Catch Up
I seem to have a lot of that to do. For this week, I've decided to make good on a 2-year-old promise to fix the front door on one of OMF's holiday houses. It happens to be in Hokkaido, and I need to take the truck and tools, and OMF pays to get my truck across the Tsugaru Straight, so I am going to double up and visit daughter Anna and her husband Jun in Sapporo. Then I can make good on another promise- to re-balance the rocking chair I gave them for a wedding present. Good timing- I need to keep quiet the first part of the week (when I will be at the holiday home alone), and Anna will be needing the chair come July, when grandchild #2 makes an appearance.
I also need to post a couple of photos that didn't make it in when they were taken.(April 8).
This is a replica of a Jomon house. The prehistoric Jomon culture was named for the rope patterns they put in their clay pots, remnants of which are so common here they wash out of people's fields in a heavy rain. Any hilltop near the ocean will have a Jomon village site.
The old thached farmhouses around here were basically just this hovel (house consisting of a roof over a sunken floor) with walls added.
And, speaking of catching up, the town needs to do some repairs. This house looked a lot better when we first saw it, a new tourist attraction, in 1986. Alas, the tourists didn't come- to this ,or any other of the thousands of attractions built by aspiring rural towns in the "bubble economy" period. I doubt if the town will ever get around to these repairs- especially as it has amalgamated with several others in response to the federal government's request for "streamlining". This current trend doesn't seem any more likely to succeed than the tourist-trap one. The towns join up and change their names, but I don't see any very effective attempts to really cut down on bureaucracy.
However, life goes on. The crowds didn't come, but this young couple is taking advantage of the park to give their child a place to run. In spite of, or because of-hard to tell which- ordinary people just keep chugging along.
And so had I. It is to be hoped that this rather wordy post will keep my readership happy, as there is unlikey to be another until I return to Ajigasawa on Saturday- and try to catch up some more..
I also need to post a couple of photos that didn't make it in when they were taken.(April 8).
This is a replica of a Jomon house. The prehistoric Jomon culture was named for the rope patterns they put in their clay pots, remnants of which are so common here they wash out of people's fields in a heavy rain. Any hilltop near the ocean will have a Jomon village site.
The old thached farmhouses around here were basically just this hovel (house consisting of a roof over a sunken floor) with walls added.
And, speaking of catching up, the town needs to do some repairs. This house looked a lot better when we first saw it, a new tourist attraction, in 1986. Alas, the tourists didn't come- to this ,or any other of the thousands of attractions built by aspiring rural towns in the "bubble economy" period. I doubt if the town will ever get around to these repairs- especially as it has amalgamated with several others in response to the federal government's request for "streamlining". This current trend doesn't seem any more likely to succeed than the tourist-trap one. The towns join up and change their names, but I don't see any very effective attempts to really cut down on bureaucracy.
However, life goes on. The crowds didn't come, but this young couple is taking advantage of the park to give their child a place to run. In spite of, or because of-hard to tell which- ordinary people just keep chugging along.
And so had I. It is to be hoped that this rather wordy post will keep my readership happy, as there is unlikey to be another until I return to Ajigasawa on Saturday- and try to catch up some more..
posted by John Elliot | 9:07 PM
1 Comments:
To bad our visits to Hokkaido didn't coincide. I haven't seen Tarugishi in . . . probably about 20 years.
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