Central Japan Tour Day 4

Fujifilm X100VI 23mm f/2: 19mm (Wide Angle Adapter) 1/1000s, f/11, ISO800

Sorry this chapter took much longer to produce, it was an exhausting week at work! After another Japanese/Western buffet hotel breakfast, we were on the road again. The first stop was a rest stop. Even the rest stops started to get exciting as we moved further north and into the mountains.

Fujifilm X100VI 23mm f/2: 19mm (Wide Angle Adapter) 1/500s, f/11, ISO800

Fujifilm X100VI 23mm f/2: 19mm (Wide Angle Adapter) 1/500s, f/8, ISO800

One of the digital photography tips I picked up along the way is, when taking a horizontal (landscape orientation) photo, is that’s usually a pretty good time to also take a vertical (portrait orientation) photo so I try to do both when I remember, because sometimes the one I don’t expect turns out to be the better of the two.

The first stop was the Shirakawa-go lookout (the first photo in this post) where we took a group photo. My scanner does a terrible job digitizing the print, so I can’t share it here. This is a cool town designated as a UNESCO world heritage site for the 250+ year tradition of their Gassho-Zukuri “Prayer hands 🙏” Farm house roofs that are designed to handle large amounts of snow. I’d have loved to have explored the whole town, but alas, we didn’t have enough time. I saw some anime characters at a few of the shops while galavanting, and found the characters were from a show called: Higurashi: When They Cry. It turns out this is kind of a horror/suspense show that’s set in a fictional village called Hinamizawa that takes very heavy inspiration from Shirakawa… I watched a few episodes and it isn’t exactly my cup of tea.

Next we had lunch in the country side. The scenery behind the restaurant was beautiful too. I missed taking a picture of the restaurant front, sadly.

After lunch we were bussed to Gokayama Washi Paper to experience the final stages of converting fiber into paper after watching a video describing the steps leading up to this part. This was really quite fun! I missed getting a good photo of folks dipping their trays and then shaking them though.

The last stop of Day 4 before the dinner I also failed to photograph is Hakukokan Gold Leaf Center. Here we saw a lot of gold that’s hard to take your eyes off of. There was a gold leafed chamber with golden armor made from 10,000 gold leaf. There were sound-isolated rooms where people were actually going through the steps of actually making the gold leaf with guides explaining what was happening in those rooms and a quick demonstration of how loud the pounding/flattening machine actually was. Needless to say I’m glad that room was sound-isolated. Of course there was a shop selling all kinds of things infused with gold, and even ice-cream with gold-leaf!

* I had forgotten to turn off the internal neutral density filter in my camera so some of these photos are much noisier than I would’ve liked. 🤦🏻‍♂️