On Saturday, May 7th we had a school trip to the site of the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka. After the fair ended most of the pavilions etc. were demolished to make space for an extensive and very nice park with a couple museums and other attractions which is now called the ‘Osaka Exhibition Memorial Park’. I accidentally called it the ‘Osaka Explosion Park’ once and was quickly corrected.
I had never been on a fieldtrip like this before, but while we were required to come our only obligation was that we had to show up for the class picture at the end of the day. This left us all about 5 hours to wander around the park grounds and museums at our leisure, so luckily the weather was nice. The park has several areas dedicated to specific types of plants, such as a lavender field, a hill covered in hydrangeas (which were sadly not in bloom) and a camellia garden, as well as wading pools, a suspended walkway over a forest-like area and large open areas for games or picnics.
One thing we discovered pretty quickly was that all of the museums required an entry fee in addition to the park entry fee, which was a little annoying, but after wandering through several gardens in the full heat of our clear, sunny Saturday afternoon we decided to just choose one of them to kill some time and get into some air conditioning. We ended up paying student admission to the Osaka Museum of Ethnology, which turned out to be extremely interesting. The interior of the museum was divided up by geographical region, starting in the Americas and ending up in Japan, and contained a wide variety of national costumes, artwork, religious items and even a fully-furnished yurt. It was *really* cool, and my only regret is that I didn’t realize that it was okay to take pictures until about halfway through. One thing that I found especially interesting was that the Japan section dedicated significant space to the Ainu, a people native to Japan but not considered racially ‘Japanese’. I guess their aim was to show a piece of Japan’s ethnological makeup that would be unfamiliar to most visitors, but I’m certainly no expert on the subject.
By the time we assembled for our class picture we were tired and very ready to go home, and I at least was sweaty and footsore. As soon as we were dismissed the whole group headed for the exit, saying goodbye to ‘Tarou’, the sun tower that stands near the gates (I think it looks like a chicken or maybe like one of the gods from ‘Princess Mononoke’) and hopped back on the monorail for home.
0 comments:
Post a Comment