Gold Leaf Museum and Souvenir Shopping

Here's the thing.  We didn't actually take any pictures of the gold-leaf process or goods in the actual building.  We were getting shown the process by this older gentleman in about 1/2 English and 1/2 Japanese and we just didn't think to get the camera out.  Sorry. I'll describe the gist of it: they hammer the heck out of the gold with machine hammers, which causes it to spread out.  Then they cut the spread out pieces into smaller squares and hammer them until they're once again inconveniently large.  This repeats for days.  The small chunks are put between leaves of paper that are bound into a book-like thing made for hitting, so that they can hammer hundreds of the ultra-thin squares of gold at once.  At the tail end of this process, the gold leaf is exceptionally thin - he mentioned one ten thousandth of a millimeter, which is about 0.000004 inches if I did the unit conversions correctly.  At this point the metal doesn't act like you expect, but folds and flows like cloth, which was really cool to see.  The place we were at also had a store with quite reasonable prices (compared to places further from the source) and we did a lot of souvenir shopping there.

We did take a picture of green tea being milled in a tea / tea-ceramics shop we passed.

We've intended from the beginning of our time here to come back with a certain quantity of cool Japanese stuff.  We've generally held off on purchases so that we'd get to know what was out there and what it cost before laying down real money on things that might later be eclipsed in excellence and undercut in price.  However, we're now approaching the end and decided that this month would be a good time to get into the hunt in earnest.  We've been out a few times looking for particularly nice items that also happen to be in our price range.  I saw a $25,000 plate in one store; it was freakin' gorgeous and I probably would have bought it were it say, only $500 or so and therefore merely very expensive instead of simply beyond any semblance of reason.  Another vase for a mere $12,000 caught my eye at another point, but I had to let it go. 

 

We discovered one of the major craft-stall areas at the top of a shopping complex temporarily displaced by a children's fun center, which stopped us from shopping there on this occasion.

Fortunately, there are a lot of things out there that aren't quite that expensive, and occasionally they're even nice, and worth what's being asked for them.  Over a few different instances we went to probably a few dozen different stores and only made purchases at maybe five or six of them.

 We grabbed dinner at a Vietnamese/Thai place near the station that we hadn't tried before.  Pretty good for the price - it was cheap and solid but not outstanding.

 They did have some pretty interesting plating and presentation going on, very showy.

 This is the current and mostly final haul of goods - I'm still looking for a vase of a particular style and Ana may buy more tea mugs if she encounters the right one(s) at the right price(s). There are some nice serving plates, some Japanese tea (matcha) mugs, a couple of interesting vases, and some additional pretties that we can display that are very Japanese.  There really aren't more pictures that are relevant to this post, so I'll sign off by saying that the next post will probably be our tour of the local "ninja" temple, which never had anything to do with ninjas but is supposed to be chock-full of interesting hidden defenses and cunning escape routes.