Fukuoka Garden Tour

Fukuoka is not generally known as a garden city. And this is reasonable, because it isn't one. Home to one and a half million people but not a single "big" garden to be found in the whole place. This is a bit of a shame to a Japanese garden lover like myself. Even tiny Takamatsu, one-fifth the size of Fukuoka, boasts a huge garden that in my opinion puts Victoria's Butchart Gardens to shame.

What Fukuoka lacks in big gardens however it makes up for in little gardens. There are a lot of them, scattered throughout the city. I think the best one is Yusentei, the garden I liked so much on my first visit that I made the 15km bike ride back the very next day because I wanted Ena to see it too. There is also a nice little garden in Ohori Koen that I visited with my dad while we went Cherry blossom viewing last year.

Yesterday Ena and I did a little bike tour to two of Fukuoka's other little gardens that we hadn't been to yet. Our original plan was to take in three, including the one at Ohori Koen that Ena hadn't seen, but it turned out to be closed on Mondays so we only squeezed the two in.

The first one we went to was the flower garden at Hakozaki shrine, just up the road from our place. We pass by it all the time but for some reason in the two years we've been here we have never gone in.

Its a pretty small garden that you can walk through in about 15 minutes, but for the 200 yen admission its a good deal. I like the fact that they use the honor system to collect the admission fees, during the off season (ie now) nobody mans the gate soyou just put your money into the box as you enter. Its a bit of a testament to the honesty of this society that they can do this, in Canada it would never work:
There weren't any other visitors yesterday. The garden has a number of specialty flowers that it is known for like peonies. It is really crowded when those are in bloom and virtually deserted the rest of the year. There were some colorful flowers around though:
The garden also has elements of the more traditional Japanese garden look, with some nice paths covered by maple tree canopy:
There is a restaurant in the garden which I think is their main source of revenue. We had just eaten so we didn't go in (its pretty expensive too). It overlooks the vest viewing point of the garden, which we viewed from a bench outside:
After leaving the Hakozaki flower garden we pedaled downtown to Hakata, which is where the Rakusuien is located. This is kind of a remarkable little garden, originally built as a villa in 1906 by a local merchant and rebuilt as a garden by the city in 1995. It is on a tiny, postage-stamp sized plot of land right in the middle of the busiest part of the city, surrounded on all sides by high-rises.

What I find remarkable is that despite its size and location, they've done such a good job of screening out the surrounding buildings through the use of mature trees that when you enter you feel like you might as well be in the middle of the countryside.

The garden is surrounded by a really attractive tile-topped wall:
The front gate leads down a nice path into the garden lined with Japanese maples:
Admission to the garden is only 100 yen (about 1$). For an extra 300 yen you can have macha served in the tea room of this building:
The garden is tiny but they've made such effective use of the space that it creates the illusion of expansiveness:
There is a path leading around a central pond:
The pond is, as usual, stocked with carp that will frenzy around you if you make them think you have food for them, which we didn't. One of them did its best great-white shark impersonation for me:
It would have been much more terrifying if carp had been a species of fish which actually had teeth.

The garden also boasts a little waterfall:
And mature tree limbs being supported by stilts:
After wandering the garden for about 20 minutes we retired to the tea room to redeem our 300 yen tickets. The tea was probably good. I don't know though, I've never really taken to macha. The main benefit is that you just get to sit in a nice room and look at the pretty garden in peace and quiet, which is what I was really paying for, though Ena likes macha a lot and assures me it is extremely healthy:
One of the benefits of buying the macha ticket is that you get access to an exclusive part of the garden reserved only for the tea room people. Actually its basically just a tiny strip of the larger garden which they have put a little bamboo fence around, but it is nice to feel like you are a VIP. The other cool thing is that you have to wear geta (old style Japanese footwear) to go into that part of the garden:
Geta are a form of footwear that do not really complement modern socks very well. Ena and I adopted different strategies to get around this. I just jammed my toes in, forcing the sock to give way, while Ena put her feet in diagonally, avoiding the risk of any potentially-damaging sock stretching:
Our VIP section of the garden had a little hut we could sit in and look at the tea house:
That pretty much wrapped up Rakusuien, a bonny little garden indeed. After that we cycled over to Ohori Koen where we discovered the garden to be closed. So we called it a day. Not bad for a Monday.

Our tour of Fukuoka's gardens continues in this post here.

Hojoya: Carnies come to Fukuoka!

This week Hakozaki Shrine has been packed with hundreds of thousands of people visiting the Hojoya festival. Its a pretty old festival that commemorates....something. Probably. I don't know actually.

Anyway, the festival is most well known for these delicate glass ornaments hand-blown and painted by artisans at the shrine which they sell for between 3,000 and 9,000 yen each. They have a special religious significance and all people who purchase them must devote themselves to a rather long ritual that involves storing them on a shelf somewhere in their home and, being completely at a loss to find anything useful to do with them, forgetting about their existence until several years later when they inevitably get broken during a move.

We decided not to purchase one.

Anyway, they put some interesting stuff on display at the shrine during the festival and open up bits that usually are closed to the public. Like these pictures:
And these Mikoshi:
And these masks:
And a bunch of other stuff that people don't really come to a festival to see but look at anyway because everything else is too crowded.

We had a bit of excitement in the shrine as we got on TV! Cable TV! Which we....don't get. But it was fun anyway. A nice reporter asked us to stand in front of their camera and give a thank you message to someone. I chose my parents. We did two takes, I was pretty nervous about my Japanese but with Ena's help I got through it. Because we couldn't see it on TV I asked the reporter to take our picture in front of their microphone just to prove that we were there:
Anyway, that was the shrine part of the festival. After that we went to see the real attraction: Japanese Carnies!!!
When I use the word "Carnies" I have the spirit of the Austin Powers definition in mind:

"Carnies. Circus folk. Nomads, you know. Smell like cabbage. Small hands."

Carnies have an interesting existence in Japan. They travel the length and breadth of the country (well, mostly the length, Japan is short on breadth) with whatever they sell or do in the back of their trucks and go from one festival to the other year-round. They are a mysterious people to the outsider like myself, living in a colorful world surrounded by gangsters, cheap gimmicks and ridiculously inflated prices. If ever there was a people whose lifestyle demanded a reality-TV show based on their lives, it is these folks.

Between Hakozaki Shrine and Route 3 there is a tree-lined avenue normally closed to vehicles that stretches for about a kilometre or so. Technically it is part of the shrine and during the Hojoya it is over-run by a massive herd of carnies who set up their stalls ("yatai") to ply their wares to the hundreds of thousands of visitors that come. This is one end of the avenue, from the Route 3 side with the giant tori gate:
And on the opposite end, from the shrine itself. The giant tori gate is so far off on the horizon you can't even see it:
Between these two points is Carny territory during the Hojoya. They provide all the fun bits of the festival experience that are what people REALLY come to see.
A lot of the more colorful (and photogenic) ones cater to kids. Like this one with Kamen Rider masks:
Or this one with girl's toys. Ena said she used to really like these when she was little:
Or this one selling something called "Character Pipes":
And flutes:
Looking for some surprisingly-realistic looking toy guns? This is your place:
A lot of the other yatai were games. Like this one where you try to catch balls floating in water:
Or you could try your hand with the giant vat of goldfish:
I'm not really a fan of the above type games. About 8 years ago at a similar festival in Himeji I tried one of these where the object was to scoop up a little turtle with this wafer-thin paper cup that would disintegrate virtually the second it came into contact with the water. I paid my 300 yen, confident that I had worked out a way to get the turtle succesfully out of the water and into the pail in the millisecond I had before the paper cup evaporated, dropping the turtle back into the water. And sure enough it worked! I got the turtle into the pail! I got to keep the turtle! Ena and all my friends with me were laughing and patting me on the back for a job well done when suddenly the guy running the thing yelled "Dame!" ("no good"), grabbed my pale and dumped the turtle back into the tank of water.

Incensed I demanded an explanation. "Your wrist was at the wrong angle. You had to keep it straight" he replied in the gruff voice of a man clearly making up the rules as he went along.

Suffice it to say I did not get my turtle. You may take the fact that 8 years later I am writing about the experience in a still-indignant tone as some indication of how pissed off I was at the time.

Anyway, I digress. Ena and I decided to pump some money into the economy by buying lunch at a falafal (how the hell do you spell that correctly?) yatai:
We then went to the main entertainment area where all the big games and attractions were.

The haunted houses looked pretty cool:
An old woman with a microphone exhorted the children to test their bravery at the hands of the ghosts and demons located up the ramp only 500 yen away. Two other staff, also old women, sat indifferently behind her with the distinct look of people who had other things they wanted to be doing:

Looking at the quality of the rides whose level of excitement could be gauged from direct observation, we opted to give the haunted houses a miss:
We worried that we would be committing some sort of faux-pas if we didn't throw money away at at least one of these places, so we decided to try our hand at one of the places where you throw darts at balloons:
Take THAT you stupid, yellow licensed character I see everywhere I go in this bloody country:
Ena also gave it a try:
We had 5 darts and missed with the first 4. It was down to me. I took careful aim and....POP! I got one! Excitedly I waited to be presented with one of the giant toys that bedecked every square inch of the stall not directly in the line of dart-throwing fire. Disappointingly he reached into a bucket out of sight under the counter and gave us two sticks that, he had to assure us as it was broad daylight, would glow in the dark:
Well, it was way better than that turtle yatai in Himeji 8 years ago.

After that we got some ice cream:
And wandered around some more of the yatai:
For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, in the only quiet part of the festival area a number of pottery dealers had set up shop:
I suspect they were there to give parents a sanctuary while the kids had fun.

After that we went home, as the rain was starting to come down. It was a fun day. A couple days later I snapped some photos of the festival in the dark as I passed by on my way home from downtown: