Substitute Holiday

Last Wednesday, I had a Substitute Holiday.

A substitute holiday is the weekday you get off to make up for having to work on the weekend. Many teachers work on the weekend, almost every weekend in fact, and they don't get substitute holidays, but that's beside the point. The previous Saturday was considered a mandatory work day because the students had special tests. I don't know which is worse, making the teachers work on the weekend, or making students take tests on the weekend. I guess giving everybody a Wednesday off makes up for it.

As far as I can tell, no other schools had a substitute holiday, so I was left to my own devices, with no complaints. In the afternoon I went on the nice long bike ride that I'd been thinking about since Silver Week.

First I rode to the main Post Office to get stamps and send out a package, and then I headed towards Hirosaki Park. I had this idea that I might be able to get another page of my 御朱印帳 (goshuuinjou, shrine stamp book) filled at the shrine at the northern end of the park where I hadn't been yet. As I pedaled along I realized I was following part of my usual bus route and decided to go a little further to find the dango shop that I always see open for business in the afternoons, but feel too tired to visit. At 3pm they were clearly in a quiet period with the staff back in the kitchen making dango, but the selection was pretty amazing and I ended up buying too many little dango only realizing afterwards that I'd probably have to eat them all myself.

Sneak shot of the display case at Kyokushoudou dango shop, in the Honchou district

Confections- Banana monaka, a buttery biscuit, a sakura monaka and a persimmon-looking dango

I rode along the long, uninterrupted east side of the park with the moat on my left splashing and gurgling at elevation changes where the water tumbles over stone barriers. That kind of made me wonder... if you build a stone dam to keep your moat filled, and it essentially functions as a bridge, it isn't much of a defense mechanism, is it? But it's very pretty and pleasant in any case.

I left my bike at the park gate closest to the shrine and walked in. The shrine gate was open, but I was the only person there, visitor or otherwise, so no stamp for my book. There was a big candy-striped scaffold set up on either side of the walk to the shrine that didn't seem to be supporting anything except itself. There were a couple of less-than-permanent looking signs that I might get around to translating some day, but right now I have no idea what it was all about.

Gokoku Shrine at Hirosaki Park

Gokoku Shrine with candy-striped mystery scaffold

Gokoku Shrine gate and walk to the shrine

I walked away from the shrine and found the Shunyo-bashi bridge, and a school of enormous carp who thought I looked like someone who might have a snack for them. Further on I walked through the Cherry Blossom Tunnel, although it's the wrong season for those right now, and around the end of the west moat and back past the bridge to the gate where I left my bike.

Shunyo-bashi Bridge and West Moat in Hirosaki Park

Carp swimming under Shunyo-bashi Bridge, looking for a snack

Cherry Blossom Tunnel sans cherry blossoms

Random advertisement for "Flying Witch," anime set in Hirosaki

The other side of Shunyo-bashi Bridge and the West Moat

Flowers at the edge of Hirosaki Park, I assume in preparation for use elsewhere...

On my meandering bike ride home I got intentionally lost in the Nakacho Historic House Preservation Area (or "Samurai District" for short), and rode through the parking lot of the Neputa Mura, a museum for local culture and tradition that I need to visit soon. I was on my way past a senbei bakery when the smell of fresh hot senbei grabbed me by the nose and I was compelled to stop. I think they were probably about to close up shop, but they kindly opened all the sample containers for me to try, and I bought a package of macadamia senbei to add to the dango already in my bag. I am a sucker for sensory pleasures, especially delicious smells...

Hirosaki Apple Park

Aomori Prefecture, and the Hirosaki region specifically, are famous throughout Japan for apple production. Let me preface all this by saying that I grew up in another apple producing region, Upstate New York. It was a favorite family tradition in the fall to drive a pickup truck up the hillside dirt road into Hicks’ U-Pick, and climb into the trees and fill bushel baskets with McIntosh, Spy, Cortland, Empire and other types of apples. Then we’d drive back down the orchard road, pay the farmer at the gate, and head to the Apple Barn for fresh cider donuts and coffee. Ahh, childhood. The bushel basket would sit on the back porch for a long time as we worked our way down through all the apples, making pies, apple sauce, apple butter, you name it. I've got some vintage apple-picking photos to demonstrate:

Upstate New York-style apple picking: Macs by the bushel

Hicks Apple U-Pick Orchard - drive right on up

Upstate New York-style apple picking- send somebody up the tree

Upstate New York-style apple picking- the casualties...

Hirosaki Apple Park is a different sort of thing. It's in the southwest outskirts of the city, within easy walking distance of my base school as it happens. The park itself is free- you can wander around in the apple trees a little, have a nice look at the giant, perfect apple specimens hanging from every branch. These apples are on average about the size of a softball, gorgeous, polished. Special care is taken with certain apples that they don’t develop variations in color or spots- a reflective blanket is spread across the ground and apples are individually wrapped in blue paper bags to protect the surface. 

Hirosaki Apple Park welcomes you

Map of the Park

The "barn" and apple trees in the picking area

Reflective sheets under the apple trees

Apples getting the suntan treatment from the reflective sheets

There's a big gift shop/restaurant where you can eat local specialties, including apple katsu curry, and buy just about any apple-related product that exists in Japan. Apple jams, pocket pies, whole cooked frozen apples; apple juice, sake, brandy, cider, wine; sweet apple vinegar, apple soft-serve, and of course, giant perfect apples. Don't forget the rest of the trinkets: handkerchiefs, socks, aprons; coloring books, toys, lunch boxes and figurines; dishes, mugs, the works. There's a t-shirt with an anthropomorphic apple on it saying "I'm delicious!" in the local dialect, Tsugaru-ben. I am still regretting not buying that shirt.

The entry gate to the left, and the gift shop/ restaurant/ info center on the right

View of Mt. Iwaki and the "apple production area" in the midground (bbq pavilion in the lower right corner)

The ratio of apple to tree seems a bit out of proportion with what I am used to.

If you want to pick your own apple, there is a table out in front of the gift shop staffed by apple-picking guides. Every twenty minutes they will escort a small group of interested apple-pickers to the designated row of trees, and indicate from which of the several surprisingly small trees you should pick your two apples. The trees may be small, but the apples are not. Two apples per person per tree, and they give you an appropriately sized plastic bag to put your apples in. While we waited for the designated time for apple picking, we learned some Tsugaru-ben from the gentleman at the table (enough so that I could translate the t-shirt when I saw it later!) 

One of the U-Pick apple trees

Once we arrived at the trees, the guide demonstrated the proper way to pick the apple- twist it upwards and then turn the stem, so that the rest of the branch doesn't experience any pressure or shaking. I noticed that there were no apples on the ground, and I thought about my childhood experience of picking my way through the carpet of smushed fallen apples under the trees in the orchard, and the sweet boozy smell of apple mush that would stick to the bottom of your shoes if you tread through the apple piles. It does seem rather wasteful in retrospect, but a totally different system. 

Apples for the picking

I picked my two apples from a tree that was described as suppai, or sour, mostly because I knew for sure that tree was designated for picking and I wasn't clear about the trees around it. I really wanted to pick more than two apples, but I held off since that seemed like it wasn't the done thing. When we got back to the stand, our apples were weighed and we paid our yen- the guide service itself was included. I bought a pack of fresh cider donuts that smelled and tasted just like they are supposed to, and then we went inside for lunch and souvenirs. It was so easy to get there, I'm hoping to get back before the season ends.

Dragonflies everywhere!