Japan

A gargantuan spotted pumpkin and other oddities on Naoshima Island

Japan day 7

Three trains, a ferry, and a bus brought me all the way to the small island of Naoshima some 150km (100 miles) east of Hiroshima. The bus was so stuffed that I didn’t make it off at the stop that I had wanted, so I got a bit longer of a walk to the already remote guest house where I dropped off my pack and went to the Town of Honmura’s bike rental shop only to find that they had closed for some reason. “I guess I could walk”, I thought to myself but somewhat later I went by a garage lending bikes on an honor based system. Got a bike intended for someone a foot and some shorter than me and with just one gear, but oh well.  

I pedaled my way to the aforementioned spotted yellow pumpkin which felt almost comically misplaced at the end of an old concrete pier here by a former fishing society. It was just one of many of such “misplaced” outdoor and indoor artworks in what had turned the island into a hotspot for modern art. 

The road turned sharply upwards and there was no way I would be able to ride that bike up there, so I dragged it along and sweat profusely in the humid heat. At the Bernese House Museum there was some okayish art and installations, but the most interesting was actually a series of black and white photographs of the sea framed in exactly the same way and almost indistinguishable but apparently taken from across the world. They where hung on concrete wall on the outside and framed a nice view of the sea. Later at a dock a painting came into view on a rock wall at such distance that you (intentionally) couldn’t really make out what it showed. 

Some more odd outdoor art and some decent nature along the bike path later I made my way back to Hommura, which had a nice rural fishing town feeling to it, and later to the guest house. 

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