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Parcly Taxel: In some ways my trip to Japan paralleled an earlier trip I made to South Korea, in that I visited three kinds of places in order. The first place was not often frequented by tourists and possessed a strong regional identity; that was Jeju on the South Korea trip and Hokkaido on my current trip. The second was a rather old but still culturally important town: Busan in South Korea and where I was now in Japan — Takayama. The last place was the national capital, Seoul of South Korea and where I would be going next after Takayama — the largest city in the world, Tokyo.

Yet the two trips diverged in many other ways. Whereas South Korea has been on the cutting edge of technology and entertainment for years, to the extent that digital products are ubiquitous, Japan has been slower to ride the wave and retains its quaintness in many locations. Hida-furukawa (飛騨古川), fifteen minutes away by train from Takayama, is one of those locations.

Spindle: There are, safe to say, no modern buildings everywhere you look. Even the train station is just a little house with a ticketing booth and three benches, while hoofpaths and long alleys connect wooden shrines with wooden houses. Most of those houses were shuttered or seeing no visitors whatsoever, and the schools of carp that plied local streams in the summer had migrated elsewhere for the winter. Fluttershy would see this place as a perfect match.

Fluttershy: Um… having a stream just flowing without any fish inside sounds a little too quiet?

Spindle: They are hibernating.

Fluttershy: Yay… what did you eat for lunch?

Parcly: Some hot soba in soup with a potato croquette. Outside the restaurant where I ate this was a large drum. If I had come in the middle of April there would be a huge and lively procession where such drums would be banged throughout day and night above throngs of revellers, who would be drinking sake and dancing and singing until they dropped… at this time of the year, however, the best thing to enjoy is the surrounding mountain range.

Spindle: For the same reasons that the two towns mentioned here are sleepy, we waited 45 minutes for the train back to Takayama. After returning to our house for a brief rest, we embarked on a short tour of the local food streets, which were not that exciting to Parcly.

Parcly: A few more differences between South Korea and Japan were apparent. The former emphasises cities and the latter areas; there is also a slightly higher dependence on imported goods in the former. Japan once invaded the Korean peninsula, and for a long time that was enough to make ponies on both sides hate each other, but now they're back to being friends.

Spindle: For dinner we went to a popular restaurant serving the regional specialty of Hida beef. Like the majority of Japanese beef restaurants, the meat came raw and we cooked it ourselves, allowing for fine-tuning of the taste. Cabbages and other vegetables were also provided to complement the juiciness. Parcly was loving every bite, to the point where a stove was unnecessary — the fire of our friendship was all we needed.

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Posted previously at: 2016-12-07T22:54:54 | Posted previously by: Parcly Taxel