1 day exploring Hikone (21/5/09)

Our Osaka field trip was cancelled due to some cases of swine flu in Osaka and Kobe that many schools and colleges are closed for a few weeks. We supposed to visit American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, attend business presentation by two prominent executives and attend a lecture about Japanese-style management by Professor Maeda. This was a very interesting schedule to me to learn more about Japan’s economic but unfortunately, we couldn’t make it.


However, the Shiga Prefecture government had arranged us an alternative to visit Hikone Chamber of Commerce and visit Hikone old down shopping area which were really interesting too.





Hikonyan is a famous character of Hikone. It wears the Samurai’s hat and looks really cute. No wonder why I see this character everywhere and they have stuff animal, mobile phone’s chain, key chain….in this Hikonyan. I will get a stuff animal of Hikonyan as a souvenir from Hikone hehe.


We visited a over 200 years old Japanese hotel and went to a place where we can put on Samurai’s clothes.

I remember learning about their heroic warrior code longtime ago in history class. The Samurai was the elite warriors in ancient Japan. They fought in battles for the shogun and emperor of Japan in modern times. The samurai based their philosophy on heroism. All samurai trained vigorously in numerous styles of martial arts. Bushido was their way of life. Samurais never accept defeat. They chose to perform their famous samurai ritual of cutting their own stomachs if they ever face defeat. Most people think of samurai as only warriors, but they were actually the elite with very high education level.




We also visited a Japanese artist’s house, his name is Toshiro Odagaki. I love all of his Hikone’s landscape paintings which were placed at JCMU. Odagaki and his wife are so kind and friendly, they prepared us a lot of Japanese food and tea. The artist demonstrated some skills using black ink and I had a chance to try drawing a frog.