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Tourist stamps, Izumo Shrine, the Kiyamachi canal, music tool interview

A traditional Japanese wedding at Izumo Shrine, Japan's connection shrine.

Countries afflicted with overtourism are coming up with all kinds of ways to get more tourists to go to less popular or less known areas (say in Italy or in Spain). Japan is doing this now with the hope that more tourists will visit the country's national parks of which there are 35. Many of Japan's national parks are in the off-the-beaten-track category and also not so easy to get to and get around.

To lure foreign tourists to go there the Japanese government is offering special collectible stamps call goshuin. In the Edo period (1603-1867) early forms of stamps emerged that were sold by notable temples & shrines to the countless pilgrims.

The Japanese Environment Ministry hopes visitors will find a path less trodden by creating an interest in the nation's stamp-collecting tradition, which will last until March 2027. This isn't such a bad idea. These stamps have old meaning and now new meaning. In the next 2 years thousands of national park goshuin stamps will be given to the foreign tourists who love national parks above all else.

The closest and most accessible parks are the huge Shinjuku Gyoen Park (in central Tokyo) and the park surrounding Mount Fuji. But there are many and in most cases accommodation is just on the edges of these magnificent green wonders. The exception to this would be the national park in Tottori, which is an incredible sand dune landscape, with a few imported camels believe it or not (see Izumo City and Matsue City below).

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Content by Ian Martin Ropke, owner of Your Japan Private Tours (est. 1990). I have been planning, designing, and making custom Japan private tours on all five Japanese islands since the early 1990s. I work closely with Japan private tour clients and have worked for all kinds of families, companies, and individuals since 1990. Clients find me mostly via organic search, and I advertise my custom Japan private tours & travel services on www.japan-guide.com, which has the best all-Japan English content & maps in Japan! If you are going to Japan and you understand the advantages of private travel, consider my services for your next trip. And thank you for reading my content. I, Ian Martin Ropke (unique on Google Search), am also a serious nonfiction and fiction writer, a startup founder (NexussPlus.com), and a spiritual wood sculptor. Learn more!

Praying for connection & love at exotic Izumo Shrine

If you pray for connection or love in Izumo, a little west, on the north coast of Honshu Island of the famous Tottori sand dunes, you will likely be heard by the Shinto gods as eight million gods gather at Izumo Grand Shrine every year. The romantic angle is likely also the bigger need for good connections (or musubi) between people, lovers or not.

The word enmusubi covers the relationships that are part of the human life cycle including family, friends and work. But as you all know, the romantic yearning for connection is extremely powerful and Izumo Shrine has become a beacon of luck in love across Japan, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. In 2023 nearly 7 million tourists visited Izumo Shrine!

Many of the love connection romantics fly directly from major city airports across Japan and land at adjacent Izumo Enmusubi Airport. I favor basecamp near Matsue City 30 km east of the shrine itself.

Izumo Shrine is part of the greater Matsue orbit in Shimane Prefecture, which faces north to the Sea of Japan. Shimane is the second least populated prefecture in Japan. It is also pretty far off the beaten track for contemporary tourists. Truth be told it takes a long time to get to Matsue and Izumo Grand Shrine and there's no bullet train to speed things up.

Lafcadio Hearn, the late 19th century English-Greek writer, lived in Matsue for a long time and his old home is a fabulous museum. The Matsue region is perfect for sea and freshwater lake swimming from late May to early September. The Adachi Museum of Art is renowned for its gardens and architecture and art collections.

And for the really curious, who are asking when exactly do eight million Shinto gods gather at Izumo Shrine, the answer is the 10th month of the old lunar year calendar. This translates into November 11-17, 2025. The festival of the gods begins with a beachside deity welcoming ceremony, then bonfires are ignited. Learn more! Details: http://www.izumooyashiro.or.jp/ & https://www.visit-matsue.com/ .

Along Kyoto's Takasegawa Canal: Pontocho and Kiyamachi

If you have the time, consider strolling down the Takegawa Canal along the lively, yet always interesting, world of Kiyamachi and Pontocho just east of the famous Gion geisha district and cherry blossom central (Maruyama Park).

Though the Takasegawa is called a river in Japanese, it is actually a canal, built with thousands of laborers. This is quite an amazing fact, when you consider that the canal runs from Nijo all the way down to the Yodo River in Fushimi/Chushojima, a distance of some 15 kilometers. The water in the river was siphoned off from the Kamogawa River, and the canal ran parallel to the river until Jujo Street, at which point it crossed the river and continued in a southeasterly direction until it merged with the Ujigawa River.

The giant Takasegawa Canal was the brilliant idea of one man: Suminokura Ryoi (1554-1614), a prominent 16th/17th-century Kyoto merchant and overseas trader, who was responsible for a number of visionary projects in Kyoto. A colorful figure of great confidence, Suminokura boldly proposed and funded the construction of the canal, which had a huge impact on Kyoto commerce and also greatly facilitated his own business activities. He was born in Kyoto, as Yoshida Mitsuyoshi, to a family of physicians and money lenders. In the 1590s, he obtained an official license to engage in overseas trade from Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the and quickly built up a fortune trading with Annam and Tonkin (both located in present-day Vietnam).

In its heyday, the canal functioned as an important transportation artery for moving goods to and from Osaka. The canal played a special role in the wood trade. Lumber was harvested in the areas north and west of Kyoto (logs were floated down the Hozugawa River from Kameoka and then moved on giant carts on Marutamachi, or log street, to the head of the canal, where they were turned into lumber and then shipped on to Osaka). More than 100 Takase boats, characterized by their flat bottoms and high sides (there is one laden with sake barrels at the head of the canal, just south of Nijo), plied the canal.

After the Meiji period (1868-1912), the Takasegawa Canal was no longer used as a commercial canal. However, lined with trees on both sides, the canal adds a distinctive charm to downtown Kyoto.

The ancient Pontocho & new Kiyamachi districts along the canal

The head of the Takasegawa became one of Kyoto’s busiest merchant center. And to take care of all the new traffic in the area, Kiyamachi (which runs parallel to the first few kilometers of the canal) became a boisterous world of inns, bars and restaurants. Today, most of the inns are long gone, but the bars and restaurants, old and super new, live on. And a few meters east of the busiest section of Kiyamachi (between Sanjo and Shijo) lies the refined and generally much more upscale world of Pontocho.

Too narrow for cars, Pontocho is one of the few pedestrian-only paradises in downtown Kyoto. It is linked to its lower scale sister by a number of unbelievably narrow passageways (most of them just barely wide enough for one person). It is also the home of Kyoto’s second-largest geisha quarters. The street's history is closely connected with the canal that parallels it to the west. Pontocho catered to the off-hour needs of the wealthier tradespeople. In 1712, the Tokugawa government permitted the area to become a pleasure quarter.

Nowadays, both streets engage in mizu-shobai, Japan's "water trade", or the world of bars and the drinking life. Kiyamachi caters to the student crowd and the young salaried set, and thus tends to get pretty wild and crazy on weekends. But if you slip down one of the many alleyways that connect it to Pontocho and you'll find yourself in a different world.

Although the neon tackiness of Kiyamachi is slowly infiltrating the street from either end, the central part of Ponto-cho still retains an elegant feeling of Old Kyoto. Many of the latticed and lacquered house fronts are those of Ocha-ya, or teahouses, where businessmen wine and dine important clients with the help, of course, of a witty and charming geiko. Needless to say, business is not the topic of conversation. In spring and fall, the geiko of Ponto-cho put on public performances in the old theater at the street's north end, and all the shops hang red lanterns from their fronts. The street becomes even more magical then.

An interview with a traditional Shinto gagaku instrument maker

Mr. Zenichi Yamada, 61 years old, at age 19 Yasaka Shrine entered apprentice has been a professional maker of all types of Japanese gagaku instruments for nearly 30 years. This interview took place at this studio in 1995.

YJPT: Many of the instruments you make are used in the gagaku music tradition. Could you explain a little bit about where gakaku comes from?

ZY: The root of gagaku has it origins in a diverse number of cultures such as Israel, India, China, Vietnam, and Korea. We distinguished this kind of music and call Togaku, besides Korean one we call Komagaku. Japanese gagaku is essentially a mixture of all these traditions with the and Komagaku and also Japanese native music called Kagura which from 1500-600 years ago. So none of Japanese art is pure original, it's mostly and originally came from foreign culture, and Gagaku is not the exception. Now what appears to be important for us is to promote what we created to the world, to hand it to the next , in stead of keeping only in our hand, hiding in the closet. This open attitude contributes to support our domestic culture as well as international scene.

YJPT: Could you explain what some of the instruments are in the gagaku orchestra?

ZY: The gagaku orchestra is made up of a conductor, known a the cho, percussion instruments, which referred to as dagakki, stringed instruments (gengakki), and wind instruments (kangaki). Gagaku, unlike almost all other Japanese arts, does not have any schools, or any overriding identity with a certain teacher or teachings. There are also no apprenticeships in the gagaku tradition.

YJPT: Can you describe your involvement in making Japanese instruments?

ZY: Well for example, this is a sho, which is made of 17 separate bamboo pipes put together to form a cylinder of varying length. This instrument is remarkable, because it makes a sound both when breathes into it and when one breathes out. The making of gagaku instruments requires skill in a number of different craft traditions including carpentry skills, the ability to skillfully work with bamboo, as well as being able to skillfully carry out the lacquer and metal work which is undertaken to give the instrument its distinctive beauty and design effects.

YJPT: How long does it usually take you to make a sho flute of this quality?

ZY: For sho flutes of medium quality, I can make about 5 in a single year. Even if I work like a dog all year, I'm lucky if I can make 15 normal, single stem bamboo flutes in a year.

YJPT: What is the most important material for the instruments you make?

ZY: The main source for most of these instruments is bamboo. But this is misleading, because the bamboo used for wind instruments must be perfect and totally dry. For bamboo to be totally dry it has to be 100 or 200 years old and specially cured. If you have ever been in an old traditional Japanese farmhouse you might have had noticed the bamboo lattice used on the interior ceilings of straw roof houses. This is a special kind of bamboo called susudake, and it is the best kind of bamboo for gagaku wind instruments. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of the susudake available on the market at any time is suitable. The stems have to be quite thin, and perfectly straight from the root up. This is very rare. And the distance between the joints has to be rather long, especially for flutes. Finally, each bamboo joint has to be the same length for each piece and sometimes for pairs, as with the sho. This is important both for the sound and for visual symmetry.

YJPT: Is it true that the gagaku tradition and the special skills required to make these instruments is slowing disappearing.

ZY: Most of the traditional Japanese craft apprenticeship system has disappeared. And artistic masters from every field seem to agreed that their level is always less than their master's level. However, I believe that the latter problem is actually more a problem of training and conditioning than a direct result of changes in successive generations. As much as apprentices are losing their endurance, also for the teachers have to concern that teaching and educating somebody is different from mastering and accomplishing your own way of art. If there was less rules or restrictions, young people would have been more courageous and spontaneous. After all, especially in the world of music, an artist has to be independent in the end and that's the only way to breakthrough one's limit. Nanikuso culture espouses fighting back with a hungry spirit is a Japanese tradition for conquering confrontation and overcome fixed ideas or inappropriate conditioning. It is very important to have independent, individual aspect unconditionally.

YJPT: What are your feelings about modern society, here and elsewhere?

ZY: In modern societies, especially Japan, manufactured goods are overwhelmingly dominant. But what about the Quality? What about product life span? Products are just made for the profit. They are never made for consumers real needs and wants. I strongly believe that we have to change to get out of this chaos to think who we really are again. In the Gion festival, almost all the pipes are made by ancestors hundreds of years ago, but they are still fine, in perfect shape but that doesn't make any damage of my business.

YJPT: How would you characterize the gagaku scene today?

ZY: Nowadays, Japanese traditional Gagaku was reimported to Japan, this is a big change of Gagaku scene. The audience used to be the elder people but there's more young people in the theater recently. One day, I was interviewed by several foreign press and one of them asked to me this question " Why Japanese parents never introduce this great music and the instruments to their own children? Why everybody want them to take piano lessons?" Talking about piano, for most of the families' pianos are kind of wealth status. Sometimes nobody plays it in the house, it just sit there as an interior. Japanese never realize that they have such a nice music in our culture, unless some foreign culture admits it.

Content by Japan travel specialist & designer Ian Martin Ropke, founder & owner of Your Japan Private Tours (YJPT, est. 1990). I have been planning, designing, and making custom Japan private tours on all five Japanese islands since the early 1990s. I work closely with all of YJPT's Japan private tour clients and have a great team behind me. I promote YJPT through this content and only advertise at www.japan-guide.com, which has the best all-Japan English content & maps! If you are going to Japan and you understand the advantages of private travel, consider my services for your next trip to save time & have a better time. Ian Martin Ropke (unique on Google Search) is also a serious nonfiction and fiction writer, a startup founder (NexussPlus.com), and a spiritual wood sculptor. Learn more!