My Travel Adventures

Despite waking up at six o’clock in the morning for a seven-fifty bus, the last leg of our journey was a nail-biter. Because I had done my laundry on our first night in Kanazawa (which spent the next day drying around our rooms), Brent and Joel had to do theirs on the second and pack it in the morning. It dried faster than mine, as I had tried to complete each stage manually with my knowledge of Chinese characters while Joel simply used the five-hour automatic wash and dry cycle. Still, Brent and Joel had to collect all their clothes in the morning from across the room, which took a fair bit of time, and Joel’s decision to repack his entire bag did not help.

Today was a leisurely day when we did not have to worry about anything because we had booked a tour. We were originally going to visit Shirakawa-go and Gokayama by ourselves, but the logistics were far too convoluted and would have involved a very unreasonable amount of time in transit. The tour was unguided. Instead of being shepherded from one site to another, the itinerary was to be driven to Shirakawa-go, spend two hours walking around, eat lunch, transit to Gokayama, spend one hour there, and return to Kanazawa late in the afternoon.

On my twelfth day of travelling across Japan, Brent, Joel and I visited Tomioka Silk Mill. The factory was established at the dawn of the Meiji restoration in 1872 as part of Japan’s effort to acquire money for industrialisation. Japan had already been producing copious amounts of silk before the Meiji restoration, with raw silk and silkworm cocoons accounting for 86% of its exports in 1862 – a situation greatly aided by the chaos of the Taiping Rebellion in China and a silkworm disease ravaging France and Italy. In the 1870s, however, overproduction and the recovery of Japan’s competitors in the silk market caused a collapse in raw silk prices. Japan then decided to refocus on silk products such as silk thread and silk cloth, enlisting European specialists to help construct Japan’s first silk mill.