Travel Features :The Best of Okayama

Situated midway between Osaka and Hiroshima, Okayama is often overlooked by visitors, seen merely as a blur from the window of a bullet train. The area does, however, have a lot to offer. Okayama is home to the imposing Crow Castle, an idyllic garden, a record-breaking bridge, and, for one night a year, several thousand half-naked men.

Okayama Castle

Modern Japan may be dominated by giant corporations, but for centuries it was feudal lords or shoguns who ruled the land. A lord’s castle served as both a military stronghold and as a sign of his power and status.

Nearly all Japanese castles were painted white, the most famous example of which is Himeji-jo. With its elegant towers and iridescent walls, Himeji-jo is thought to be Japan’s most beautiful castle, and became known as The White Egret Castle. Eastern philosophy says that everything has its opposite: Yin and Yang, good and evil, life and death. The White Egret Castle in Himeji has it opposite in Okayama – The Crow Castle.

While Himeji-jo, could be described as elegant or fairy-tale, The Crow Castle is far more imposing. The black walls and towers may be trimmed with gold, but they still give the appearance of brute strength and invulnerability. When the castle was built, the country’s finest weapons were samurai swords. The castle’s downfall would come centuries later from something far more devastating. On June 29, 1945, allied bombing raids hit Okayama City, leaving all but one turret of the castle destroyed.

In 1966, Okayama Castle was carefully reconstructed, and has once again become a commanding sight on the city skyline. The crow, like the phoenix, can rise from the ashes of disaster.

Koraku-en Garden

Okayama’s mild climate and fertile soils mean that the prefecture is known for its quality rice, grapes and peaches. One of Japan’s most popular children’s stories is about Momotaro, the boy who was born from a peach, and a statue of Momotaro greets visitors at the city’s main train station.

The area’s fertile soil also contributed to Okayama’s Koraku-en becoming one of the country’s top three gardens. Constructed between1687 and 1700, Koraku-en was designed with an expansive lawn for leisurely walks, a tea plantation, paddy field, and the Yatsu-hashi zig-zag bridge. Another classic feature of the garden is its use of borrowed landscape. Okayama Castle, although outside the boundary of the garden, is “borrowed” so that its presence on the skyline makes it appear as an integral part of the scenic landscape.

Saidai-ji Eyo Hadaka Matsuri – The Naked Man Festival

As the birthplace of karate, judo and jujitsu, Japan has numerous ways for people to show off their strength, courage and general virility. For some, however, a brawl, isn’t a brawl unless you’re fighting against a couple of thousand other guys.

Each year, at midnight on the third Saturday in February, Okayama’s Kannon-in Temple holds one of Japan’s most unusual festivals. The rules are simple: the Buddhist monks bless three sacred sticks known as shingi and drop them from the temple balcony into the heaving mass of testosterone. The man who gets hold of the top shingi, wins some money, but more importantly is ensured good luck and vigor for the following year.

Men, both young and old, compete dressed in only a traditional mawashi. It is the same piece of cloth a sumo wrester wears except this fight is done in freezing temperatures and with far less body fat to keep participants warm. Those at the centre of the melee, however, are packed so tightly that steam curls off their bodies into the cold night air.

A line of police 4-men-deep separates the spectators from the half-naked men. It ensures the safety of non-combatants, but makes watching the event a little tricky. There is, however, a ¥1,000 standing section from where you have a better angle. A ¥5,000 ticket gets you a seat with an unrestricted view of the chaotic action.

Seto Ohashi Bridge

The Japanese seem to have a love, if not an obsession, with concrete. Most construction projects are generic apartment blocks or somewhat dubious schemes to “beautify” rivers and coastlines. Every so often, however, they build something that shows a flash of technological brilliance.

The Seto Ohashi Bridge connects Japan’s largest island, Honshu, with its fourth largest, Shikoku. The 12 kilometer bridge is actually made up of six sections spanning gaps between the smaller islands across the strait. The span closest to Shikoku is the world’s longest double-level suspension bridge. The best view of the bridge is in the early morning from one of the viewing platforms on Washu-zan Hill. The bridge is also floodlit from dusk till 9 or 10pm every Saturday and during the national holidays at New Year and Obon (mid August).

Bizen

A little ways east of Okayama City is Bizen, a nationally renowned area for pottery. Japan has six main styles of traditional pottery, and Bizen-yaki, dating back more than a 1,000 years, is the oldest. The high iron content of the clay used in Bizen-yaki produces deep red-brown pots that are unusually strong. They are also distinctive as they are unglazed, “reflecting the harmony of earth and fire.” The durability and unique look of the pots make them popular with practitioners of the Japanese tea ceremony and collectors of ceramics from around the world.

Ichiyougama Pottery is a family run business, open to the public. Now 29, Hajime Kimura has worked as a potter for 10 years learning the art from his father Kouzou Kimura. You can watch the craftsmen at work on their wheels or make reservations to try yourself. Your creation will be fired in the kiln and then mailed to you at a later date.

The land around Bizen is also rich in iron sands and charcoal, two of the key ingredients for producing steel. The area was so predominant in sword making that it is thought that 60-70 percent of surviving samurai swords were produced in the local forges. At the Bizen Osafune Museum, dozens of historical swords are on display, but the museum is also a working forge. Once the blades were made for the samurai, but now it is collectors who place the orders. Only occasionally do they construct the full length katana, however swordsmiths can be seen working on hilts, scabbards and smaller blades.

Kurashiki

Technological progress and almost continuous urban renewal have meant that many Japanese cities have very few older structures. The exceptions tend to be individual shrines or temples, but rarely is there any entire area of older buildings.

Kurashiki was an Edo-period mercantile town. Its storehouses with their whitewashed walls and distinctive black tiles were filled with grain, cotton, rice and rush seeds. Kurashiki Bikan Chiku is the historical district of modern Kurashiki, and still maintains the buildings and atmosphere of the old town. A canal runs through its center flanked by willow trees and the iconic warehouses. Stalls sell local souvenirs including bamboo mats, Bizen-yaki pottery and the prefecture’s famous peaches.

For those looking for a more spiritual connection, Achi Shrine looks out over the town just a short walk from the canal area.

Bitchu Matsuyama Castle

The first Japanese castles were not enormous lowland castles such as Himeji or Okayama Castle, but smaller mountain top castles. Bitchu Matsuyama Castle sits atop Mt. Gagyu, which at 430 meters, is Japan’s highest castle. The fact that it was so inaccessible, made Bitchu Matsuyama Castle a highly defensible position. However, like other mountain top castles, its great strength was also its weakness – inaccessibility meant problems with supply. The castle has been destroyed and rebuilt several times, the latest version having been completed in 1960. The castle is designated as an important cultural property and well worth the hike.

When to go

Hadaka Matsuri is on the third Saturday in February. At this time, however, it is still quite cold and the expansive lawns of the Koraku-en Garden or the canal-side willows of Kurashiki are more yellow-brown than luscious green. If you want to take part in hanami (admiring the cherry blossoms) then the only opportunity is in the first couple of weeks of April.

Getting There

Okayama has its own airport which has regular flights from most major Japanese cities with either JAL or ANA. From Okinawa there is only one flight a day with JTA which leaves Naha in the late afternoon and returns early in the morning. Okayama city center is a 40 minute bus ride from the airport (¥680). Kurashiki is a 35 minute ride on the expressway bus (¥1,000).

Okayama is on the Shinkansen bullet-train route that connects all the major cities on the southern coast of Honshu including Tokyo (196min), Osaka (44min) and Hiroshima (34min).

Getting Around

Okayama City has its own tram system starting from the train station and stopping at the main attractions (¥140 to any destination). The trams themselves are actually tourist attractions as they are such a rarity in Japanese cities (Sapporo, Hiroshima and Kumamoto also have trams).

Bizen is east of Okayama on the JR Ako line. Get off at Inbe Station and then it is a quick walk to the potteries. For the samurai sword museum, get off at Osafune Station and then take a taxi for the remaining 3 kilometers.

Kurashiki is 16 kilometers west of Okayama City on the local Sanyo line. The journey takes around 15 minutes (¥470). Stay on the Sanyo line for another 40 minutes to Bitchu Takahashi Station if you want to visit Bitchu Matsumoto Castle. From the station, walk through the old part of the town and then it’s a one to two hour hike up to the mountaintop castle.

Seto Ohashi Bridge viewpoint is accessed by bus from Kojima Station (20min). Kojima is reached by either bus from Kurashiki (55min) or by train from Okayama (15min). From the bus stop on Washu-zan it is then a twenty minute walk uphill to the viewing platform.

More Information

Bizen Osafune Swordsmiths have a webpage.

To find out train times and fares use hyperdia.com

View all Okayama images at Alamy.com