Hello, and welcome back! October!!! A big month, mainly because it is Halloween month, my favourite spooky time of the year. I love putting up the decorations – witches, bats, ghouls, vampires, skeletons, etc – and it is so much the better here, as they embrace the season with enthusiasm (ok, mainly for retail purposes, but I take what I can get 😊).

Zowie as decoration

Now to the weather. I have to say that it really has been glorious since my last post, with most days being high 20s/low 30s, sometimes sunny, sometimes not and not too much rain. That is, until three days ago, when it suddenly became cool; literally overnight. One night we were still sleeping under a sheet, with the fan on low, the next night it was time for a quilt. It seems that a big mass of cold air has moved down from Siberia-way and cooled things down across most of the country – they have even had sub-zero overnight temperatures up north over the last three nights.

Is this a harbinger of things to come this winter? We have been told that the ‘weather people’ (whoever they are) are expecting it to be a cold winter. Colder than last winter? Will Godzilla go out skating again? We are well prepared personally, so we’ll just have to make sure we prepare the garden better by moving the plants in pots under cover and anything else we can do to make sure it is as best prepared as possible.

The other big question is, of course, what next for The Virus? Things move slowly here, on the whole, although the vaccination process has been very good after a slow start. It also seems the people have finally taken on board the danger the Delta Variant poses, with the infection numbers very suddenly dropping. Researchers indicate that it has largely been due to the unvaccinated being a lot more careful.

The state of emergency was lifted at the end of September, and so far the numbers have remained down. I have to say, I was a little nervous that we may have a repeat of last time, especially when the late news on 1 October had two items re The Virus – the first talking to bar owners and restaurateurs who were very keen to start selling alcohol again and stay open later. They were saying that at first the patrons were a little wary coming back, but once they had a few drinks in them they loosened up, and this made the owners and staff happy…

The other item was about the pandemic experts and medicos making preparations for the sixth wave!!!! Already! Ok, so good to be prepared, but I really hope it proves to be unnecessary. Let’s hope the cooler weather doesn’t bring on a surge, too. I am being hopeful that we will indeed have guests staying with us again next year. In fact, we took a booking for three people in April recently! Some Australians who have decided to be optimistic and get in early. It cheered us up – a lot.

We have had two at home dinners with friends since we last spoke; one with our Israeli friends and a pizza night with our friend from down the road, a small birthday repast. For our Israeli friends we made an Afghan meal and played Carcassonne, since they had indicated they would like to play a board game with us (we do have a largish collection of games). Craig also made one of the recipes he has learnt through the patisserie course he is doing, which was very (very) nice. A fun night.

Craig’s pistachio cream with praline topping tarts. Yum. (Zowie as photo-bombing decoration)

This being October, it was time for my annual birthday excursion. This year I decided it was finally time to make the long (and somewhat expensive) journey to the Tsujikawayama Park – land of the youkai. Yes it is a mouthful; Tsujikawa being the local river, yama meaning mountain and youkai being supernatural entities and spirits in Japanese folklore. Youkai are not literally demons in the sense of the word as we understand it, but are instead spirits and entities whose behaviour can range from malevolent or mischievous to friendly, fortuitous or even helpful to humans. What better way to celebrate my birthday and Halloween all at once?

A selection of the many, many youkai

The drive takes about three hours if you don’t take the toll roads, hence the somewhat expensive part as it takes just over half the time to get there via the tolls, clearly the better option. It took about 1 hour and 40 minutes to get there (a bit longer on the way back as one side of one of the expressways was having road works done). The park itself is free to enter and is located in a town called Fukusaki. It was created to celebrate the birthplace of Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), a famous Japanese scholar and folklorist. In his study of regional lore, Yanagita revealed a particular interest in tales involving youkai, hence the park has various youkai statues and two mechanical youkai attractions. His childhood home, which is now owned by the city of Fukusaki, is also part of the park.

Apparently Yanagita called his home the smallest house in Japan

The statues are really amazing in detail. Along with all the statues, every fifteen minutes a kappa (water sprite or river monster) rises out of the pond, and a few minutes later a winged tengu flies out of a nearby small tower, upside down (don’t know why). It is a lot of fun and children seem to like it too, despite them being ‘monsters’. On the other hand, a small dog that accompanied a woman there did not like any of the monsters, and barked at all of them as it came to them. Unsurprisingly, we were the only non-Japanese people there, and, interestingly, a lot of the Japanese people that were visiting the park were dressed traditionally.

Apart from the park, there is a bit of a trail around the town, with ‘bench youkai’ placed in front of some of the businesses there. Unfortunately some of the businesses appear to have closed down, and some of the benches had been moved, so we didn’t find all of them in the end, especially as we had limited time since the journey there and back took a while. We did, however, make sure we found the nekomata. The nekomata is a kind of cat youkai which has two tails and can either be of a type that live in the mountains, or domestic cats that have grown old and transformed into youkai. Funnily enough, sometimes we think Miro is a nekomata, with the sounds she makes when playing with Zowie, although she doesn’t have two obvious tails. She did belong to a colony of cats that live here in the foothills, though…

What’s with the head of that horse???

It was a lot of fun taking photos with the youkai, and as we returned to the park to get our car we found a large plant nursery which had a good collection of larger trees and shrubs, something we haven’t found within the confines of Kyoto. We were looking for a replacement for a couple of plants which have suffered from both the cold winter and then the very wet and overcast summer, and we found larger plants than we already had and a lot cheaper than smaller versions here.

We actually went to see the youkai a few days before my birthday, as the weather was pretty good and we had planned to go out to dinner on my birthday and thought it may be difficult to fit all of this in on one day. So, for my birthday I had decided I would like to go to a vegan ramen restaurant which is a bit more upmarket than the places we usually go to, ie more expensive, and it was designed by teamLab. Unfortunately, when we got to the location it was closed. There was no warning on their website, but it coincided with the opening of a new restaurant in Tokyo, so it is likely they were there helping them learn the ropes.

Through the door…the teamLab artwork constantly changes

In the end we walked into the city centre and went to Ain Soph, not quite as ‘upmarket’ but we know the burgers are good and they serve wine there. I suppose we’ll just have to wait until the ramen restaurant re-opens here, maybe around New Year, to give us time to save up some money!

Before I sign off, I thought I’d mention a visit we had from our backdoor neighbours, the people who own the pottery kiln behind us, and includes the lovely stone wall at the back of our yard. In that wall a fig tree has sprouted at some point – how this happened, I don’t know, but it is quite healthy and a reasonable size. This is the tree the monkeys and badgers came here for last year. A group of four of the family arrived at our front door, a youngish couple, their son and grandma – likely great grandma to the boy. It seems that she was very worried about the tree, that it was causing us a burden looking after it, and she wanted to ask us if they could help look after it. We told them, as best we could, that we were perfectly happy looking after the tree, that we loved having it there and it was absolutely no burden to us – though it took some convincing. She is a lovely old woman who has always been very friendly to us. Nice to have good neighbours.

That’s all for now – enjoy Halloween!

Cheers!

Very bright green old library house in Fukusaki

Hhhmmmm

Restaurant near the park

Old building de-constructing…

For you, Steven

The sometimes very confusing expressways

L: When a road becomes a carpark        R: A very large ferris wheel

Many tunnels through the mountains 

My birthday night – the Teremachi; Tanouki already preparing for xmas; me in one of my new masks

My first personal Halloween decoration

Just happened to see movement in the pond before the kappa arose

Huge preying mantis, which flew across the street in front of us

Turns out this is what a Red Helen caterpillar looks like – when it is eating our lemon tree…

Impressive display of pitcher plants

At first I thought it was a UFO…

Bye