Weekend wrap

On the weekends Ruby’s brass band practice is in the mornings only, so in the afternoons we are afforded a bit of time to do things together as a family. Thus it was that on Saturday afternoon we headed off to watch mummy’s latest Japanese drumming performance at a local festival held in a nearby part of Mihara. Actually “festival” is probably not the right word; this sort of event is really just a get-together organised by the local neighbourhood association in a local park. There are tents selling food and drink, seats dotted around the place, music on the loudspeakers and if they’re lucky they’ll try to get some sort of local performance event just to add a bit of Culture. Such as this:

It is still fiendishly hot here, what with the abnormal freak unprecedented record heatwave ‘n’ all, so poor Eleni was bathed in sweat by the end of it but nevertheless the performance was deemed a success.

On Sunday afternoon we insisted on dragging a reluctant and exhausted teenager out of the house to go visit a local island called Okunojima that we read about by happy coincidence in a magazine while sipping thoughtfully on a coffee during our Friday trip to Fukuyama, a largish city about an hour up the road where, incredibly they have a place where you can get a real coffee! It’s an American chain called Tully’s, whose claim to fame is that at one stage their business strategy was apparently to set up opposite every single Starbucks they could find. It must have worked because they’ve expanded into Japan and are doing quite well. And no, we didn’t travel for an hour to Fukuyama in the sweltering heat just to get a coffee; we were there to do some furniture shopping as well.

Back to Okunojima island: it’s precisely 12 min by ferry from Tadanoumi, a nondescript town 15 mins down the coast from us that only gets a mention for having the Aohata jam factory where we did a factory tour and made jam a few months back, plus it’s right near our favourite Cafe Hoxton. Plus it has a ferry terminal. So the kids loved the ferry trip:

Ruby got a bit scared but brave fearless handsome Daddy vowed to protect her from any evil marauding sea-creatures that hopped over the stern:

Okunojima is so tiny that there are no cars on it and you can walk the 4.3 km circumference in an hour and a half. You can also hire bicycles which is much more fun and that’s what we did:

One of the attractions of Okunojima is that it’s teeming with rabbits, which hardly sounds attractive at all if you come from Australia, large swathes of which have been ruined by the introduction of rabbits by some stupid ancestor from the mother country many years ago, although if you’re a city Australian you might think rabbits are cute furry things that live in a hutch. The ones on this island are pretty cute and outrageously tame: they come right up to you as if to say “oi where’s me feed”:

So we obliged them with some carrot sticks and cabbage leaves that we’d prepared earlier:

We also climbed a hill at one point and got some nice views of the mainland:

And there was an old abandoned power station thingy to look at too:

It turns out that Okunojima was a military centre during the war where they produced poison gas, so there are a few ammunition stores and cannon emplacements and spooky war things like that to look at on the way. There is even a Poison Gas Museum but I don’t suppose they have a hands-on interactive display where you get to have a sniff of the real thing.

To finish off we went for a swim at the lovely beach there which was mercifully free of loudspeakers and wizened old men in uniforms wandering around telling you what not to do. All in all it was an excellent day out and we vowed to go back there again sometime soon and do it properly, including the Poison Gas Museum.

When we got home, Felix decided to put on his Ninja suit for no particular reason so I thought I’d better take a photo of him with our flash new camera:

Scary eh?