Japanland: Little Edo

Last weekend we spent a Sunday afternoon in Little Edo, in downtown Kawagoe. 

I used to work around there and around Tokorozawa at the sick joke of a job I left a couple of months ago, happened upon an article about this area, and decided I wanted to go so I could think of Saitama as something other than a place full of nightmarish kindergartens I hated working at.

I didn't take a picture of it, but I stopped in a little handmade craft, accessory, and baked good shop called The Walnut Tree (くるみの木) that not only had very inexpensive little things that would make great souvenirs to bring or send back home, but all of their proceeds go toward assisting and caring for disabled people. We're talking wallets, pouches, and plush brooches made out of what I'm pretty sure is recycled kimono fabric, teensy baggies of shortbread cookies the size of water bottle caps, and so on. 　

This cute and informative blog post about it has lots of photos and details, and you should be able to find it if you walk into Little Edo on the left side of the street.

"Oh, am I in the shot?"

Can anyone explain this childrens' shrine to me? Mostly it just comes off as creepy.

Most of the buildings, I'm pretty sure, date from the 18th and 19th centuries. 

There was also the Great Fire of Kawagoe in 1893, though, so I suspect the current incarnations of many of the structures are pretty recent.

Caught a rickshaw and a group of traditional archers passing each other

There were quite a lot of these large, cartoonish animal statues around...

... and I'm not entirely sure why lol (no, it was just bright out)

One of the main attractions of this little slice of historically relevant nostalgia is "Confectionary Row" or "Penny Candy Lane", an alley full of vendors selling traditional snacks, and often for less than 50 cents. It was so crammed full of very slow-moving Japanese tourists, though, that we hurried through it and wouldn't have been able to look at anything anyway.

I felt bad for taking a picture of this vendor without asking, but, well, giant sweaty writing mass of humanity pushing me along, you know.. Plus it's still way too hot for chestnuts!

"Soon."

The only giant animal statues that make sense, these are from the Choju-giga, a well-known picture scroll done by monks back in the 12th and 13th centuries that looks surprisingly like a modern comic strip. There are monkeys as monks, frolicking frogs and rabbits in court attire, and all kinds of silly things going on.

Terror bird and chameleon, though, are as much your guess as mine lol.

A rusty Bridgestone sign with a penny-farthing on it is about as vintage nostalgia as you can get, right?

Hannes' stomach is unfortunately pretty unhappy pretty often, so we stopped in the nearest cafe to sit down for a few, and it turned out to be a really intense, grandma's house-looking one.

Then we walked to the castle, the Kawagoe branch of the Tokugawa Shogunate 

"Buildings like this weren't made for people as tall as you!"

"You know what this bitch needs? More identical empty rooms. Boom!"

"Man, people back then were really small. I mean, I know they were smaller, but it's always surprising to see stuff like this."
"Yeah, it kind of takes the epicness and grandeur out of the classic image of a samurai battle when you imagine someone the size of a baby running at you full-speed."

We went across the street to the small but respectable city art museum, and instantly took a couple of pictures upon finding out we weren't allowed

And we caught this bad boy back to the main part of Koedo, which I'd seen online and was hoping to ride. It looks like a life-size die-cast toy and not the other way around.

And there.. There was a Ghibli store. There was also a Hello Kitty store I'd skipped earlier, but the gravitational pull was too strong with this one.

-heavy breathing-

After also grabbing a sweet potato cake and some super light fried tofu as snacks, we took a gander at the bell tower, which doesn't really have a whole lot going on in or around it. It was originally built between 1624 and 1644, but the current one dates from after the Great Fire.

Boom, girls in yukata plus bell tower plus couple posing for photo in rickshaw.

I reached my daily allotment of kitsch with this one.

Here's my swag, for some reason consisting almost entirely of pins. There are two little fabric owls on branches and a little dancing doll in a hat from The Walnut Tree, and I got a mystery Ghibli pin (soot sprites, yay!) as well. 

Hannes surprised me with the Totoro hair tie after we got home! He wanted to get me something bigger, but couldn't sneak it while we were both in the store! Aww.

As we were leaving, we noticed two young women talking to an older man sitting in a small park area with a colourful parrot. They were laughing and seemed really amused and impressed, and when the older man noticed us, he motioned for us to come over.

He didn't tell us the Amazon Bullhead (he thinks it is in English?) parrot's name, but he's had her for over 25 years!

"Ehrmahgerd!"

She does such cute tricks, and is obviously very intelligent. He's been letting her fly around freely (though not all the time) for about 15 of those 25 years, and interestingly, she's largely forgotten how to talk since then, or doesn't want to anymore. Maybe she doesn't feel the need to communicate as much because she's fairly independent, or maybe flying around is just as interesting and enriching as practicing a trick like talking. 

It's crazy to think that this bird is the same age we are, and I hope that whatever almost certainly illegal and morally reprehensible stream of wildlife trade brought her into Japan dried up long ago.

Either way, it was all extremely charming, and she did say "Bye bye" to us when we left! 

Architecture and Street Art in Rostock

And now onto Part II: the lovely buildings and interesting street art of Rostock.

Fun facts: 

I never got a picture of it, but on one building at the waterfront that used to be a granary/silo used by shipping companies to house goods back in the day (the waterfront in the center of town, on the one side of the river), there's a griffin, the city's symbol. Under the griffin, it was pointed out to me, are a number of stones that have been replaced. That's because a swastika was put there, probably around the time when Mecklenburg was united under the Nazi government in 1934.

Graffiti is, like, a legitimate past-time for German kids and teenagers from what I can gather. And for university students who make some really good stickers and stencils, too. 

It's weird seeing these super cute, old buildings that look like pastel-coloured sugar grandmas' houses out of a book of fairytales with a layer of graffiti and street art on the bottom 6 feet, like there was a tidal surge of kids that left a defiant stain on them.

Brick gothic is the dominant form of architecture in this region, because they don't have many other resources to use for building materials. It's totally worth reading about on Wiki and then seeing for yourself, because the buildings may look ugly, boxy, mean, and imposing, but in person, they're also extremely impressive. 

These are parts of the old city wall, with some of dat classic brick gothic I was just telling you about

And this one here is Heiligen-Geist-Kirchhe, or the Church of the Holy Ghost, built from 1905 - 1908, and apparently classified as neo gothic:

This is the city flag; in the complete version, there's a griffin pictured in the blue part

This is the main part of the university; I think it's where the dean's office and the law school are. Another interesting fact, this city's university is one of the oldest in the world (third oldest in Germany, oldest in the Baltic region), originally established in 1419.

If this doesn't make you want to bust out some classic gothic fiction and imagine yourself in the 19th century, I don't know what will

This is City Hall, originally with a brick gothic facade, but with a baroque one stuck on over it. In German it's "Rathaus", and I was like, "Wow, your word for the seat of local politics is the 'Rat House'? Nice." Hannes was like, "Oh man, that's great, I never realised it sounded like that before!"

The "porno fountain" in the centre of town, so dubbed because of its many nude and frolicking pilates instructors and creatures

This one here is the Steintor, one of the four main gates of the old city and part of that aforementioned wall, built from 1574 - 1577. This style of architecture is actually Renaissance, despite its tricky bricky pointy appearance.

These aren't buildings, they're more like dessert mints or petit fours

This obviously became a running joke because of how close it was to being really awesome, were it not for that unfortunate typo

The upper text is anti-racist and anti-appearance-based political platforms

That image of flood stains is pretty fitting, don't you think? 

This part is so colourful and amateurish though, to me it looks more like someone released a particularly rambunctious gang of kindergartners with crayons to wreak havoc on the local bakery or something.

This artist I really like. We found another one of his, pictured a ways below.

And of course this Gundam stencil is awesome. It is a Gundam, right? It'll get less awesome if it ends up being from some other franchise, so let's just stick with Gundam.

These photos barely scratch the surface of that whole spiky star ball decoration phenomenon I mentioned in the first post about Rostock

This is in front of the super tall pointy church. Cute!

Quaint!

Pointy!

I'm no expert at camera settings and don't know why this extreme brightness thing was happening that day, but I really like it.

The inside of Petrikirche, 117 metres tall (it's also on a hill, making it seem even taller), originally constructed around the mid-1300's, and maybe constructed in something more like its present form around a century later. It was pretty thoroughly destroyed in WWII, and the pointy bit of note was only added in the late 90's.

It's a medieval maritime church if anyone's ever seen one.

I mean, I can totally picture them overseeing Viking-style funeral ceremonies.

Alright, taking a break from building facts for a second, here we've got a good old-fashioned statue fact. This is a memorial site for the revolutionary (or just brave, but in a propagandistic sense) seamen of WWI, used during GDR times as a rememberence of German-Soviet friendship and the November Revolution (that brought down the Reich and ushered in the Weimar Republic). Built in 1977.

I think this was actually a continuation of that other waterfront day with the pictures of wharves and chocolates, but I'm not completely sure anymore: 

Old shipyard building with lots of luscious texture

Just adjacent to this, in an interesting example of rapid gentrification, some investors erected some fancy, expensive apartment buildings, condos, and some other shit, but decided to do murals on the walls:  

Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?

Here's that same artist again. Fucking AJ, go home.

Mildly terrifying wall monkey

Back in the early- to mid-2000's, this "Bunker" place, which was indeed an actual WWII bunker, became the sort of de facto spot for alternative shows and clubbing events, along with another one called Trafo, and another underground rave venue in the same neighbourhood, which were all at the edge of town in those days.

Then the city realised - because it was a freaking War-era concrete bunker - that it didn't meet fire or other safety standards, forced it to close for a full 3 years in order to get their shit up to all of the current building codes, and in that time, of course, the crowd that had frequented it grew up and changed a lot, meaning that they had no interest in going back by the time the renovations were complete and the area became suddenly populated by monied old farts. So, that's why we didn't even go inside and have a drink lol.

This is another part of the university on the other side of town, 

adjacent to where Hannes studied

The Molotov, a bar we also didn't actually go to, though they apparently have clean toilets, a chessboard, and cheap beer

... And the vans parked outside The Molotov

To the right, "So where's the Christmas woman (as opposed to the traditional "Christmas man" we all know and love)?!"