I woke up to an amazing breakfast prepared by Sato-san. She must have been up an hour before me making everything. She was also nice enough to make mostly western style breakfast stuff, toast, eggs, sausage, coffee, and OJ, as well as miso soup and some other Japanese breakfast things. Sato-san then hustled me out the door to meet up with Sakai-san in downtown Kumamoto. Sato-san had to work at the hospital during the day today, but I would meet up with her later.
Sakai-san was a great guide with a good sense of humor, and actually speaks pretty good English too. First we checked out the Center for International Studies building, where many of the city's international outreach programs are based. There was an exhibit on Kumamoto's sister city relationship with San Antonio with some Texas information and memorabilia, as well as some gifts that the two cities have sent to each other. The people working there seemed excited to have a visitor from San Antonio, and they told me a little bit about what they do. The main thing they have is a study center and library for people to come study English or other cultures.
Downstairs in the lobby there was some kind of school fashion show going on with a full runway set up and students strutting and posing. Interesting.
We moved on to a famous 400-year -old Japanese garden in the city, the Suizen-ji Joju-en garden. The whole garden is supposed to represent in miniature the 53 stages of the Tokaido road, a road that used to connect Edo (present-day Tokyo) with Kyoto. The most obvious "stage" that has been miniaturized is Mt. Fuji. The koi fish in the ponds, however, have not been miniaturized, and they are huge! The garden was very beautiful and serene, but man, it was starting to get hot out there.
Sakai-san drove me around the city a bit more pointing out some landmarks to me, eventually heading over to the Kumamoto University campus for a brief stop. They have a pretty nice little campus, though there weren't too many students around, it being the middle of Summer. We explored a couple buildings before we had to leave to meet up with KU's dean of the school of architecture downtown.
KU's architecture program actually has a studio and classroom on the second story of a downtown building that helps bring students into the urban environment to do their studying. There we met Dean Morozumi-san, who had invited some of his students to come up and say hi when I arrived. Many of them were busy and had to leave pretty quickly, though, since they were working as volunteers in some kind of festival downtown that involved a lot of people wearing kimonos.
Sakai-san took off and Morozumi-san took me out for a short walk around downtown with two of his undergraduate students.
We visited the Kumamoto Modern Art Museum and some of the downtown shopping streets before having a amazing lunch in a restaurant at the top of city hall overlooking Kumamoto Castle.
Though the day had started off sunny and beautiful, thing can change very quickly in Japan. Our view over the city from the restaurant gave us a nice seat to watch the clouds roll in and start dumping buckets of rain. After we finished eating we ran through the rain to the closest convenience store and bought cheap umbrellas.
The castle in Kumamoto is right in the center of downtown, with many streets lined up to frame a view toward the highest tower.
We made our way across the moat and into a maze of stone walls leading to the center of the complex. I'm pretty sure that the walls and pathways through the castle grounds were zig zagged to make entry difficult from intruders. The walls here are also well known for their curved facades, which apparently makes them difficult to scale.
The whole castle has been burned down in the past, and the most recent reconstruction was actually fairly recent. This means that the interiors of many of the buildings look brand new, just as they did when they were originally built. The residence halls are immaculate, with beautiful gold trimmed artwork on sliding doors and awesome wood structure visible everywhere. Many of these castles were built with very few nails, with most of the structure consists of expert wood joinery. Also interesting was how the building itself cantilevered a bit over the foundation of stone walls underneath, making it more difficult for soldiers and ninjas to break in. The spikes on the underside of the cantilevers probably helped, too.
After checking out the residence, we scaled the castle tower. Inside were many artifacts and weapons on display. I think I found Raiden's hat:
The view from the top was great, looking at out over the many mountains surrounding the city.
After stopping briefly at a few other notable buildings in the city, Morozumi-san and his students said goodbye as they dropped me at the hospital to meet up with Sato-san. I got to hang out in her workplace for a bit while she poured me and some of her coworkers tea and offered us snacks. When it got to be dinner time we took a couple cars over to the restaurant.
I wasn't sure what to expect, as all I'd been told was that Sato-san planned a "party" for this evening. It turns out they had reserved a large private room and table at a really nice place, with seating for us and about a dozen of Sato-san's friends, most of whom were coworkers who were close to my age. We had an incredible feast of sushi, sashimi, pork and udon noodles, tempura, vegetables, you name it. They even had an elaborate presentation for the sashimi, with the whole fish impaled on a stick staring up at me as I grabbed bites from the dish.
Later, they decided to feed me some famous Kumamoto food. The good news was that one of them was these delicious fried lotus roots filled with spicy mustard. The not-so-good news was the other thing Kumamoto is famous for: basashi, otherwise known as raw horse meat. After some prodding, I tried it. It actually wasn't too bad - chewy, but not too different from the sashimi I'd had earlier. Thankfully, the pigs feet I had in Tokyo retained the title of food I most regretted eating in Japan.
We had such a great time that night. Everyone was in a good mood, there was a lot of beer and sake, and we were all having a lot of fun talking and trying to understand each other a little better. There was a little bit of English language knowledge at the table, and I managed to pull out enough Japanese phrases to get them to laugh with me. Later, a few gifts were exchanged, including a 3D model of Kumamoto Castle from some of Sato-san's friends and a Japanese bandana presented by Sakai-san.
A message to those who are thinking about visiting - bring LOTS of gifts! You will never run out of people to give gifts to. They also twice had me do toasts, which I naturally used to thank them profusely.
Sato-san had decided to only have non-alcoholic beer, so she drove a me and few of her friends home for the night.
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