Jonah's Journey across Japan

 Today was an eventful day, we started off by checking out and storing our bags at the hotel. We headed out to the morning markets by Miyagawa river. The markets were booming today because its a holiday week called golden week, four holidays from April 29 to May 5. April 29 is Showa day, the birthday of former emperor Showa. May 3 is Constitution day, the day Japan's postwar constitution was put into effect in 1947. The most significant part of the new constitution was that Japan removed the ability to wage war, but it does still have a self-defense force. May 4 is Greenery day, which is basically earth day, a day to appreciate nature and the planet. May 5 is Boy's day, when families pray for the health and success of their sons by putting up carp streamers and setting out samurai dolls, but don't worry there's also a Girl's day on March 3. On the way to the morning markets we saw this ginkgo tree that is apparently 1200 years old.     At the markets themselves we a...

Today we woke up early and checked out asap to go see the monkeys, the kind family hosting us gave me a business card and some Japanese stamps with Yudanaka's famous snow monkeys as the image. We rushed to the train station to keep our luggage in a coin locker and caught a bus at the last moment to snow monkey park. It was a quick hike up the mountain and you could tell when the first monkeys were visible when a crowd of people were huddled up. We paid our admission and observed the monkeys in their natural habitat, it was really fun to watch them play, and huddle together, and groom each other. There were a lot of baby monkeys because they tend to have babies right after winter.     After taking a hundred pictures of the monkeys we made our way back down the hill and spotted an ice cream vendor selling apple ice cream which sounded intriguing. Nagano, the prefecture in which Yudanaka is located, is famous for its apples so we had to try it. It was not exactly ice cream, more ...

We had a lot of travelling to do on this day, it took around four hours to take shinkansen and local trains all the way from Ishinomaki to yudanaka, I ended up sleeping for most of it because the rocking motion of the train usually gets me tired. We also spent a significant amount of time just waiting for trains to arrive, so a lot of our day was lost to travel. Once we arrived in Yudanaka, we trekked up the hill to our hotel, which was a family owned ryokan (traditional inn where you sleep on the floor on tatami mats). The family hosting us was very nice. They had a good idea of why we were visiting, as Yudanaka is famous for its snow monkey park, where macaque monkeys hang out in hot springs. After checking in and dropping off our bags we walked up to Kannon World Peace Statue, Kannon is a goddess of mercy in the Buddhist faith who is very popular in Japan. This is a big statue of Kannon on top of a hill with some Ukraine flags, I'm assuming in an attempt to bring forth peace.   ...

 On our morning in Ishinomaki we had to walk up some massive hills to get to our destinations. From our hostel we had to go up a mountain then back down to get to our first place to visit, the site of the Kadonowaki Elementary school. On March 11, 2011 a huge earthquake created a massive tsunami wave reaching heights of 40 meters in some areas which tore through the eastern coast of Japan, taking the lives of over 10,000 people. The site of Kadonowaki Elementary school serves as a haunting reminder of the event, as well as an opportunity to learn from the tsunami.      The damage done to the school was a terrible combination of the elements, as the first floor was flooded and destroyed by the debris the wave pushed along, but the second and third floors were burned to a crisp after power lines were taken down and set the dry parts ablaze. Luckily every student survived, as they evacuated to the top of the nearby mountain, but they had to watch in horror as this giant...

 We woke up early this morning with the intent of making it all the way to a small town called Shima Onsen to stay in the oldest hot spring inn in Japan called Sekizenkan Kashoutei. Hayao Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away used this inn as inspiration. We had planned to ride a shinkansen (bullet train) for the first time, but of course we were just a little bit late and had to find a different way to our destination. We ended up taking local trains most of the way, but rode a shinkansen for about a half hour, and it was incredibly fast. It accelerates and gets faster and faster and when you think it's done it keeps getting faster. After our roundabout way of getting to Nakanojo station we were around two hours behind schedule, it wasn't a big deal because we could still catch a bus to Shima Onsen early enough to check in for the dinner they provide. The dinner they made for us was a traditional Japanese meal of many different small dishes, comprised mostly of pickled veggi...