Korakuen and Okayama Castle

Thursday, February 25th, 2010 in: News, Travel

Ryan’s an early bird, I am not. I don’t remember if I asked him to wake me, probably because we both assumed I would wake up before 10am. I rolled out of bed at noon, wiping the sleep from my eyes and apologizing for the late start. We had a pretty free day, so it was no big deal. Don’t let me sleep in like that again, I admonish Ryan, as if it were his fault.

We have to run to the station to catch our train; only one every hour stops at Imbe, which is quite a change of pace from what I’m used to in the cities. Our destination is Korakuen (後楽園), the first public garden in Japan, but first, we stop at an old friend’s photo studio to hang out for a bit. Some more delicious coffee, this time from a french press. Ahh, I like how the people here think. Shin-san’s a talented photographer, and gave me some good advice on my product photography for the store. I had never had such an in depth conversation about a specialized topic in Japanese before; I couldn’t help but feel a little proud of myself.

The park itself was like stepping into a time warp; the meticulously manicured garden had been carefully looked after for a long time. This was confirmed later when we went back home and Grandma showed us photos from when SHE was our age, before the war. Though the images had faded with time, the park looked exactly as it does today. Grandma is a quiet lady, but when she talks about the past, her eyes light up and her voice fills with laughter. The tragedy of growing old is your recollections become littered with the dead. This is my son, isn’t he handsome? He died of a heart attack. This is my husband, he passed away when he was 30. This is my junior high school class, we still get together every year. There’s only four of us left, now. She’s been cursed with the blessing of longevity, left behind by those she loved, isolated from the modern world; she references her faded images and letters to rekindle the memories of the life she stopped living long ago.

Satisfied with the moments we captured in the park, we moved on to the castle on the other side of the river. Just as well preserved as the park it faced, except the castle had been rebuilt since the war, a victim of the firebombings. There seems to be two kinds of castles in Japan: the drafty, dark ones, preserved or rebuilt as they looked hundreds of years ago, and the ones that’ve been rebuilt as brightly lit flourescent museums. This one was the latter, the smell of history hidden behind sheets of glass. I learned a lot about how we treat our past today.

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