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Day 6: Sendai

The travel plans Ava put together were aggressive; we basically hit a different city every day. Heck, I'm getting tired just going through these photos and my notes.

"But Paul", you say. "Surely that cost a hilarious amount of money, moving from city to city like all the time."

"Aha!" I say, in that sort of voice.

Before leaving for Japan, foreign tourists can buy something called the "Japan Rail Pass" for unlimited travel on JR Rail lines. The JR Group runs the Shinkansen bullet trains and a lot of local lines. There are some minor exceptions to what you can take, but we spent very little on transportation once we got to Japan because of the pass.

After two weeks in my pockets, my rail pass was pretty beat up.

Anywho, the whole point is after leaving Naoshima early in the morning we started a thousand kilometer journey to Sendai. It took the whole day, with a couple of short stops in Osaka and Tokyo to stretch our legs and get food.

It was already pretty late when we finally arrived. Sendai is Japan's biggest train station outside of Tokyo, and there was a huge fleet of taxis out front waiting for passengers.

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We were in Sendai for the annual Tanabata festival, but unfortunately the weather wasn't great. There were bits of heavy rain, and the weather report predicted more. We ducked into a nearby shōtengai shopping arcade.

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織姫 Orihime: Weaving Princess
天の川 Amanogawa: River in the Heavens
天帝 Tentei: Emperor of the Sky
彦星 Hikoboshi: Cow Herder Star

Long ago, the story goes, the beautiful princess Orihime sat along the banks of the Amanogawa river and weaved the most beautiful silk cloth. Her father, Tentei, the king of the heavens, loved the cloth she wove, and she worked very hard. But in her devotion, she was lonely.

Tentei saw her sadness and brought her across the river to meet Hikoboshi, his cow herder. The two fell deeply in love and were married. They were wonderfully happy together.

But the couple soon began to neglect their duties. Orihime stopped weaving her beautiful silk and the cows Hikoboshi was supposed to be watching strayed to all corners of the sky. Furious, Tentei brought Orihimi back across the Amanogawa, separating the couple.

Orihimi was devastated, and she begged her father to allow her to see Hikoboshi again. Tentei relented, and once a year on the seventh day of the seventh month the two are allowed to cross the river and meet.

Tanabata celebrates that day.

Fukinagashi streamers, representing the strings of cloth Orihimi wove, are hung throughout the city. They're incredibly colorful, something that I'm embarrassed to say I wasn't really able to capture.

Some are simple paper streamers, some included origami cranes and other decorations.

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They were all hung so that you had to push the streamers out of the way as you walked through the arcade.

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You also write wishes and poems on tanzaku strips of paper, which are hung from fresh cut bamboo branches. At midnight, the branches are burned or set afloat on the river.

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It was raining—hard—so we ended up buying an umbrella from a convenience store and ran to our hotel.

The hotel was unexpectedly British. Pictures of the royal family on the walls. Antique furniture and art. Run by an old Japanese woman and her daughter, of course, but still. I half expected someone to get murdered that evening, just so Jessica Fletcher could pop out and solve the case.

I secretly think Ava chose it because there were more than a dozen cats and one neurotic dog in residence.

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It was still raining the next morning and we didn't feel up to exploring. We headed back to the train station and started making our way south again. We needed a break.