Gifu – Where?

Miserable rain poured down the day I arrived in Gifu. The boys in my new apartment were nice enough to leave me a welcome note, and I went through the motions of unpacking. Where is Gifu? The ‘city’ of 400,000 certainly isn’t the pulsing drama of Tokyo that I had requested as a placement, but for the time being I’ll give Gifu a chance to prove itself.

It’s an easy sized city which behaves more like a satellite suburb of Nagoya. Gifu’s downtown area does little to flatter itself but my apartment is pleasantly situated at the foot of Kinka-zan mountain. It gets better. There is an insect museum next door. And a history museum and park area. And the ‘cherry on the top’ is actually a castle on the top of Mt Kinka.

On a cracking blue sky Saturday I made my first ascent of little Kinka-zan and 45 minutes later I was standing at the entrance of the castle. The castle, Gifu Jo, is unfortunately a reconstruction of the original which only means the inside lacks any authenticity of age, but the exterior is still quite impressive, as is the view across the town and river.
On this river cormorant birds are used to dive and catch fish from the nightly fishing boats in the Ukai season that begins mid-May. That looks interesting from the video playing the castle museum.

On the walk down the mountain I took the ‘path of meditation’ rather than just the ‘normal’ path as I must’ve taken on the way up (at least I didnt take the ropeway!) One last 14 metre surprise awaited inside Shoho-ji, an extremely non descript temple that I’d walked past the past 3 days without thought of the treasure inside. The 14 metre surprise is a Daibutsu (great Buddha) that was lovingly created from about a tonne of paper sutras, making it the largest paper mache buddha I can think of.

So that’s Gifu in a nutshell, but I guess it will take time for me to really decide if I like it here. The people seem nice and I’m getting used to doing a bend-bob bow each time I buy something. I’ll be meeting the other newbi instuctors at orientation in a few days time.

ps the flatties are cool and I’m hooked up with a wireless internet connection. Bingo. And the apartment is not as pokey as I’d assumed, though this isn’t the big smoke.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.