Japan day 4

Another day of weird contrasts.  I'm staying - here's my ryokan, or traditional hotel - in Kurashiki, which self-consciously evokes Old Japan;

but I come out in the morning and find not only that it's somewhere where people take out their cats to enjoy the morning air (look at that pretty little tabby head!),

but that it was where the Japanese denim industry began just after WW2, and one can not only buy denim clothes in Denim Alley (where there's 60s music playing, of course), but you can purchase denim flavored (??) ice cream and buns and soft drinks.

The Ohara Museum here has a terrific collection of late C19th French paintings - and ... a million years ago, when I was working on Segantini, there was one painting of his that I thought I would never see, because it was in a small collection in an out of the way town in Japan ... today was the day!  The collection really reflects early C20th interest in French and European art: one thing I'm taking away from this trip is that I've been so interested in the influence of Japanese art on the European that I've never given much thought as to what was happening the other way round.  That's been corrected ...

Then to Okayama, to the amazing Korakuen gardens - one of the Big Three Japanese gardens, and unusually (for Japan) grassy; with pools and tea houses;

and people feeding carp;

and streams so clear that you can see all the differently colored pebbles at the bottom of them.

And another castle (reconstructed - it was destroyed in WW2 ...) - but with pedal boats in front of it, like Echo Park.

And then the bus back to the station was covered in black cats, inside and out.

Back in Kurashiki, I climbed a little hill to a very pretty little Shinto temple complex;

and was again in a quite different century - until, back at the hotel, the whole canal frontage had been taken over by a horde of cosplayers.  There is a good deal here that's confusing.