Shibata

The next day I had the chance to see the small town of Shibata. Shibata is a castle town, much like a smaller version of Kanazawa. It comes complete with its own garden, Shimizuen, which was built by the samurai overlord of the district.

It reminded me of Kenrokuen, though much smaller in size, importance, and crowds. In fact, my little group pretty much had the whole place to ourselves!

Niigata is famous for sake, and between the garden and the main shrine was a sake brewery. They plied us with free samples... lots of free samples. I think I must have tried at least 5 or 6 different styles of nihonshu, and by the end I was the proud owner of a new bottle of sake and a pretty good buzz!

The other major tourist attraction in Shibata is the castle, the towers of which are partly a reconstruction and partly new. I actually walked into the courtyard and said, "This is it?!" because the area looks a lot larger on the outside than it is on the inside. The largest and most interesting looking tower is off limits, settled on the neighboring military base.

The base itself was having an open house day, so we got to tromp around looking at all the high tech weaponry used by the Japan Self Defense Force. I was actually kind of surprised that a foreigner with a big camera was allowed on the base without so much as an ID check.

Then it was time to head back through the mountains to Gunma, though this time I opted for speed and convenience over cost and beauty.

The Tengu Comes

The Festival was in Sanjo City, right in the center of Niigata Prefecture. It started with a parade of local children carrying floats and playing music. Their performance really impressed me, it takes a lot of stamina to march in a parade, and they all took to their tasks with an abundance of sincerity.

 

 One of the centerpieces of the parade was the Tengu, a demon who can be both a protector and an antagonist. The festival ends with the Tengu walking around the local shrine three times, while young children are held up by their parents for good luck, though we missed that part.

The local adult population also had a chance to show off their parading skills.

Once the parade had passed it was time for the true heart of every festival, festival food!

Though a significant percentage of Sanjo's population had that thought at the same time we did! The food stall alley was jammed with humanity, you would have thought we were in the heart of Tokyo rather than rural Niigata.

The shrine was surrounded by games, food, toy tents and more. Everybody was having a wonderful time, though the crowds could be a bit too much at times. Of course saying that Japan is crowded is like saying that the sun is bright, it's just a fact of life!

Over instead of Under

A few weeks ago a friend invited me up to Niigata Prefecture for a local festival. I was interested in the trip, but a little worried due to the expense of taking the Shinkansen there. I have always been a 'faster' instead of 'cheaper' person, but this time I opted to take the much slower local trains instead of the shiny new bullet train.

While this required me to change trains a whopping 7! times, it saved me a lot of money and let me see the high mountain scenery that lies across the spine of Japan. Gunma lies right at the edge of the vast Kanto plain, where the Japan Alps thrust up from the flatland. Niigata lies to the west of Gunma, on the other side of the massive Echigo Range. Trains, as a rule, dislike steep grades, and the high speeds of the Shinkansen require a very flat operating surface with wide, sweeping curves.

This makes it very hard to climb mountains, so the engineers did one better, and dug right under them! The Shinkansen enters a tunnel a little way outside of Maebashi, and rarely comes out until it reaches the next stop, at the ski town of Echigo-Yuzawa. It goes underground again there almost all the way to the coast of the Japan Sea!  While this makes for a speedy trip, tunnels don't really offer much to look at.

I picked a great day for such a leisurely train journey, the weather was perfect. Clear blue skies and warm winds made for a remarkable contrast to the chill rain that has characterized much of this Spring. Many of the farmers along the route were using the nice weather to plant their summers crop of rice. The whole trip just put me in a great frame of mind, which is something I hadn't expected when I was looking at the rather epic amount of time it was going to take.