Sorry for the lack of blogs recently. I’ve been busy with the lead up to Christmas and the New Year. However, to make up for it, here’s the first in a whole bunch of blogs about my recent adventures. My mum came out to Japan (for the third time!) during my winter vacation, so we did lots of exploring and adventuring around Nagoya and local areas…
On Monday 28th December, my mum and I set out on a little adventure. I had planned to take her to Meiji Mura and (if there was time) Inuyama Castle for a sort of Christmas present. After a little bit of adventure on the trains, we got to Inuyama and stood waiting for a bus to Meiji Mura. When the bus driver came along I checked with him (in Japanese, of course) how much it cost to Meiji Mura. He looked surprised, and told me it was closed because it was Monday. Doh. I had checked so carefully about when things were closed over the New Year period, but I had forgotten to check about its regular closed days.
There was another bus waiting, bound for Little World. Little World is a place I had quite fancied going to for a while, although I didn’t know much about it. To save wasting a journey out to Inuyama, we spontaneously decided to take our little adventure all around the world, and hopped on the bus to Little World!
The general idea of Little World is that it is a “museum of man”, an anthropological open-air museum. It mainly consists of house and building replicas, but also includes some artifacts (I’m not sure if they are all replicas or if some of them are real), statues, paintings, and the opportunity to try on costumes. It all has a hint of Japanese about it, but it was much better (and less tacky) than I expected. My only criticism would be that it seemed a bit Asia-centric, in that it barely touches on Europe or other places, but it did cover a fair portion of the world. The places included in the main exhibitions are: Okinawa (Japan), Kagoshima Prefecture (Japan), Hokkaido (Japan), Taiwan, USA (Plains and Navajo Indians), Alaska, Peru, Indonesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, Germany, France, Italy, China, Morocco, Sweden, Kenya, Syria, Tanzania, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Nepal, India, Thailand, Korea, Yamagata Prefecture (Japan). Of these, I personally thought Alaska, Nepal, Taiwan and India were the most interesting.
I took loads of photos, of course, and you can see the entire collection here. Here’s a very small selection…
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Mother and child statue in the main entrance
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Feeding a sata andagi (サーターアンダーギー), or Okinawan donut, to an Okinawan lion statue (Sisa).
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Farmhouse in Taiwan
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Me dressing up in “Taiwan”. The other costumes available were much better but it was way too cold!
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Tlingit House in Alaska
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Gentry House of Bali in Indonesia
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Bayern Village in Germany
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Tent Village – Sami Tent in Sweden. This was perhaps the only part of Little World that I had really seen in the real world. My mum and I spent Christmas 2007 in Sweden, and visited the Sami people on Christmas Day.
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Mani Wheel, Sherpa, Nepal
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Buddhist Monastery in Nepal
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Lanna-Thai House in Thailand
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Village Guardian Deities, Korea
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Haikugirl's Japan 