Osaka and the Castle

 Tuesday September 8

We disembarked today in Osaka, by far the largest city and busiest commercial port we have seen. It is the second largest city by area and the third largest city by population in Japan.  It rained on and off all day, but we managed to do some birding and visit the Osaka Castle with friends. The temperature was in the mid-80s, humid, but a lot better than the high 90s they had last week. 

Osaka sits on a wide bay that connects to both the North Pacific and the East China Sea. It has been a trading center, particularly with China and Korea, for many centuries. There was a lot of Chinese influence in Japan in the 7th and 8th centuries, including one of the three writing systems still in use. Starting in the 10th century, Japan chose to the more isolated and to develop its own culture. 

In modern times, Osaka is known for its business and financial focus. We heard that instead of “how are you?” The greeting in Osaka is “are you making money?”. But you should be humble and answer “so-so”.  There has also been a futures market, trading in rice harvest futures, since the 17th century. 

By the 5th century, the imperial palace was built on the same site as the castle. The imperial capital moved to Nara and then Kyoto, and the site Osaka became the compound of the local feudal lord. 

Throughout the trip we have heard repeatedly about the Tokugawa Shogunate which ruled the unified country from 1603 to 1858 (while ostensibly serving the emperor). The first Tokugawa shogun displaced the heir of the previous ruler (Totoyomi Hideyoshi), who has risen from a humble beginning rather than the traditional noble hereditary background of most samurai and lords. This story is the basis of the novel and movies “Shogun”.

Here in Osaka, the story comes to life. Totoyomi built Osaka castle in 1583 to be the largest and strongest in Japan, capable of housing 5000 samurai. Totoyomi died in 1598, and by 1603 Tokugawa had taken over, but the Totoyomi heir still held Osaka Castle as his feudal domain. In 1615, the castle fell and was largely destroyed by fire, and the heir committed honorable suicide. 

In 1620 the second Tokugawa shogun began rebuilding the castle, having first buried any remnants of the previous one under a thick layer of dirt and rock. Only very recently have vestiges of the original castle been found.  The second castle was not nearly as large as the first, but was well defended with curtain walls, moats, corner bastions, and murder holes in the central tower itself.  Various parts of the castle succumbed to fire (some natural and some from conflicts), although the moat and defensive walls survived. 

In 1931 the local community began to rebuild the Tokugawa central tower. The structure and outer appearance is as close as they could make it, while the inside houses six floors of artifacts and historical displays. We spent several hours on the grounds and in the museum. The area surrounding the castle and the moat is a lovely green space, and we enjoyed birding there during breaks in the showers.

Pictured: Osaka castle— corner bastions, main tower, original Otemon gate, castle view across the moat 

Shimizu

 Monday, September 7: 

After a mildly rocky night (but with 40 knot winds and 12 foot seas a different ship would have been much rockier!) we pulled into the sheltered harbor of Shimizu. The rain subsided to gentle showers, the winds died down, and on the whole we lucked out again. The rain and wind intensified as we left the port at mid-day, a remarkable piece of good fortune. 

Shimizu is known for its tea and seafood (the bay is quite deep). It also has a vibrant craft industry, sustaining many historic arts from the Tokugawa era, including katana (sword) making and traditional ceramics and fabrics. 

Some of our shipmates chose to go (by climbing stairs or riding in a tram) up to a shrine with potential views of Mt Fuji. They enjoyed the shrine but Mt Fuji was invisible in the clouds. We opted for a cultural tour this morning, visiting shrines, learning about the Suruga Hina dolls and tasting tea blends. The dolls are quite detailed and ornate; some celebrate weddings and other life milestones, while others are considered protective good luck emblems for children. 

At the tea tasting we sampled green, roasted green, and black teas.  We also tasted teas with the addition of roasted brown rice, which surprised us. The roasted brown rice added a nutty flavor to the teas, in some cases making for an odd taste profile. 

We visited a site with multiple lacquer-decorated shrines, one of them built for the first shogun, before returning to the ship for the transit to Osaka and disembarkation tomorrow. As this was the first time our ship had visited Shimizu port,  the captain received a plaque and we all were treated to a fireworks display as the ship pulled away from the dock.

By the time we arrive in Osaka, we will have traveled over 4500 nautical miles. For comparison, that is longer than the northwest passage! 

Pictured: two of the shrines at Monday, September 7: Shimizu

After a mildly rocky night (but with 40 knot winds and 12 foot seas a different ship would have been much rockier!) we pulled into the sheltered harbor of Shimizu. The rain subsided to gentle showers, the winds died down, and on the whole we lucked out again. The rain and wind intensified as we left the port at mid-day, a remarkable piece of good fortune. 

Shimizu is known for its tea and seafood (the bay is quite deep). It also has a vibrant craft industry, sustaining many historic arts from the Tokugawa era, including katana (sword) making and traditional ceramics and fabrics. 

Some of our shipmates chose to go (by climbing stairs or riding in a tram) up to a shrine with potential views of Mt Fuji. They enjoyed the shrine but Mt Fuji was invisible in the clouds. We opted for a cultural tour this morning, visiting shrines, learning about the Suruga Hina dolls and tasting tea blends. The dolls are quite detailed and ornate; some celebrate weddings and other life milestones, while others are considered protective good luck emblems for children. 

At the tea tasting we sampled green, roasted green, and black teas.  We also tasted teas with the addition of roasted brown rice, which surprised us. The roasted brown rice added a nutty flavor to the teas, in some cases making for an odd taste profile. 

We visited a site with multiple lacquer-decorated shrines, one of them built for the first shogun, before returning to the ship for the transit to Osaka and disembarkation tomorrow. As this was the first time our ship had visited Shimizu port,  the captain received a plaque and we all were treated to a fireworks display as the ship pulled away from the dock.

By the time we arrive in Osaka, we will have traveled over 4500 nautical miles. For comparison, that is longer than the northwest passage! 

Pictured: two of the shrines at Shizuoka Shengen, tea tasting demonstration, Hina wedding dolls, samurai doll for a small boy 

Oarai / Mito

Sunday September 6: 

This morning, we arrived at Oarai, the port and beach town for Ibaraki prefecture, just north of Nagoya. This is an agricultural area, particularly rice and grapes. We traveled to Mito, the prefecture capital and a city of 250,000, to visit sites from the Edo period (the Tokugawa shogunate, 1603-1861). The original shogun had 11 children, but only three sons survived the clan wars. These three established their own cities, with Mito as the city of the youngest. While the Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan for 250 years, only the last shogun came from the Mito line. 

In 1841, the 9th lord of Mito (Tokugawa Nariaki) established the Kadokan school for samurai and their children. The samurai learned not only martial arts and warfare tactics but also math, Confucian philosophy, music, reading and writing and even to write poetry. Later the school added medical and astronomy facilities.  The Mito clan samurai were nearly 100% literate. The school was closed in 1872 as the national school system ramped up and the Meiji emperor suppressed the samurai. 

The same lord also designed and established the Kairakuen gardens in 1842 as a place where the students could relax and meditate after their studies. It contains over 3000 blooming trees and is considered one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan. It also has groves of different types of bamboo to make fighting staves called Bo’s, arrows, and fences. While September is not the best time to visit the garden, we did enjoy the peacefulness. Walking to the gardens we admired the decorations on the manhole covers, reminiscent of the scores of plum trees at the gardens. Each city in Japan can choose the design for their manhole covers. 

We also visited the Tokugawa museum, which contain a number of artifacts from the first shogun as well as his sons and descendants. There were displays of swords, books and other household items. It was fascinating to see the number of reference books in French and English that were in the family’s possessions. Some of the swords showed evidence of having been burned during the great Kando earthquake on 1923, when they were in storage in Tokyo. 

We have been so lucky with weather on this trip, skirting storms in the Bering Sea and the North Pacific.  This ship is also designed to ride as smoothly as possible through rough seas.  While the main typhoon that has been pummeling southern Japan has weakened and moved out to sea, this afternoon we began to rock and roll a bit (12 foot waves) on our way south to Shimizu for tomorrow. 

Pictured: interior of Kadokan, Shogun armor at the museum, “Bo” Bamboo grove at Kairakuen, manhole covers, eastern spot-billed duck

Aomori and Sendai

 September 4 and 5:

Aomori, on the north coast of Honshu Island, is an industrial city in a region famous for its apples.  It has about 260,000 inhabitants and is also known as the snowiest city in Japan, often receiving over four feet of snow per winter. The houses have flat roofs, which surprised us. The explanation is that a peaked roof might deposit snow in your neighbor’s yard, so best to keep it to your own. Aomori is the terminus for ferries coming from Hakodate, the furthest south city on the island of Hokkaido. We saw many car ferries en route and in the harbor. Historically there was also a ferry that carried train cars across, until a tunnel was built for the train in the late 1980’s. The tunnel is the world’s longest undersea railway tunnel, with 15 miles of the 34 mile total being undersea. The tracks are 330 feet below the sea bed and 800 feet below sea level. 

The area around the harbor was lovely, It was sunny at the dock but as we gained elevation (to 1000 ft)  we also gained clouds and some rain. Most of our walk was under dry but overcast skies. The beech forest was largely secondary growth (it was logged in 2000) but some older trees showed interesting shapes from the logging activity. Logging happens in late winter. So the trees are cut at “snow level”, sometimes 4-5 feet off the forest floor. Many trees then sprout again from bellow the cut, creating tortuous profiles. 

As we went back down the mountain to the apple orchard we recovered bright blue skies. We were permitted to pick a pair of apples each and got to taste the local apple juice. As we returned to the dock, about one hundred school children greeted us, ostensibly on a school assignment to practice their English, but they also gave a musical performance. 

Friday afternoon through Saturday morning we traveled another 200 nautical miles south to the city of Sendai. Sendai is a city of over 1 million inhabitants, so we were very surprised to be greeted at the dock by folks in samurai costumes who demonstrated karate katas and urged us to take photos with them. Sendai is known for its green spaces, and for its place in samurai history. The actual city is 8 km from the port, which reduced the impact of the 2011 tsunami. It was founded by Date Masamune, a Samurai lord aligned to the Shogun, in the 17th century, including the construction of Sendai Castle high above the city.  

We visited the mausoleums of Date Masamune (1567-1637) and two of his sons on a wooded hill above the city. The mausoleums were all destroyed in the WWII fire bombing of Sendai, but were reconstructed based on records.  The design of his armor is thought to have influenced the costume of Darth Vader.

We also visited the ruins of his castle, high above Sendai. The location is magnificent, protected on three sides by cliffs, forest and a river so only one curtain wall needed to be built.  The castle was built in 1601 and acted as the government center for the prefecture until 1869, when it was destroyed by imperialist forces as part of the Meiji restoration. 

Pictured: the Aomori train ferry ship with rainbows on the mountains, an oddly humanoid beech tree, sunrise in Aomori, welcoming Samurai in Sendai, detail from the Date Masamune mausoleum, statue of Date Masamune showing his signature armor and helmet, Japanese Pygmy woodpecker

Muroran, Hokkaido

 September 3: 

We traveled overnight and through the morning, south along the coast of Hokkaido for about 200 nautical miles. We spent the afternoon in Muroran, on the southeastern end of Hokkaido. Muroran is a heavily industrialized city, home to Nippon Steel and Japan Steelworks as well as oil refining and ship building. Its natural harbor hosts one of the largest ports in Hokkaido. Muroran also has the longest suspension bridge in eastern Japan, with a length of 4500 feet and a center span measuring almost a mile. We were welcomed by the mayor himself, recently returned from a visit to their sister city of Knoxville, TN. It is amazing that our 130 passenger ship receives this kind of attention. 

We traveled north from the city to explore the area around Mt. Usu in the Shikoku-Toya National Park. Mt. Usu rises 2420 feet above Lake Toya, itself in a caldera. Mt Usu first erupted 20,000 years ago and the main peak has collapsed and eroded, but the Usu system has continued to erupt and create new cones. The 1943-5 eruption created Showa Shinzen, a new mountain that includes a lava dome that filled in its caldera, all created in just two years. It is still steaming. 

The most recent eruptions of Mt. Usu were in 1977 and 2000. We traveled by tram up to an overlook above the still smoking caldera of the 1977 eruption.  While we were grateful that the predicted rain held off, we did have fog roll in as we went up the mountain, which was a little disappointing. 

Later we traveled to a nearby town and surveyed the damage from the 2000 eruption and a massive mudslide in 2001. The local community begins evacuation as soon as there is a “warning earthquake” and there were no casualties from the 2000 episode despite the visible damage. It is humbling to consider what it’s like to live under such a threat, especially as Mt Usu has tended to erupt every 30 years and it has now been 26…

Pictured: lighthouse and cliffs entering Muroran harbor, Showa Shinzen, the Muroran bridge at night, the 1977 caldera, snail on a tree at Mt Uzu, Chestnut-cheeked starling 

Kushiro, Hokkaido

 September 2: 

We made our first landing in Japan at Kushiro, an industrial hub on the northeast corner of Hokkaido. Hokkaido is the ancestral home of the Ainu people, who had a separate culture from the Japanese communities on Honshu and other islands to the south. The Ainu were very connected to the natural world, but were absorbed by the Japanese and forced to abandon their language and culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. Recently there has been an increase in recognition and efforts to re-establish their traditions. 

We spent the morning on a hike at Kushiro Shitsugen National Park, the largest marshland in Japan ( about 4 times the size of  Manhattan) and home to the highly valued Red-crowned Crane. In the afternoon we went to the Kushiro City Museum, which had a wonderful display of Ainu artifacts, including clothing made from fish skin, bark fibers, or layers of silk. The museum bordered a lake and an inlet from the sea, so we did some birding there too. 

It is a bit unusual for a cruise ship to stop in Kushiro. We were welcomed by the community, including a send-off concert on the pier as we left this evening en route to Muroran. 

Pictured: Great Spotted Woodpecker, Ainu garment made from elm bark, Eurasian Nuthatch (white-bellied subspecies), flowers of the local monkshood, the most deadly plant in Japan. 

Sea days

We have spent four days at sea en route to Japan (August 28, 30, 31 and September 1). We skipped August 29th by crossing the international date line. Each day held a mix of time spent looking for sea birds and sea mammals, educational sessions with our naturalists, historians and photographers, and of course wonderful and interesting meals. The presentations covered natural history topics, the role of the Aleutians in WWII,  and preparation for our experiences in Japan. 

We have been exceedingly lucky with the weather on these sea days. The seas have never been more than 10 feet and while some days have had winds of 35 knots, the ship is built to maintain a smooth ride. The North Pacific is often much rougher. 

Our wildlife viewings have been great. We have seen blue, fin, killer and sperm whales, and Dahl, Pacific White-sided and Pacific Right Whale (finless) porpoises/dolphins. Dahl porpoises look like small killer whales and are very speedy. And of course we have seen new bird species. 

We watched blue fin tuna leap out of the water while hunting Pacific Saury, a small migratory fish that the albatrosses seem to like as well. We saw a feeding frenzy, this one including tuna, 2 kinds of dolphins, and seabirds. At one point the ship was entirely surrounded by jumping dolphins. 

Today was amazing: we saw two groups of fin whales, a blue whale, four groups of sperm whales, tuna, sharks and a swordfish. The sighting of 20 sperm whales playing around in front of the ship for an extended period was particularly special. Sperm whales are the largest toothed whales and their bulbous heads contain huge brains and echolocation organs. They have wrinkled skin, which can expand and contract as they deep dive in pursuit of giant squid. Some of the sperm whales showed scars from the suction cups of giant squids. 

Pictured (from all 4 sea days): killer whale, Dahl’s Porpoise, Northern Right Whale Dolphins, Pacific white-sided Dolphins, wrinkled side and fluke of a sperm whale, fin whale, sperm whale group, blue fin tuna jumping and with pacific saury trying to escape, providence petrel, broad-billed swordfish