NO ONE VISITS Kakunodate (But you should)!!!! Old Samurai Village in Northern Japan

After arriving back in Hirosaki from the ryokan in the rural mountains of Aomori, we went to the JR office at the station to get tickets to Kakunodate. The lady printed out all our tickets in Japanese, including the city names, so it was a bit difficult to figure out what tickets were for where without the internet, but we eventually figured it out. First we had to take a JR limited express to Shin-Aomori station in a non-reserve car then we would jump on the Hayabusa to Morioka (11:52-12:45). Hayabusa are reserved seating only so you must have a ticket. Then we took the Komachi to Kakunodate (13:35- 14:20). This ticket confused me. We were assigned seats in car number fifteen, but the train only had seven cars….Apparently this train is like that, they only use cars 11-17, but seeing as our tickets were all in Japanese, this scared me. We arrived at Kakunodate station at 2:20pm and walked to our Airbnb, arriving just after 3pm which was the agreed upon meeting time for our host, but he wasn’t there. We stood at the front of the house for about half an hour before he drove up. Our host was a super friendly man, who toured us around the house and joked about how we shouldn’t contact him after 5pm because he would be drunk. He also told me not to wear my touque in the woods because it had too pom pom like bear ears and the bears would claim me as one of their own. We then had a beer and relaxed in our Airbnb, it had been a long day with an even longer journey, all the way from the rural mountains of Aomori to Kakunodate, Akita. We did leave the place later that evening, but only briefly to visit a Lawsons to buy omelette rice for dinner. We curled up in our futon and fell asleep.
We decided to have a local day in Kakunodate after all the train and transportation days we had been having. I made us a coffee using the little drip things from the kombini and then went to the Family Mart to get us some breakfast onigiri. I also got an oden set from the kombini to finally try oden. Oden is a winter specialty in Japan, various items like fish cakes, tofu, root veggies etc are boiled in a hot soup broth. It is a great snack for the cold Japanese winters.
We decided to stick around in Kakunodate for the day to explore, as we had taken a lot of trains lately. We started out walking down the main old town samurai street. We went to an old samurai house called Ishiguro Samurai house (their family crest was two holly branches crossing ). A lady gave us a little tour of the place and showed us the cool turtle carvings in the ranma. The wood grain is meant to look like water, when you have candle light through them the grain looks like waves. As well the house had a special entrance for royalty, but the lady said it had never been used. We then toured the farm equipment seeing how many layers go into making a thatched roof. They had a large section of medical and botanical illustrations, as the first Japanese man who made these types of illustrations, scientific drawings and observations was a samurai from Kakunodate. I believe this man might have even been part of the same samurai family as the house we visited. The Samurai house entrance fee was 500 Yen.
Next we continued our walk down the samurai street. We wanted to go into Aoyagi house, but there was a huge tour group, so we went back later that day. We were walking along the street admiring the kamakura and watching them be made, and a lady approached us. She was helping to make the snow domes (kamakura). She said she had seen us the day before. She was originally from Germany but had lived in Kakunodate for a long time. She told us that the fire and snow festival was the next night and told us about its significance to the locals, it meant that the end of winter was soon. The festival also gave something for the locals to do to entertain themselves in the dead of winter. She said that some foreigners took part in the fire throwing, but one got hurt and held the festival accountable.
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