After recovering from major homesickness, the IES group all took a charted bus to Inuyama, which translates to Dog Mountain. It’s a very quiet but huge town.
On the way there, something that was interesting to note is that in Japan, highways never go out into emptiness like they do in America, civilization disappearing to be replaced by mountains, farmlands, or the like. It’s never-ending people. You are never out of sight of buildings, homes, companies, and stores. If there is empty space, its filled with trees or the like. Constant humanity and living, wherever you go.
In Inuyama, we stayed in a traditional Japanese inn called the Geihanrou. There’s only 4 floors for living, but the rooms are all in the traditional style. Tatamis, sliding doors, and shower/bath rooms. Sleeping on the floor on mattresses was surprisingly comfortable, though with the humidity, the comforter was a bit hot and stifling. It was definitely something I could get used to.
From Wednesday to Friday, we got to know our group better. We had 3 hour classes every day to refresh our Japanese, then free time or planned activities. The first day after all the academic stuff and having a delicious lunch consisting of curry rice, the whole group got to experience calligraphy by writing “ai”, the kanji for love. Definitely not as easy as it looks.
We then went to go climb up to Inuyama castle, a historic castle used for battle. Also pretty amazing, with a great view and extremely steep stairs, which were torture in the extreme humidity. The history of the castle itself was fascinating, it was an extremely formidable place with natural defenses in the shape of a hill and a river on one side, and there were many turrets and other offensive features built into it to ward off attackers.
After more climbing and melon shaved ice, we had dinner on a boat right before watching cormorant fishing, a very old and traditional style of fishing where they had cormorants tied on plastic strings dive for fish, after which they are pulled up and forced to throw up the fish. It’s all done at night under a huge metal cage of firewood. While the method is a bit cruel in my opinion, it was still interesting to watch, as I had never even heard of cormorant fishing before. We even got freebies in the form of a manga illustrating the origins of cormorant fishing! Granted, none of us can read it, but here’s to hoping I’ll be able to breeze through it come June.
Location: Geihanrou, Inuyama, Japan