Golden Week

Golden Week

This year, Golden Week is from April 29 to May 5th. There are four national holidays during that period so many people use it to travel around Japan. The four holidays are Showa Day (April 29), Constitution Day (May 3), Greenery Day (May 4), and Children's Day (May 5). Since most people would be traveling during this time, we chose not to travel too far. Instead we did some day trips near by!

Osaka Day Trip: Sumiyoshi Taisha and the Osaka Museum of Housing and Living

We spent one day visiting a couple of new places in Osaka. We started out by visiting the historic Sumiyoshi Taisha shrine (pictured at the start of this post). After that, we went to the Osaka Museum of Housing and Living, which was unlike other museums we've visited. They have recreated a life-size section of Osaka from the Edo Period with lighting to mimic the passage of the day and even fireworks. You can also rent a kimono to walk around the town and take pictures.

Himeji City Museum of Literature

This museum is so close to where we live but we still hadn't gone! The architect of this museum was Tadao Ando, whose work we'd previously seen on Naoshima last year. The museum o opened in the early 90s as part of the city's centennial anniversary project and is located in a neighborhood about 20 minutes away from our house on foot. The museum goes through Himeji's history, but the permanent exhibits are nearly all in Japanese with few or no English translations. Luckily with today's technology you can use you phone camera to translate it, and for formal text (such as as what you'd find in a museum) the translations can actually be pretty good, if not perfect. In addition to their permanent exhibition there was a temporary one about the Manga The Brides Stories by Kaoru Mori, which we hadn't heard of before.

Wisteria Garden

One experience we didn't want to miss this year was the wisteria blooming. Usually, it's from late April to May and draws quite a bit of attention from many people in the country. Unfortunately, many of the wisteria parks are in the mountains with no direct public transportation, and most of them would require a taxi ride from the station to the park. We luckily found one in Asago city that was offering a free shuttle service from a mall during Golden Week to help alleviate congestion. Especially since we had a decent sized group of us that were going, it was super helpful. The shuttles were definitely packed! We'd got to eat some delicious food and walk around the park taking the beautiful scenery in.