Tag: museum

Ocean and Mount Fuji every day winter trip

This year, after many ideas and discussions of places we could go for the holidays and my birthday, we opted for a short road trip to the coast of Kanagawa and Shizuoka. Plenty of blue ocean and blue skies and views of Mount Fuji from every single angles (we ended up making a 360 around it).

Our trip was more or less planned, we usually like improvisation, but more and more places, since the pandemic, operate on a reservation-only, so it is best to schedule a little if you want a good lunch, a visit to a must-see museum… but luckily there are still many places that welcome visitors on the spot too.

Our trip took us to Kamakura, Oiso, Atami and Fujinomiya.

In Kamakura, we always use the bike share service Hello cycling. There are many stations all over from Kamakura, to further down the coast. Beware that more than often the batteries of the electric bicycles are not charged enough so they will let you down at some point!!! Not funny given that the bicycles are twice or thrice the weight of regular ones and it can be pretty hilly…

In Kamakura we really like the museum of modern art. (We also love the one in Hayama too) It’s located right on the left side of Hachimangu. It’s a small uncrowded museum, with exhibitions that are usually very well curated and would take about one hour to visit.

Kamakura Hachimangu

If you want to get lost in crowds, climb up to Hachimangu, you’ll get to mingle in big crowds, and honestly I’ve never understood why people come to visit. In its present form, this not the kind of sanctuary that I personally enjoy. However, the Great Buddha is always worth a visit. It is crowded but it’s so majestic that it invites for peace and quietness.

Going down the coast, in Oiso we visited former prime minister Yoshida’s residence. The garden is quite old and features a few beautiful plum trees. The house is rather recent, with some beautiful material. If you like history of Japan it also has some interest. And the view of Mount Fuji is beautiful.

Down further south, advanced reservation only, is the Enoura observatory. It was in my list of places to visit since it opened in 2017 but never managed to be in the program… we haven’t been much in the area in the past 10 years. On a good weather day it is a dramatic place to visit with stunning views and some stones collection (yes you read well) and sculptures exhibited outdoors. And you navigate in a citrus grove, typical of the area. On a bad weather day, I am less sure it would be worth going though… same in a very hot summer day.

The place kind of made me think about the “Contempt” villa. The blue sea and sky, the parallelepiped roof top… but in more contemporary version.

We also went to visit Odawara castle ground, with pines that could make me cry, so beautiful, so old. And in Atami the museum of art MOA, but I am not sure I would recommend it. Contrarily to the name could suggest, it’s a private museum. We had an awkward feeling while visiting it, in the way the exhibition was curated, and then realized that the founder was the guru of a sect, and we then understood the awkwardness…

Now let’s talk food.

While on a trip we would have a mix of simple food taken at the hotel (I am a master of hotel room minimal cooking) and restaurants. For once we had a rough plan and booked ahead a few restaurants worth the trip, and with stunning views on the ocean, so best for lunches.

Aroma mare アロママーレ in Atami was a great experience for Mediterranean cuisine and delicious homemade pizza in a small beautiful space. While a booking may not be necessary, they get full rapidly so if you want to secure a table…

Girino in Ninomiya for Italian x Japanese food, course menu only, reservation only, also small restaurant with a do it all chef and beautiful wares.

Amalfi della serra in Kamakura, has been our favorite place for dinner outdoors, we usually go there in early evening spring or summer when in Kamakura. You don’t go there for the food, though the pizza is good, but for the chill. After climbing up the narrow stairs behind the Enoshima line, up the hill, the terrace is just breathtaking. You travel to the Amalfi coast in a climb!

Figaro in Fujinomiya has something special to me, not only it’s a beautiful cafe at the foot of Mount Fuji, it’s owned and run by the Mine’s and they are also the parents of Fujinosuke and Kintaro, to of Pablo’s kitten we saved 7 years ago. Opened just recently, we thought we ought to visit for a sweet treat for my birthday, even though it wasn’t in the plan to go to Fujinomiya. Good jazz music, beautiful space, delicious sweets (very sweet!!!) and good coffee and macha latte. Fujinomiya looked like a sleeping city but the cafe was very busy! Yet we could have a good chat about food and gardening with A.. We couldn’t stay for a proper dinner, but A.’s cuisine is delicious (we had the chance to have lunch at her place once) and highly recommended.

For casual Japanese food we also tried Hayase no himono in Odawara and chiffon cake for breakfast from the nearby Grit, where I had a nice chat with the owner-chef about the importance of cooking in copper pans.

Kitte

When we first arrived in Japan there was a huge post office close to Tokyo station. Quite convenient at the time for tourists because post offices where the only places or so where you could withdraw cash from an ATM with a foreign credit card. But the building didn’t resist the whole tide of renewals in the Marunouchi area, the construction of the Shin Marunouchi building, the opening of brick town and the revamping of the station. Opened since 2013, Kitte (which means “post stamp” in Japanese) is the shopping mall in that very former post office in front of Tokyo Station (Marunouchi south). They basically kept the facade and some of the inside such as the old postmaster office. Otherwise it is a shopping mall like many others, with a flair for Japanese brands and local products. I’ve been visiting it a few times and I find it nice to stroll in because it is usually little crowded. There are two places I like there:

北麓草水 Hokuroku souui, a brand that sells mainly soaps and body soaps and a few cosmetics and skin cares made in Japan with simple ingredients. They have two main fragrances for their body soaps and most of their products, so it’s quite limited but it’s just enough because both smell super delicious: hinoki and yuzu. I find hinoki perfect for every situations, it is both stimulating and soothing at the same time. It smells our first trips to Japan, when we were bringing back charcoal soaps with hinoki fragrance as souvenir. It smells a long time ago!!!

 Intermediatheque is the other place worth seeing at Kitte. It is a giant “cabinet de curiosities”, a museum  (linked to the University of Tokyo museum) with free access that is worth the detour and spending 30 to 90min in or even more. There are many inspiring things on display of various biology, anthropology, physics, engineering… the organization is such that it gives the impression to wander in the attic of a museum with all these treasures kept secret. Yet a very sleek one!! The top pictures was taken there, but no spoilers, go and check out yourself!

 

Taisho style

At first when we came to Japan I couldn’t get used to these Japanese-Western (wa-yo) style things: buildings, clothes, food… Everything looked like a pale copy of something we have in Europe or there is in the US, but with something wrong. The most significant period of that style is probably the Taisho era (around 1910-1925), after the many trials in the Meiji period, when the style started to be more stable and much established.

It took me some time to really understand this style. Now I think this is my favorite period for Japanese art, architecture, design and clothing and even literature. Strangely, probably one of my favorite period in Western style too!
In terms of food my favorite is probably om-rice (オムライス), even it started in late Meiji. I’ll give you my recipe very soon!
There are fewer and fewer examples of Taisho architecture in Tokyo now because of a total lack of consciousness of these jewels (or maybe trying to ignore them for profits) and they are replaced one by one by ugly plastic prehab houses. But in areas such as Taito-ku north of Ueno, Ya-Ne-Sen between Taito-ku and Bunkyo-ku, or in Arakawa-ku around Senju and Kita-Senju it is still possible to see some along with some early Showa buildings. 
Ukiyoe by Yumeji Takehisa
present of the shamisen group
Dentist office in Ueno established in 1900,
and re- built in Showa 3/1928

An other excellent example is the Yasuda mansion near Sendagi (unfortunately rarely open to public) where it is possible to also enjoy interior design and original furnitures. More accessible yet less typical is the Asakura Chosho museum in Yanaka. Other options for a condensed viewing are open air museums where such houses have been moved to. There are two excellent places, the first is Meiji Mura near Nagoya in Inuyama, the other is the Tokyo Oedo Museum of Architecture in Koganei. It has a few exemplars that have been moved there for preservation.


Probably I came to understand and like this period through literature. It is widely covered in the work by Yukio Mishima and by Junichiro Tanizaki, where the mo-ga (modern girl) is well represented and that I massively read after starting to live in Tokyo. Probably “Naomi” is an excellent start. 
The music that I’ve had the chance to be introduce to by my husband shamisen group of ha-uta has also given an interesting insight about customs and women liberalization at that time.

Regarding graphic arts, I really like ukiyoe from Yumeji Takehisa and Goyo Hashiguchi, and paintings from Kunitaro Suda for example. The museum of modern art in Hayama, besides being ideally located on Hayama beach, hosts many exhibitions during the year of Japanese painters covering that period and each is worth seeing.




But it is only very recently that I came across a fabulous book: Taisho chic, about the aesthetic of Taisho period that summarizes very well the trends at that time (architecture is not covered though) and I really recommend it if you want to understand this period of Japanese history.

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