Sakaiminato, Tottori, Japan

#sakaiminato #tottori #japan #hollandamericacruise #shigerumizuki

After reading the information about Sakaiminato, the idea of visiting a town where one street was lined with the 100 characters imagined by the Japanese Manga artist Shigeru Mizuki sounded really interesting.
Leaving the ship and going outside, we found that there were two choices of free mini buses either to the area's Botanical gardens or the town. As we had done the research, we decided to go to the town and soon arrived at the centre. Walking along the main street was a fascinating experience with the sculptures every few metres and it helped that the town wasn't very busy.
​As we walked, it was difficult to decide which ones to photograph as they were all so unique. For children, they could buy a book and  collect stamps of the various sculptures. There were stamps and ink pads dotted along the street, which was a novel way to encourage tourism and added to the interest.

Towards the end of the street was a museum portraying Mizuki's life story and his work. Unfortunately, all the information was in Japanese, although you could download an app to use but we hadn't brought our headphones to be able to use this without disturbing other visitors.
His life story was fascinating, as was a short film about his time in the army, where he lost his left arm and his final return to Japan. His range of supernatural characters were told in the magazines but his fame outside Japan didn't start until after 2010 when these started to be translated into other languages.
​The museum showed his life throughout his time in the army, his military stories and his Manga work.
There were images of his work and a room of some of his quite scary figures.

Leaving the museum, we bumped into a couple we had become friendly with during the trip and they had come from the gardens and were now enjoying the town. We realised we still had some time left, so decided to try the gardens as well.
This proved to be a disaster! It took too long to get there, we had to stay on the bus to go straight back to the ship. We did go over the famous bridge though, although this doesn't look so scary in the photograph. 

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To sum up, we really enjoyed this  interesting town and if we had been given a little more information before getting off the ship,  we could have visited both the park and the town.