Sakaiminato, Tottori, Japan

#sakaiminato #tottori #japan #manga #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.
So, leaving the ship and going outside, we found that there were two choices of free mini buses either to the 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 yards 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 to collect stamps of the sculptures and there were stamps and ink pads dotted around the street. A lovely 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, when we walked around the museum, all the information was in Japanese although you could download an app which translated the information  into English. We hadn't brought our headphones, so we weren't  able to use this.  If we had listened to the commentary without headphones, it would have been too distracting for other visitors.
Mizuki's life story was fascinating as was a short film about his time in the army where he lost his left arm, and finishing with his final return to Japan.
His range of supernatural characters were published in magazines, but his fame outside Japan didn't start until after 2010 when his stories started to be translated into other languages.
​The museum showed  images of his work and one room was full of some of his quite scary figures. His main character was the 'Ghost boy,' Kitaro. The two pictures below show how he was drawn.

​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 visit the gardens before we had to return 
to the ship.  This proved to be a disaster as it took too long to get there.
When we finally arrived, we had to stay on the bus to go straight back to the ship! However, this journey allowed us to travel over a famous steep bridge, although this doesn't look so scary in the photograph.  

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​To sum up, we enjoyed our visit to a really interesting town and were happy to have been given an insight into the origins of the famous Japanese culture of Manga.