one with the plastic tissue holder, taking out the tissues, and the other with my sunglasses case which is made of some cloth/ not really but sort of waterproofy stuff.  It wasn't great, but it worked, kind of.

Hoping to buy some indoor slippers, which I'd seen at 100 yen stores (about $1 USD) I went back to the town.  I didn't see a 100 yen store so I tried some tourist shops but all they had was the traditional wooden flip-flops which were too expensive for something I'd only use for a few hours.  Oh well.  I passed by the Zuigan-ji temple but decided to skip it since I wanted to get back sooner rather than later.  The one thing at the temple that sounded interesting was closer so I just looked at these Buddhist rock carvings.  They're tablets or whatever carved directly into the cave walls.  It was okay, but not quite as cool as I'd imagined.

Next I went to the Kanrantei tea house, which means "a place to view ripples on the water" which was beautiful and had a spectacular view of the bay.  In the late 16th century, it was given to Date Masamune, a famous samurai Lord who nearly became the shogunate to control the whole of Japan.  He was known as the One-Eyed Dragon as he was blind in one eye from a childhood bout of smallpox.  Due to his influence, this area seemed to display more samurai culture than any other place I went in Japan.

The walls and sliding doors of the teahouse were decorated with gorgeous gold paintings by Kano Sakyo, a famous painter of the period.

Inside the back part of the teahouse building was a samurai history museum.  The museum was small, but fantastic.  They had a lot of samurai stuff used in daily life, including suits of armor, makeup brushes and a case, clothes, an old painted map of Matsushima and a golden shell game (all shown below in order), which was all really interesting and even better, they had information in English!

I bought a bit of squid on a stick, and some large scallops on a stick from two different food windows on the main street and headed back to Sendai, to pick up my backpack, which I'd left in a locker at the station, and to try gyutan (cow tongue).

My Mother makes tongue sometimes and I love it.  She prepares it by boiling it for a very long time with cabbage, potatoes and carrots and then slicing it.  I usually put butter on top of the slices and eat them like that.  Every once in a very rare while, I'll also enjoy a tongue taco at Papis, my favorite taqueria.  So the idea of cow tongue, far from appalling me, appealed to me and I was looking forward to seeing how they cooked it here. 

It's a specialty in Sendai that was first cooked during one of their many "hard times" and I'd been told there were several good places to get it in the station.  I chose one that had a somewhat decent price (since it's a specialty now, it's fairly expensive, though still, not really, I'm just cheap) and went in.  I sat at the counter and watched them prepare it.  They grabbed raw slices and just threw them on the grill and cut them in half and served them on a bed of rice, with some other accoutrements, including tongue soup, in which the tongue tasted more like I'm used to.  It was very good though.  I had it with a large beer and a bit of sake that a man sitting near me shared.

From there, I caught my last shinkansen to Tokyo, found a hostel and relaxed a bit.  I found two books that looked good on the communal shelf; Lucy In the Sky and The Shadow of the Wind.  Lucy was a chick-lit book that was reasonably well written, though with mostly dislikable characters, and since I didn't feel like thinking, I went with that, though I took The Shadow of the Wind with me as well.  After reading in bed for a while, I fell off to sleep on my granite bed.