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AKITA |
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One of the few big cities on the northwest coast of Japan, modern
AKITA is an important port and industrial centre with access to some of
the country's only domestic oil reserves. Though it was founded in the
eighth century, almost nothing of the old city remains and Akita's few
central sites - three contrasting museums - can easily be covered on
foot in half a day. With its airport and Shinkansen services, however,
Akita makes a convenient base for the region. The small town of
Kakunodate , a short train ride to the east, preserves a street of two-hundred-year-old
samurai houses, while nearby Tazawa-ko, Japan's deepest lake, offers
boat rides and some attractive scenery, though it's generally outclassed
by its northern rival, Towada-ko . Better to press on Nyuto Onsen, a
group of hot springs 10km northeast of the lake at the end of the
Sendatsu-gawa valley.
The city of Akita is also home to the last of the great Tohoku summer
festivals , albeit a pleasantly low-key affair compared to events in
Sendai and Aomori . In the Kanto Matsuri (Aug 4-7), men parade through
the streets balancing tall bamboo poles strung with paper lanterns,
which they transfer from their hip, to head, hand or shoulder while
somehow managing to keep the swaying, top-heavy structure upright. Akita
hosted the World Games ( www.wg2001.or.jp ), a sort of alternative
Olympics, from August 16 to 26, 2001.
The City
The centre of modern-day Akita is bounded to the east by its smart new
train station, and to the north by the willow-lined moats of its former
castle , Kubota-jo. This was Akita's second castle, founded in 1604 by
the Satake clan who, unusually for northerners, backed the emperor
rather than the shogun during the Meiji Restoration. Nevertheless, they
still lost their castle after 1868 and the site is now a park, Senshu-koen
.
Walking straight ahead from Akita Station on the city's central avenue,
Hiro-koji, the Atorion 's twelfth-floor observatory is a good place to
get the lie of the land. Atorion also houses a crafts hall, bookstore,
concert hall and restaurants around its classy atrium. A little further
on, cross the moat into Senshu-koen and you'll find the Hirano Masakichi
Art Museum (Tues-Sun 10am-5/5.30pm; ¥610) on the second floor of the
otherwise uninteresting Prefectural Art Museum. Though the Hirano museum
has a valuable collection of Western artists, including Goya, Picasso,
Rubens and Rembrandt, it's more memorable for an enormous canvas (3.65m
by 20.5m) by the local artist Tsuguji Fujita (1886-1968). He completed
the painting, entitled Events in Akita , in an incredible fifteen days
in 1937, after which the wall of his studio had to be knocked down to
extract it. The panel, which takes up one wall of the museum, depicts
Akita's annual festivals.
You can learn more about local celebrations in the Kanto Festival Centre
(daily 9.30am-4.30pm; ¥100, or ¥250 with Akarenga-kan, below), located
to the west of Senshu-koen and across a small river. There are videos of
recent Kanto Matsuri and sample kanto to try out. The kanto is a bamboo
pole, up to 10m tall and weighing perhaps 60kg, to which dozens of paper
lanterns are attached on crossbars. During the festival (Aug 4-7), as
many as two hundred poles are carried through the streets in celebration
of the coming harvest, as teams of men and young boys show their skill
in balancing and manipulating the hefty poles. The festival was
originally a pre-harvest ritual and, as the line of kanto sway in the
dark, the yellow lanterns look like so many heads of golden rice.
From the Festival Centre, turn right and head south down this street for
about 500m to the unmistakable, red-and-white-brick Akarenga-kan (daily
9.30am-4.30pm; ¥200). This Western-style building was erected in 1912 as
the headquarters of Akita Bank, and its well-preserved banking hall and
offices are worth a quick look. Don't miss the woodcuts by local artist
Katsuhira Tokushi in a modern extension behind. The self-taught Tokushi
won recognition for his appealingly bold, colourful portrayals of local
farmers and scenes of rural life.
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