Thursday, November 17, 2011

Japanese Ceramics Tour Day 3 -- More Great Ceramics, Beautiful Garden, Ryokan

We spent the night in the small town of Hirose, not far from Matsue, at the Saginoyuso Ryokan. A nice place with a great outdoor bath (rotenburo). Food was solid kaiseki style.

Freshly cooked tofu for breakfast at Saginoyuso

The attraction of Hirose is the Adachi Museum, just across the street from the ryokan. This museum has a huge garden that may be the best post-war garden in Japan, as well as stupendous collections of works by the ceramic artists Rosanjin Kitaoji and Kawai Kanjiro and various Japanese painters of the early 20th century (e.g, Taikan Yokoyama and Seiho Takeuchi).


Garden at Adachi Museum - note the borrowed landscape (right)

After a bus, three trains (including a one-car one) and another bus, we arrived in Hagi, a famous pottery city that is also known for the role of key intellectuals in bringing down the shogunate, and ushering in the Meiji Restoration, in 1868. But more on Hagi later.

This whole area, the western part of Honshu facing the Japan Sea (and quite near to Korea), is quiet and sparsely populated. A stark contrast with the Pacific and Inland Sea side of Honshu, which is a densely populated narrow corridor extending from Tokyo to Kyushu, by way of Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, Okayama and Hiroshima.

Bobby Jay

1 comment:

John said...

Beautiful Japanese Art, thanks for the post
Here,a very nice Japanese Gallery in Paris (France)
Yakimono Paris