Day 8: Tōkamachi Town and the Echigo-Tsumari Art Festival Part 1

We reluctantly left the onsen and headed a bit further north. The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial was going on, a huge festival with hundreds of installations all throughout the countryside. Quite a few works were along a local train line, so we headed to our first stop, Tōkamachi Town.

We walked a short distance to the Tōkamachi Koryukan building, but then it started to rain. Hard.

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The cultural exchange building is a two story square with a huge, shallow pool in the middle courtyard. A series of wooden frames stretched out across.

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This was Arch Forest 2009, by the Musashino University Toshihiro Mizutani Laboratory.

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The arches grew progressively smaller until they were tiny wooden structures just a couple of inches high.

(far right) A man looks at a series of wooden cubes in front of his bench. There were wooden cubes all over the building, piled together to make tables, chairs, artists' booths, a cafe, and even the information center.

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The rain continued to pour and we missed our train. Ava and I retreated to the upper levels, where there were some vendors and indoor galleries. She found a booth selling cute stuffed animal craft kits and I wandered the floor and looked at a series of landscapes to pass the time.

The rain let up for a brief moment and three women in white walked out into the central pool through the wooden arches.

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Each was holding a wooden cube which they carried to the platform in the middle. Somone—one of the artists? a curator? volunteer?—snapped a photo as they placed their blocks in the growing design.

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Someone else considered giving it a go, but the rain picked up again just as he started to walk out into the pool. He didn't get very far before turning back.

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