Takayama Jinya

In the morning, we had breakfast in our room. It's really nice to be served breakfast and dinner as part of the deal for the ryokan, we got to see how these meals were served and consumed in a home setting instead of in a restaurant.
 
The rain was gone, and the sun was out. We packed our luggage but left them at the guest house and went for another walk around town. We walked toward the river and saw the morning market in front of the Takayama Jinya. To be honest the market wasn't that interesting, it had stalls selling some fruits and spices, vegetables and some knick knacks. But the Takayama Jima turned out to be much better than I had imagined. Takayama Jinya was the local government building for administration, finance/tax, police and courts. For about 200 years from the 17th to 19th century, this was where officials dispatched from Edo (Tokyo now) administer the state of Hida. The government of Tokugawa government during this time had almost 60 such jinyas all over Japan, but this one in Takayama was the only one to have been preserved. Only in 1969 was this building given up as the local administration office. The various rooms were well kept, and the store house had been turned into a museum showing artifacts and history of the past few hundred years. It was interesting to note that being the chief administrator of Takayama (or anywhere else probably) was not always a good thing, many were killed or punished in jail for not doing their jobs or not have kept the area in peace. So although they lived in this magnificant house, they were not in safe haven.

We toured the jinya which consisted of the Entrance Hall, many offices, guardroom, lounge, kitchen, living room of the head official, maids' room, tea house, large hall, a courtroom and torture devices, storehouses for rice, kitchen utensils and books. You can easily spend 2 hours looking at everything.

We next visited the Hida Kokubunji Temple, with its 3-tiered pagoda. Then we walked along the river, crossed it at Yayobashi bridge, where a couple of real tall and odd looking statues were installed on its railings. Then we went into the Kusakabe Folk Museum right next to the Yoshijima Hertiage House we visited yesterday.  The folk museum used to be a money lender's house, its structure was similar to the Yoshijima Hertiage House. The special thing it had was the folk museum and display of dolls, furniture, combs, money boxes etc. After that we were pretty much out of time, so we grabbed a quick bite at a small store selling steamed flour buns with meat and vegetable fillings. As we  went back to the guest house to fetch our luggage, we saw more of these tall (2-story) nooks, and wondered if they contained the floats used at the Takayama festivals, and they were indeed. We caught a taxi for the ride back to the train station.

There were still a lot to see in Takayama, if we had stayed 2 nights, we could have seen a lot more. Takayama is real popular during the festivals (once in spring, another in the fall) because of all the floats would be decked out and paraded around town. I   quite liked the Edo era housing with the latticed windows and mostly wood construction. Some people named Takayama as the place where time forgot, staneding on one of the old preserved streets, you could use your imaginiation and see if you were living some 200 years ago.