The Bread Museum
The Chocolate Museum
The Beer museum
There are probably more museums than those three but they were the ones that really stuck out to me. I didn’t go to any of them though because museums can be dull, especially when you are on your own and especially when you can’t understand anything,
The University of Hokkaido was across the road from my hotel and I took a walk through its pleasant campus.
I was really impressed with a sign saying, “Institute of Meme Studies,” as there can’t be many signposts in the world baring the word meme. In case you don’t know, a meme is like a gene but for a thought, they can spread between minds just through language. The concept of a meme is itself a meme and they compete for survival in our heads, each striving for attention. The meme meme is feeling particularly smug with this paragraph.
It was pretty hot and I was walking down the long tree lined road at the university. I couldn’t get any idea as to the layout or size of the place; I just kept walking and eventually got to tennis courts and signs for agricultural areas. There was a stretch of grass with benches and I sat down.
In front of me was a woman sitting with her dog. She had her back to me and the dog was starring into the trees. There was something about the view that made me think it would make a wonderful photograph.
It didn’t.There were plenty of pretty areas in the university, little streams and places to sit on the grass in the sunshine. Once I’d had enough I made my way out and headed through the main train station towards my next port of call, the Botanical gardens.
Being non-Japanese I headed straight for the man at the window of the little office to buy my ticket to the Botanical Gardens. He pointed to the machine opposite him where you were meant to buy the ticket first and then show it to him. He stamped my ticket, gave me a map and pointed the way. It seemed like machines don’t replace people in Japan, they just get the majority of the responsibility.
The Botanical Gardens were very extensive, even including a few small museums and historic buildings within the grounds. One museum was about the Ainu, a race of people who lived in Hokkaido having been driven out of the rest of Japan by another race of people. That other race was now what we think of as the Japanese, who had up until recently claimed that Japan was a homogenous society, but now admit to the Ainu’s existence as a different group of people. Great steps have been made since to preserve Ainu heritage, language and way of life from eradication. A book about Japanese etiquette I read puts the topic of the Ainu in a, “Never bring this up with a Japanese person” category but this paranoia if you as me.
The Ainu museum had lots of examples of tools, clothes and meaningful artefacts like this decorated turtle’s skull.
Upstairs was a an old video from early in the last century showing a bear tied to a post in the snow. The Ainu worship bears but this one was being taunted by a crowd of people standing around the post. Using sticks they were running forward and jabbing the bear making it run around the post trying to catch them. Actually it took me a while to work out that they were taunting the bear, at first I thought the bear was doing some kind of performance. The video took a sick turn when I saw the bear getting more exhausted and then limping as the crowd of people got more vicious. By the end of the video the bear was just a piece of meat roasting on a spit.
Every culture has mistreated animals, most still do. The way modern animals are slaughtered for meat in big steel factories is arguably less forgivable than what the Ainu were doing nearly a century ago. Still it had an effect on me: my interest in going to see the Ainu village outside of Sapporo melted and then evaporated.
Now having said all that I did visit another museum at the gardens that was full of dead animals. They had all been stuffed and put into lifelike poses, which seemed to be either cute or vicious. It can be pretty disturbing walking among carcasses, paused in their journey back into the soil. However, one cabinet of animals made me laugh. It was of mice, but they were completely flat like they had been run over. They weren’t just skins but whole mice as if the taxidermist had accidentally left them in his pockets before ironing his trousers. He’d probably tried to undo the damage by adding more stuffing, or trying to inflate the bodies up again with a foot pump, but to no success. Knowing that the museum had to have some mice he had perhaps claimed that it was the latest fashion in taxidermy, or that they were a special breed of low-mice adept at crawling without being seen; like soldiers on the battlefield.
As for the botany at the Botanical Gardens there was lots of it.
Including this.It’s either the name of a flower or where they think John F Kennedy was laid to rest.
My next destination was at one end of the park I had been to the day before, the one with the TV tower at its centre. Here was an old European style building that used to be a Hall of Records or something.
Above the entrance was a face.
Next I walked through the park towards the TV Tower. On the way I bought a sandwich, with this curious label.
A cute dog was playing with a ball while I ate my sandwich.
In the TV tower I bought a ticket to ride the lift to the top floor. In Japan all lifts in tall buildings are manned by female attendants who deliver a speech perfectly timed to end just when the lift reaches its destination. No one listens to the speech but the timing is appreciated. Here is a video of my ascent up the tower and you can hear the attendant giving her speech, though she cheats a bit by talking very slowly.
I really like the shadows you get to see from tall buildings, for example.
You can also see how the park cuts through the city.
On the way down I saw some Royce cookies, and this reminded me of something Yoko had said. She had told me that Royce were only available in Hokkaido, so they were a bit of a luxury in the rest of Japan. Her recommendation was a snack that looked like Pringles, but where one side was covered in chocolate and the other left salty like a crisp. I took her advice and bought a box for myself.
In the garden of another European style building I found a great picnic spot, it was under a _ and next to a beautiful pond.
The Royce snacks were really stupendously good. They were practically addictive and I got through the whole box in about twenty minutes. I could only assume that the company only operate in Hokkaido because they are too busy eating their own products to expand into the rest of Japan.
As I munched and watched the ducks I noticed that there was a man on the other side of the pond pointing his camera at me. To be fair he could have been taking pictures of the pond and the ducks but I looked right at him and kept munching so that at least I would come out as slightly more aware than the ducks when his picture, “The Grazing White Man,” was finally developed.
Also in the garden was a bizarre kind of blossom that felt just like fluff when I touched it.
Inside the building were long streams of origami cranes.
Something else to mention was this special Hokkaido shaped clock counting down the days to the G8.
At that time of day I had a shadow, but considering where the sun was the shadow was not falling in the right direction. Wondering why this was, I noticed that the light casting it was not from the sun directly but a reflection of the light from a nearby building. These things impress me.
I went back to my hotel room for a nap; I needed my energy for scaling a mountain that evening.
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