Nejo Castle and Hachinohe Museum

Planning out my parents' visit was interesting. Traveling in Japan can be difficult with the lack of road signs and the language barrier. It's not like Europe where you can sometimes guestimate what that word might mean in English. Kanji is a whole different world.

Our tours place on base has a lot of directions online, so I just picked what looked interesting. Some places we'd been to before, some places I went to working with the school age kids last year, and some places were the right combination of travel time and price.

The Nejo Castle and Hachinohe Museum fit the third description. Just an hour drive away and something like 400 yen a person.

It was pretty interesting. A couple sections of the museum had fully translated descriptions, which was wonderful. Most of the time it's a game of looking at an object or piece of paper and guessing why it matters. It was refreshing to be able to read the descriptions again. And for a couple of history and culture junkies, it was interesting to learn more about this area's past.

Did you know Hachinohe port has a big history in sardines? I didn't. Above is some contraption that helped with sardines, but I can't remember what.

I'm in love with all the carvings and statues I've found in Japan.

This was a display about the history of performing arts.

I suppose it's common knowledge that rice is a huge industry in Japan. Here's some older tools for the rice harvests.

The museum was one of the better ones we've seen in Japan. We've been raised on Chicago's amazing muesuems, so we're a little biased. The Misawa Aviation Museum probably wins the award for most entertaining, but this one had a lot of interesting displays. It's worth a visit if you're in the area.

Next up was the Nejo Castle. It's a reconstruction of the original grounds and castle. It was a little under-whelming to us, since a lot of it was just the grounds. They had some buildings reconstructed, and very well-done at that, but a lot of buildings were just plotted out. Interesting to see, but we all decided it was a one visit kind of place.

It started with some gardens. All the plants and trees were labeled, but only in Kanji. We assumed they were all plants found on the original grounds.

They had a burial ground that was very old. Some had flowers, so we assume these are important people somewhere in Hachinohe's history.

It was a drizzly, overcast day, so we wandered with umbrellas in hand.

Here are some of the reconstructed buildings. Most were buried into the ground, so only the roof was above ground and you kind of ducked down into the room. Jeff said it made for a stronger defense in case of attack...or something.

Here's a plotted out building.

This was the important building where they would hold meetings and ceremonies and such. It was open for us to walk through.

Some of the rooms were staged for display.

Even the horse stables were staged with materials from the time period.

Here's another plotted building. We were all wishing the buildings would get reconstructed, but probably the time and money it takes to build them with the actual materials would be too much for a small museum like this.

They had some wicked spiderwebs. And I was enjoying playing with my Nikon ;)

A gate at the other end of the castle grounds.

It was an interesting little piece of northern Japan. Jeff knows a lot about historical wars and soldiers, so he filled in a lot of interesting facts along the way. I wish I could share, but I don't know as much as he does about this stuff :)