I dislike my tiny room. It is not only that it is tiny, but the bed occupies too much space to let me go through. So I have to dive from the foot of the bed, and if I want to get off the bed I have to crawl sideways like a crab. In contrast, in a capsule hotel, like the one I stayed once in Sidney, the "door" opens on the long side of the bed, so you can comfortably get on and off. I am just going to open the door unto the corridor and use the latter as my dressing room.
My small resort town is maybe 10 kilometers from the larger town of Matsue, which is where I headed for the day. The weather forecast is for showers, so I am not going to venture very far from home. My first stop was at the Modern Art Museum, which is "strange" at best (and as I noted before lo raro es pariente de lo feo). I paid an additional ticket for seeing a special exhibition of a famous Japanese photographer, which left me cold. Furthermore, in the regular exhibition there was a room devoted to his work, with many of the photographs that were in the special exhibition; it did make it clear, however, that he had published a lot of books with his work, and on this basis alone he can claim fame.
My favorite hall was devoted to the art of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), who I mentioned before because of his magnificent prints of Fuji-San from different vantage points. The works were original, part of a collection that was donated to the museum in 2017. The color prints were magnificent, but I was particularly impressed by his numerous sketch books. To me a sketch is made with a few strokes, but to him it was the finished work, in exquisite detail, needing only to transfer it unto the printing stone to make the color prints. There were a good 20 notebooks, each with a hundred folios that were covered from edge to edge with elaborately detailed ink drawings. An art instructor once told me that to be a good drawer you need to carry a sketchbook with you all the time, and once you find a worthwhile scene be willing to spend a couple of hours drawing what you see (or what your interpretation is of what you see). Maybe I should start carrying a sketchbook.
My next stop was at the Museum of City History, which went back to the beginning of the Edo Period (1603 to 1867). In 1603 the shoguns battled, and the Kyoto shogun lost. The winning shogun, “the Shogun”, then moved the capital to Edo (Tokyo), and installed his compadres in the different provinces to consolidate his control of the land. One of them was appointed lord of Matsue, and the first thing he did was to build himself a castle. His samurai soldiers by default pledged felty to the Shogun, and Watsue prospered by being the gate between all traffic that came from the sea through the lakes Nakaumi on the downstream and Shinji on the upstream.
Matsue calls itself the City of Water, and its main Shinto temple is the home of the god of water (but I thought this god lived in the waterfall at Nachi). Aware of its responsibility to keep the god happy, every ten years the city organizes a huge festival, in which the god is transported by barge to the downstream lake by following the Ohashi River, accompanied by a raucuous fleet of ceremonial barges with lots of rowers, color, music, and martial arts displays. The last such festival; was in 2019, so I am going to assume that the next one will be in the spring of 2029. That pageantry would be worth seeing.
I had a great lunch at a fast food eatery whose name I will not even try to pronounce. While there I noticed that they were looking for employees, and were offering an hourly pay that varied from 1,050 yen (US$ 7.40) for the 9 am to 10 pm schedule, 1,450 yen (US$ 10,30) for the 10 pm to 5 am schedule, and 1,200 yen (US$ 8.53) for the 5 am to 9 am schedule. If minimum wage is at this level, how can young people make ends meet?
After lunch the weather looked fair, so I took a ride around Lake Shinji, which is maybe as large as Lake Tahoe. It was a lovely ride, but the wind buffeted me mercilessly for about half of the traverse. I can hear an onsen bath calling.
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