This weekend I woke up in Fukushima City and gathered a group of my friends, Cormac, Jocelyn, Rihanna, Olga, Felipe and a newcomer to Fukushima, Iris. We were going on a wholesome trip around Fukushima.
We started our day at the UFO Museum in Iino-machi, on the hill/mountain of Senganmori. Senganmori is a rather pyramidal-shaped mountain that is believed to have some extraterrestrial visitations in the past. As a result the mountain and nearby Iino-machi is famous for aliens and ufos. Olga had been to the UFO Museum once before, so she was super helpful. I am glad she wanted to come a second time.
The museum was built to have the appearance of a flying saucer, complete with futuristic sliding doors. We went in and bought our tickets.
(To preface this blog post: I don’t believe in either extraterrestrials or ufos visiting earth. But my 12 year old self thinks that this ufo museum so close and accessible was far too good to pass up!)
Here are some ufo kokeshi dolls by the entrance.
Here is a display case with many alien and ufo baubles. And hundreds of books, both in Japanese and English (as well as a few in other languages) about aliens and ufos.
The museum starts out with a dark hallway with blue lights hanging from the ceiling. There is a display of a toy alien that has been lit up to look creepy and put you in the mood for the rest of the museum.
There was also this futuristic-looking town that is what the museum owners believe Iino-machi will look like in the future (I assume with the help of aliens.)
This is an optical illusion where if you stare at the smaller colored lights amongst the wall of color-changing lights, you will see a black spot in the middle of your vision. It was kind of cool.
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| Words to live by? |
There were these little models of what they think the inside of a ufo looks like, complete with little people.
There were also a lot of alien artwork drawn by visitors or fans of the museum. A few of them were pretty cool and were done by talented people.
There was also this room with actual-size mannequins of aliens from close encounters.
On the other side of this main room was an entrance to a movie theater:
They show only one movie in the small theater and it requires you to wear 3-d glasses from the 1990’s. The 3-d effect was very bad. A throw back from when it was new technology.
The movie was about how Senganmori has had ufo visitations in the past and the reason they believe this is because the mountain has energy fields, and some rather important nearby locations (shrines and buildings) when looked at from above make triangles with the mountain. No matter that if you connect any three points on a plane you will make a triangle. No, Sir, this is proof! The film also said that the mountain tends to mess with compasses because of aliens. Not because you can have natural explanations for magnetic anomalies in nature, because of aliens.
That aside the film was short and entertaining and we all laughed through the showing.
We went upstairs where there was an empty room full of tables where you could eat lunch or relax. This room had tatami mats that were decorated with little ufos!
There was also an onsen in the building as well. It was sex-separated, and I didn’t go in, but Olga had been before and she said it was a pretty small tub, and it didn’t look the most appealing. I wish I had thought to take a look myself.
There was another display case of ufo and alien baubles as well as a little step exercise machine and a reflexology foot mat that hurt to stand on.
This is all there was to the UFO Museum, so we left and decided to hike up Senganmori to see the viewing plat form on top.
The path up the mountain had some stone statues of the aliens that they talked about in the museum. A few of us messed around and had some fun with them.
When we got to the top of the mountain this is what we saw. It has a viewing platform that looks like a ufo. There is also a small display of shiny metallic spheres surrounding a small ufo statue, and there is a small shrine off to the side.
At the top of the platform you can walk around and see all around the mountain. There were also little maps and free viewing binoculars that were in pretty good condition.
The view was breathtaking!
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| Oh wait, that's just me! |
Four peas-in-a-pod!
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| Felipe and I look like the promotional poster for a soap opera. "Nothing could stop their... Forbidden Love." |
After making our way down the mountain we stopped at a shrine nearby. It was a normal shrine, not too interesting. But what makes this shrine noteworthy is that there are a few sheds off to the side.
One of the sheds just has a few dilapidated alters inside of them, but one was storage for a whole bunch of wooden penises! We had Olga to thank for this discovery.
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| A wooden "offering" horse was sitting in one of the other sheds. |
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| Lovely view. |
We also unleashed our inner child and slid down a roller slide in a park across the street from the shrine and museum.
From here we stopped for a short while at the gift shop and lunch café across the street from the museum. I bought a little clear file folder with the various aliens and museum mascot on it.
I also saw this for sale: it is bee wine, and it is only 8000 yen!
We spoke to some people in the shop, and they were so excited that a bunch of foreigners were there. The ufo museum is certainly not popular with foreign tourists, so we attracted quite a lot of attention. It was really nice.
Everyone bought either an ice cream or a soda and we stood outside the gift shop talking for a little while. After we had finished we made our way back to the cars to go to the town center of Iino-machi.
Iino-machi is a small town in the inaka. It is not very well-known except by locals. The town has a dozen stone statues of aliens dotted around the town streets.
Our first stop was the old locomotive train that is sitting next to the town acidity center. Cormac was so excited and spent at least five minutes inside the train pulling leers. I have never seen a man so happy in my life!
While Cormac was playing in the train everyone else had found some animal toys about ten feet from the train and were riding them. No park equipment was damaged during the making of these shenanigans.
After that we walked around for a short time locating a few of these statues and taking pictures.
Here Felipe was trying to make it look like this alien statue had smoke coming out of its mouth, but the wind was blowing too hard to make the effect last for even a second after he pulled away. Luckily Cormac was there to provide assistance and block the wind a bit.
It was at this point that people were getting really hungry. It was also getting pretty late in the day, and we had quite a ways to go before we got to our last destination of the trip: the Miharu Takuzakura. We wanted to make it before it got dark. So we went back to the cars and headed south to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant.
These are some statues that I saw during an earlier trip to Iino-machi, but we didn’t have enough time to go see today.
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| Alien footprints! |
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| Each of the statues has a little illustration and name on the side. This is ... Helkafle? Helkaple? |
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| This one is named "Nappi-". |
After eating we got back in the car to continue making our way to Miharu to see the Takizakura. We arrived just before the sun set. We had about twenty minutes to take photographs while the light slowly seeped from the sky. This gave us a wide range of lighting in our pictures. It was gorgeous!
Olga, being such a good friend. Acting the tripod for a good picture.
We walked around taking pictures of each other and close ups of some other sakura trees nearby. I love this photo with a lantern behind some sakura branches and blossoms. I took two about ten minutes apart from each other.
I love the color juxtaposition of the darker picture, even though you can’t see the details as easily.
After the sky went completely dark this is what the tree looked like. It was illuminated, and the pink was pretty against the black and blue of the sky, but it gets quite washed out in my photographs.
Our group had gotten spit up during the picture taking, so Jocelyn, Cormac and I went to a food stand nearby and waited for the others so we could rendezvous before departing. Cormac and Jocelyn each got some pancakes to eat while we waited. I had one bite of Cormac’s pancakes, and they were so soft and delicious! It was a wonderful quality that I have not come to expect from Japan when it comes to western food. These were excellent! We also got a cherry-blossom flavored ice cream cone. It was pretty good. The one I had at Hanamiyama was better, though.
After that we made our way back to the cars. We said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. It was a wonderful evening with wonderful friends. And my drive back to Fukushima City with Felipe, Jocelyn and Cormac will remain one of my fondest memories of Japan.
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