* Apparently Japan loves to draw up various Top 3s. Himeji is clearly the #1 castle and there's a bit of debate about the others but Matsumoto is the most likely contender for #2.
** Ukiyo-e is woodblock printing, an art which developed in Japan - line art plus a range of colours, drawn by an artist, carved into a set of woodblocks (one for each colour) and sold as limited edition prints. If this sounds crude, the results can be amazing. The best-known example is Hokusai's iconic wave -
There's a very pleasing small-town feel about the place, especially in winter. Not far from the station are some charming little streets of black and white houses. You get the impression that not too many Westerners pass through here - it's a bit off the normal tourist routes - as we discovered when we tried to find an English or picture menu for dinner.
Matsumoto-jo, the castle, is I think the oldest surviving jo in Japan (the Japanese seem to have a hard time hanging onto old buildings, for any number of reasons - wars, earthquakes, fires including arson - but are very good at rebuilding them with great care and attention, as well as restoring the ones that have made it in one piece. As a result they have lots of lovely-looking old buildings in great condition. If you're a real stickler for history I guess you'll want to see the ones that are original buildings). It features a lot more black than most jos and is known as the Crow Castle for that reason.
As with Himeji, you can climb right up to the top, passing through various exhibits (here it's mainly a firearms exhibit) and historical tidbits
such as the hidden floor where warriors would hang out if they didn't want it known that they were in residence, on the way to a good local view from the top.
The Ukoyi-e Museum is a little way from town, and in a sense disappointing - it would be nice to think that there's a really good permanent exhibit of prints somewhere. This is an extremely large private collection with only about 40-60 prints on show, and they don't have a permanent collection because they fade too easily and the building is too small.
The good news is that the current exhibit is Kuneyoshi (the artist we first discovered in San Francisco on our honeymoon), who we really like. The bad news (for me) is that it's focussed on his use of clothing, so Lilly enjoys it a bit more than I do. Still good though - it's amazing what they could do with printing in Japan 150 years ago, miles ahead of the rest of the world apparently. They also have a few classics by the likes of Hiroshige. The good thing about ukiyo-e is that there are no "originals" but in most cases there are a lot of original prints, so there is no one Wave - you can see it in a few places and if this place has a few copies they can rotate them.
As Lilly mentioned, the museum is freezing. But we enjoyed it a lot and because it's out of the way we had it to ourselves (including a slide-show recorded for the exhibition recorded by a guy who sounds a lot like Kermit T Frog).
On the way back to Tokyo we got a great view of the snow-covered Japan Alps. A good little trip all round. We could have done one of the more traditional tourist destinations but this worked out well.
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