Hakone outdoor museum

Located about 80 kilometres from home in Tokyo is the Hakone outdoor museum. Perched on top of a mountain and set in beautifully maintained gardens there is a mixture of sculpture, art to play with and paintings.


As you enter the grounds you come face to face with a huge bison statue and then head to areas that will keep the kids amused for hours including the “soft“ sculpture room (a room full of vinyl covered foam cut outs that can be stacked in any manner) and the wood house which has the most amazing rope spiders web inside designed solely to be climbed on and then there is the cube stack.

 





There are a couple of interesting pieces of sculpture in the gardens including a huge shopping lady and art so good someone fell down.



And the main attraction for many (apart from the hot springs foot bath!?!?) is the Picasso shed.



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Venus Forte (A little bit of Rome in Tokyo)
Described by the owners as “…a shopping mall designed to resemble a medieval European village. The Sky Feature Program displays a fantastical sky expanding overhead, creating a magical atmosphere where time flows unlike anything in the outside world.”


The “mall” is located in the Odaiba area of Toyo and demands to be seen. While from the outside it looks like any other large shopping centre when you enter you are transported away from Tokyo by a series of rooms that have been dressed to resemble mainly Roman streets.



You move from the church room (where one entire wall has been made to look like the portico of a European church), down onto the Piazza and then through the streets, complete with window shutters (all the time looking at the roof that has been painted to look like “sky”) to a Piazza containing a Roman style fountain.




The Rome theme is never more obvious than where you can queue and put your hand in the “mouth of truth”. I don’t know why but it just didn’t fill me with the same sense of foreboding when I put my hand in the mouth.


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Strange
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I don’t know if any words are needed to describe this (I note that it’s a bit of the figures shirt in the second picture).


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Hakone escape
Located in the mountains about 100 kilometres west of Tokyo, on the shore of Lake Ashi, is the town of Hakone. From the shore of the lake there is the most spectacular view of Mt Fuji including the red Torii of the shrine in Hakone. The shrine and settlement in this area has been traced back for over 1000 years.



The mountains plunging into the lake and the location of the town on the shores of the lake has a very European feel or even, dare I say it, when walking the promenade around the lake it almost felt like Queenstown in New Zealand. Though I did enjoy the sight of a sausage and ham resturant.



Lake Ashi is a very popular tourist location and there are a number of boats that cruise the lake showing tourists around the area. There are seven stylised pirate boats which seemed to be very popular with long queues every time one of these ships pulled in to take on passengers.


We actually went to Hakone to visit a smaller town further around on the lake shore and here enjoyed an aquarium visit, cable car to the top of the mountains and some great lake views.



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Autumn has arrived.
After the hottest summer on record the heat has broken and it is finally bearable to head outside. We went down to the “beach” again and for the first time ever there was a sunbaker. If anyone can remember that old lady from the movie Something about Mary then they will have an appreciation of what this guy actually looked like.

The picture contains the old fort (over 200 years old), the newish Rainbow bridge and the guy who’s age fell in between the two.

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Is this Nirvana?
At the end of another hot week in Tokyo what better way to deal with the heat than to head to the “Ebisu garden place” where the headquarters of Sapporo breweries are located along with the Yebisu beer museum. Entrance to the museum is free but they charge for beer tasting.




This area of Tokyo, and its community, was built around the brewery in the early 1900’s. Prior to being redeveloped a brewery stood on this site and the station was built for the sole purpose of distributing beer. Can there be any better reason for a community to exist?

When the site was redeveloped Sapporo beer built a “beer hall” (remember nama biiru onegai shimasu – draught beer please) and the Japanese interpretation of German beer hall food (think sauerkraut, bratwurst and frankfurters and you would have described the main stays of the menu). What better way to spend an afternoon when the temperatures are high than to sit in the shade and drink beer?


There is also a large department store and a huge roof covering an outdoor courtyard which, on this day, had floating flower arrangements on the waterfalls.


One of the stranger sites was this reproduction of a European manor house.

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Thin building
How do you get rooms big enough to live in when the building is this wide?



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Imperial fish
I was walking around the Imperial Palace grounds and looked down a steep grass slope and see these fish. I have this funny feeling that I would be arrested if I went anywhere near them.

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Tokyo Dome amusement park
After a short 20 minute subway ride from our house you emerge from the subway and, while still in the middle of the Tokyo, are right in the middle of the Tokyo Dome amusement park. Just across the road from the amusement park is the Tokyo dome which is home of one of the Tokyo baseball teams.


The attraction that draws your attention straight away is the roller coaster called the “Thunder dolphin” which has the added feature of the track going through part of a building and the middle of a ferris wheel.



The ferris wheel is known as the Big O and is hubless (allowing the roller coaster to go through the middle of it). A 20 minute ride on the ferris wheel gives you a great view of the area surrounding the dome.
 
There are also the normal attractions like merry-go-rounds and a special log ride.

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Escaping the heat (well almost).
On the weekend we decided to drive to the mountains to try and escape the summer heat for at least a day. It has now officially been declared the hottest summer ever in Tokyo (and Japan) with the temperature in the last 16 days never falling below 27 degrees Celsius (even at night). It turned out that everyone had the same idea and the expressway out of town was bumper to bumper. Over the day we drove for seven hours and covered less than 150 kilometres. Unfortunately the cunning plan also failed. When we hopped out of the car there was a strategically placed temperature gauge that said it was 34 degrees. No escape from the heat at all.


The place that we chose was the Okutama dam to the west of Tokyo.  


The dam is located in the steep, cedar wooded hills, but the water (when you consider your within 80 kilometres of Tokyo), is the most amazing glacial colour. There were also large black bass and some trout cruising around in the no fishing section near the dam wall.  


The park near the dam was beautifully maintained with gravel walkways and shaped pine trees.



The car park took advantage of the weather with solar panels making up the roof.


Though there appeared to be some steps from the carpark to nowhere.


But, even with all of the heat, it was great just to get out of Tokyo and have an uninterrupted view of green.

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Its, a new car...
After a year in Japan it was time to get a car, especially a car with an English navigation system. Having now seen a lot of the things in Tokyo that are of interest the car allows for more exploration of the Japanese country side.



One of the interesting things I was reading while trying to get up to speed on driving in Japan was contained in the 2010 "Living in Japan" book that provided the advice that "When you see senior citizens driving pay attention. They are known to cause many trafic accidents due to their advanced age." I best watch out.

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I asked for one with the lot...
maybe something was lost in translation...

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