The last two nights in Nagoya, Jenn and I stayed at a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn. The windows have paper screens, you sleep on futons that get stored in a cabinet during the day, and the floors have tatami mats. In places with tatami (the ryokan or Ai's family home), there is pretty strict etiquette about footwear. Your shoes come off in an area at the entrance to the building and you switch to slippers. The slippers are fine for traveling around the halls of the ryokan, with their hardwood floors, but when you enter the bedroom you have to leave even the slippers behind and go barefoot.
Another great feature of our ryokan was the amazing bath tub. There was just one communal bathing room for the whole inn, but you lock the door when you go in to get some privacy. After a changing room with a sink for shaving, you enter a big steamy room with a huge cedar tub. This place was not a true onsen, but the water is still very very hot. After spending as much time in the tub as you can handle, you rinse off with cooler water from some showerheads at the side of the room (and you shower while sitting down on a little wooden bench).
On the way down to the bathroom, I passed these tanuki statues. Jenn and I became somewhat fascinated with tanuki during our trip, after seeing some statues outside of houses in Inuyama. The tanuki is a real animal (commonly translated as a ‘raccoon-dog”), but Japanese folklore includes stories of tanuki as shapeshifting tricksters. Most of the depictions of tanuki are cute or funny (and they emphasize the tanuki's huge testicles), but there are also scarier stories of tanuki clubbing grandmothers to death and stuff like that.
The last day of our trip arrived. Jenn and I showed up for the free breakfast provided by the ryokan (we missed it the day before, in our hurry to get to the Toyota factory tour) and it was delicious. This ryokan served a European-style breakfast, meaning coffee, fruit, egg, a bit of salad, and a croissant. This was fine with Jenn, who could never warm up to the concept of a Japanese breakfast. I was excited about the idea of grilled fish in the morning, but the closest I managed to get was a tuna-filled pastry from a café in Tokyo.
We had plenty of time before our afternoon flight, so we took a short walk from Jenn's parent's hotel to Nagoya Castle. Nagoya Castle is much bigger than Inuyama and it also has a long history of battles and feudal rulers. Unfortunately, nothing from the original castle is still standing. Nagoya, being an industrial center of Japan, was heavily bombed in World War II and the castle was completely destroyed. It has since been rebuilt as a museum. Though it looks every bit a Japanese castle on the outside, I was disappointed by how modern they made the interior. There was even an elevator, which is understandable, I guess.
On top of the castle are two huge golden dolphins. The golden dolphin is also the symbol of the city of Nagoya. This photo is of a replica down at ground level. One entertaining bit of historical information that I read somewhere in the museum is that, while the statues started out with a lot of gold inlay, they were repeatedly melted down through the castle's history, whenever the lord of the castle started running out of money. Each time the statues were reformed, it was with lower quality metal.
Around the castle, in addition to the wide moats, were some peaceful gardens, mostly empty of tourists. I got a photo of a bamboo frame that was set up around some shrubs. I saw this sort of gardening in several places throughout my trip. Bamboo was used for frames for vines to grow up or to prop up trees so that their branches could extend out further horizontally.
So this is the end of the trip. We took the train back to the airport and it was another long flight, followed by some brutal jetlag while I was at my collaboration meeting in Pasadena. You can find some more photographs at higher resolution on my flickr account. Or send me an email to get the whole set.