Omiya Hakimono Shop

One of the things you see a lot of in Japan are the old tiny stores selling traditional things. Here’s one gloriously over stocked hakimonoya, a traditional foot wear store that I passed in Omiya city in Saitama prefecture north of Tokyo. The Japanese merchant custom of putting a lot of their wares on the street is naturally due to small spaces and the fact that Japanese shops, restaurants and cafes love having huge menus, lots of choices to pick from. All kinds of Japanese stores have huge choices! I have never been in the market for these kinds of traditional footwear so I wouldn’t be able to identify half of these items or the prices, but it’s great to see these hold out stores in local neighborhoods.

Hikawa Shrine – Omiya

Last week I was in Omiya, the center of Saitama prefecture just north of Tokyo. Saitama prefecture has a population of only 7.2 million people but if it was a country it would be about the 40th biggest economy in the world, just above the UAE in the Middle East, but it is much smaller even than the territory of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. Amazing. Every time I visit Omiya (which is famous among Tokyoites for the great railway museum) I try to visit the large Hikawa Shrine, the mother shrine of all the Hikawa related shrines across Japan. In Tokyo most wards have one of these shrines. Naturally they also had one of the giant ema (votive plates) to celebrate the year of the dragon, but when I took a closer look at the regular ema I noticed a large proportion of ema that had been decorated with little drawings and anime characters! I’ve never seen this at any other shrine and the reason turns out to be very simple, Omiya city is the home of a major anime business college and it’s also one of the centers of the Japanese anime industry. The stuff you learn from just being curious about ema!

Omiya Flamingoes

Around Tokyo there’s a score of small and relatively unknown places to see animals. Behind the huge Hikawa Shrine in Saitama prefecture’s Omiya, there’s a tiny zoo barely known even to locals and yesterday I was in the area so I went there to have a look at the flamingoes. It was biting cold and just a few days earlier I had seen ice along the rivers of western Saitama prefecture so I was hoping to see something I have always imagines: flamingoes hanging out in snow! Sadly enough for me but lucky enough for them there was no snow nor ice yesterday, but I still enjoyed seeing these gorgeous birds. The zoo itself is really old and run down but they have some interesting animals, a trio of Hyena for example, and until a couple of weeks ago, a talking crow who showed his temper by greeting visitors to his cage with a hoarse “bye-bye”! Sadly though, the crow recently passed away.

Best of all the zoo is free to visit! If you are in Omiya with nothing to do, you can impress your Japanese friends by taking them to a double treat of the beautiful Hikawa Shrine and the mini-zoo!

Ageokoikiren Awaodori

Proving once and for all that Awaodori dancing is not reserved solely for young people, here’s the amazingly spry Ageokoikiren (あげお小粋連) from the city of Ageo (上尾市) in east-central Saitama prefecture just north of Tokyo. I think this awaodori team is one of the oldest that I have seen so far, at least when it comes to the average age of the members. but you wouldn’t know it from the dancing itself. Apart from the kid’s section and a couple of drummers these dancers probably have more years of experience between them than most other teams in the Kanto region. Ageo is a small city with a population of only 37 000 people, and since this team has about 38 members it would mean that more than 1 in 1000 citizens of Ageo are members of their awaodori team! If anyone is reading this from Ageo, this might be a good time to join up! I took these photos at the Omiya summer festival, also up in Saitama. It was during the “energy saving” phase of the summer so I really had to crank up the ISO in these photos, which also explains the strange coloration of most of them, which is always a good way of telling if photos were taken during the night or just underexposed. These might be both. Enjoy!