Gifu Cultural Tour

Today was a miserably wet day. When it starts raining here, it doesn't seem to stop at all! I spent the morning at school once again helping out with my speech contest students. They are really sweet, even though they can mix up their "L"s and "R"s.....

Later in the day, a huge group of us gaijin (foreigners) spent the afternoon on a cultural tour of Gifu. Five minutes after leaving my apartment, my jeans were drenched up to my knees...

The first place we went to was a cormorant fisherman's house. Cormorant fishing is where a fisherman guides cormorants to catch sweetfish. The cormorant has its neck tied so it doesn't swallow the fish. They catch about 6 or 7 fish at a time. In an hour, a cormorant can catch about 60 sweetfish. Pretty skilled I reckon! (They make funny noises, sounding like barking dogs sometimes)


The fisherman then showed us the traditional outfit. They wear blue outfits because they have a calming (?) effect on the cormorants. As the sweetfish move slower at night, cormorant fishing is performed at night. Due to this, the fishermen carry big bundles of fire to allow the cormorant to see the fish. To protect their hair from fire, the fishermen wear headscarves. They also wear straw skirts. I forget why though.....
Cormorant fishing is very traditional, and has been around for 1300 years. It is passed down through the family. The fisherman's son will become a cormorant fisherman when he is older. There are 6 fishing masters in Gifu, and this fisherman is one of them. The river is the Nagara river (very difficult to say in Japanese - Nagaragawa). The depth is very shallow, from 10cm to about a metre.

So after the fishing visit, we went to Gifu Park to participate in a tea "ceremony". I had seen one on America's Next Top Model, and this tea ceremony was a rip off. We paid 400 yen admission, sat at benches and had a grumpy woman in a kimono deliver the bitter bitter tea and the um, tasty sweet. I gingerly ate the sweet, which tasted like an overcooked potato gone cold and skulled the tea. It was like swallowing sea water.....

The Gifu Great Buddha in the Shobi-ji Temple was next. It was huge and very difficult to take a decent photo of, so my apologies.... This Buddha is the third largest in Japan. It took 38 years to make and is 25 metres tall. It's made of bamboo, covered with clay, and then covered with a stack of Buddhist scriptures. It's pretty cool, it gives the "OK" sign.

These statues were sitting all around the Buddha. They look like they're cheering him on. I don't really know what they are, but they all had different expressions and personalities. Many of them were missing their hands and eyebrows.....

These two guys were my favourite. The hand in the second photo wasn't actually connected to the statue. I suppose it was like Thing from The Addams Family.... I'd think it would be fun to go back and give each of these statues names. I reckon the first guy suits "George", and the second one is "Fabio"