Tohoku Japan 日本東北

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We were back to Aomori in the afternoon and went to the 睡魔之家 WARASSE. Nebuda is a ceremony held in the first week of August every year. People make a large lantern, so large that it needs tens of people to carry, and carry it for parade. The best one will be choosen as a competition. This Warasse is an exhibition center for this ceremony and it also displays the winner of every year. The entrance is modern and looks like the Chinese opera center in Hong Kong.

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The entrance has a small model of the lantern. Then a corridor showing the winner of every year and the name of the maker, the story of the lantern etc. Most of the lantern comes with a story, mostly Chinese story too. The themes of the stories are like those in The Three Kingdom, some ghost story, etc.

Then we entered the exhibition hall and we are all stunned by the size and craftmanship of the lantern.

The last picture shows the size of the lantern. Do you see the people on the right hand side?

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Each of them has a different story to tell. The making of these lanterns is like what we have in the lantern for Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival in the old days.

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That ended our tour in Aomori. Our next stop is Yamagata 山形. Before that we stopped at Sendai 仙台 to have the Ox tongue and some local specialty food.

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Before we checked in the hotel, we went to Yamadera 山寺. Yamadera in fact is a collective name of a group of temples. These temple are built along a hill side slope. From the foot hill up, you need to walk more than 1000 steps to the top of the hill.

The lower level has already had a few temple, and some statues too.

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But the challenge was the uphill walk. You have to pay for entering the path. Along the path we can visit different temples and some structures.

The first picture is the entrance. Then walked up. The third picture is some wall crafting on the hill. There is a saying that if you can put a coin on the wall there, it will bring you luck. So we have the forth picture.

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Along the walkway we saw a lot of temple, shrine built from somewhere. Its architecture and structure are really interesting. At last we reached the temple at the top (2nd pic)

The other end has an isolated temple, which made me think of the three tower in San Marino.

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The view from that isolated temple is stunning. 欲窮千里目，更上一層樓

We can see the city view of the area (2nd picture), the lower right hand side of the picture is the train station that we started our walk.

The third picture shows the temple we passed through during our walk uphill.

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Later afternoon now and people were leaving. Before we left, we took a few pictures as there were not many people blocking our view.

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We went back to train station, got our luggage and headed to Yamagata. After we checked in, I found this notice in the hotel lobby. A time for learning special Japanese......