Takayama, Shirakawa-go, Toyama and Takaoka Trip

Takayama Sarubobo Bench

Day 1 Takayama

We bought our train tickets at Himeji Station. ICOCA is not accepted at Takayama Station, so it's best to have tickets since we'd have to transfer trains as well. In total, it was about 4 hours to get there. Once we arrived, we looked for lunch, but with the timing most places were closed. We eventually found a Nepalese restaurant. After checking in to our hotel, we left our luggage and walked around briefly in Takayama Old Town, a series of streets with well-preserved buildings. We also relaxed with a delicious ice cream break. We'd return to the area another day so we weren't in a rush to see it all. For dinner, we tried Takayama ramen at a place near our hotel. We wrapped the day up by going to the onsen (hot spring) in our hotel.

Day 2 Takayama

Many places don't open early in Japan so sometimes the hotel breakfast is the way to go when you want to get an early start. The hotel we stayed at had a nice buffet and was close to the station. We needed to stop by to buy tickets for the bus to nearby Shirakawa-go, a well-preserved rural town, for the next day. Most of the buses were reserved seats so we wanted to be safe and have the tickets ready.

Criminal Torture Room

We walked to Takayam Jinya, which is a historical government building from the Edo Period (1603-1868). Surprisingly, it was used officially from 1692 to 1969 and is the only building like it left now. They mainly did legal trials (there was even a torture room) and collected taxes. We took our time walking around the building, especially since it was raining outside.


Once we finished and the rain had calmed down a bit we went in search of lunch and found misokatsu, which is a type of breaded pork cutlet with miso sauce. Satisfied with the food, we continued to Sakurayama Hachimangu, a wooden 5th-century shrine. They have a famous autumn festival with matsuri-yatai festival floats.


After a break at our hotel, we went to Hida Kokubun-ji, a Buddhist temple in the area. It has a 1,200 year old ginkgo tree! It was amazing to see how wide and tall the tree was! We wrapped the day up with a Hida beef rice bowl and Takayama ramen for dinner.

Sakurayama Hachimangu

 

Day 3 Shirakawa-go

As I mentioned before, many businesses don’t open early in Japan, so we had a quick breakfast at McDonald’s and caught our 50-minute bus ride to Shirakawa-go. Shirakawa-go is a village near the mountains that has traditional a-frame gassho-zukuri farmhouses, some are more than 250 years old! Gassho-zukuri means "constructed like hands in prayer," that way the roofs can withstand large amounts of snowfall. The pictures of the village in winter look beautiful. We were there for the summer but all the seasons have a beauty to them. People still live in the village, but you can largely wander around the streets freely and there is also an open air museum where you can enter to see some of the houses that have been relocated there.

 

 

There’s a nice cafe we stopped at and the owners even had a guestbook for visitors sign - people from all over the world have visited here! We enjoyed our stop at the cafe, the owners were sweet and we got to have some zenzai: sweet red bean dessert soup. There were a few souvenir shops along the main road we looked at as we made our way back to the bus station to catch our return bus to Takayama.

 

Day 4 Takayama

Takayama is considered as little Kyoto for its historical neighborhoods. The Higashiyama Walking Course runs through the Higashiyama district, which was created by Kanamori Nagachika (1524-1600), who loved Kyoto and wanted to create something similar in Takayama. The walking course takes a couple of hours as you walk through a park and temples. We may have taken a wrong turn somewhere but we made it through a decent part of the route. We had ramen for lunch and used the afternoon to go back to the historic district and explore that area again. There were various shops of souvenirs and experiences you can enjoy. One of them is making your own sarubobo doll. Sarubobo means “monkey’s baby” in the Japanese Hida dialect. Mothers used to make them for their children’s happiness. Now you can buy different kinds of sarubobo dolls, with each color having its own meaning depending on what type of luck you would like. At the end of the day, we ate at a local okonomiyaki place near our hotel.

Day 5 Toyama

We changed cities from Takayama to Toyama. There is a bus you can take, but we opted for the train. ICOCA is accepted at Toyama Station. Depending on the train route it can take from two hours to three hours. We had lunch near the station, but after a morning of traveling by train our plan for the day was just to check out the Toyama Glass Art Museum. The museum is actually located in the same building as Toyama’s public library main building. It kind of reminded me (in a way) of Burton Barr Library in Downtown Phoenix. In some of the exhibitions you weren’t allowed to take photos or video but for the Chihuly exhibition you could, so we have more pictures of his artwork. Some of the artwork that interested me, but couldn’t take a picture of were: “Motherhood” by Bohumuil Elias (2003), “Beams of Light Through the Forest Trees” by Tsukada Midori, and “Pendul III” by Berti Vallien (1990).


It was interesting getting to see Chihuly’s glass artwork here in Japan, as the last time we saw his work was at the Desert Botanical Garden back home. 

 

Day 6 Toyama

Tayoma Castle is a smaller reconstructed castle and there was a school trip also visiting. The information was all in Japanese, so using a translation app is helpful if you visit with limited Japanese. You can buy a ticket to include the Sato Memorial Museum of Art or purchase them separately. After visiting the castle we walked across the park area to the art museum. We took a break afterwards, went to Kansui Park and its fa bridge. There’s two small towers near the bridge that you can go up to and get a view from the top for free.

 

Day 7 Takaoka

The next day we did a day trip to Takaoka. Takaoka has one of the three Great Buddha statues, which is only a 10 minutes walk from Takaoka Station. The other two are Nara's Todaiji Temple and the Kamakura Daibutsu, which we have visited already! Originally it was a wooden statue but it kept getting destroyed and it was thought it’d be best to change to a different material like bronze. You can go inside the base and see where they stored the previous wooden head, which survived the last fire. A 5-minute walk from there is Takaoka Castle Park. In the park, we saw the castle ruins and got a stamp for our castle book. The original castle was demolished only a few years after it had been built because the Tokugawa Shogunate introduced a new rule that only allowed one castle per feudal domain. We also saw the Takaoka Municipal Museum, which was free, but there was almost no information in English. There are also many items on sale about the anime Doraemon since the animator, Fujiko F. Fujio, was born and raised in Takaoka. The next stop was Imizu Shrine, its outer torii gate is made of bronze to symbolize the city's metal casting history.


On the way back to the station, we ate lunch at Cafe & Bar 810. They had a nice lunch set for only 1,000 yen. Once we were back in Toyama Station, we did a little omiyage (souvenir) shopping and headed to a free viewpoint near Toyama Castle to catch views of the city and sunset. Unfortunately, since it was raining lightly, the sky wasn’t as clear as we’d hoped but we still got to see some of the city, just not the mountains nearby.

Day 8

Our final day was just spent returning to Himeji and resting.