Japan Adventure

I love this painting in the restaurant!

And this hanging fish, which usually hold a teapot over a fire below.

After lunch, we drove on into the old White Wall area of Yanai, where we're walking around. Is this a crab crossing?

And I always like to find the beautifully-painted manhole covers. Yanai's is the goldfish.

Nancy has taken us somewhere we've never been: Muroya No Sono, which is the Oda family merchant residence & now a folklore museum run by Mr. Oda. He told me they live in a "new" house nearby in Yanai. The Oda family was one of the most prosperous oil dealers in Yanai, and its influence extended to many parts of Western Japan, including Kyushu Island to the west and Osaka to the east. The family is said to have owned as many as fifty merchant ships in the 1780s. This group of connecting structures is an example of an Edo Period (1600-1867) merchant residence, including a main warehouse, an accounting warehouse, a rice storehouse, a gadget hut, an intermediate apartment, and main building where the family lived. Here I'm looking through several rooms. It's very cold in here, so it's easy to see why Japanese prefer new houses, but the beauty here is amazing.