At the weekend, we went to Matsumoto. a decent sized city in Nagano which is historically significant because Matsumoto castle is located there. The castle is original, something very rare in Japan. It dates to the sixteenth century and is an unusual black colour. The castle is near the center of the city and there are several things to do in the area.
As for us, we arrived at about 2pm on Saturday after our morning looking around Suwa. We quickly parked in the Parco car park and got to the ramen shop in town which makes special Nagano ramen just before they stopped serving lunch. The ramen was really tasty there. I must admit that although many areas in Japan have special ramen, its often nothing special at all, Yokohama ramen, for instance, but the ramen in this place was great. The restaurant was called Mensho Sakura.
After the food, we walked past the Matsumoto Timepiece museum, probably interesting, if you like clocks... Then along Nawate-dori shopping street, with lots of quaint little shops dotted about, to Yohashira Shrine, a large shrine on the way to the castle, and finally to the castle itself.
The wait to get into the castle was 40 minutes and it was getting late in the day, so we put off the visit until Sunday. The Matsumoto marathon was on Sunday morning and so the castle was crowded with sightseeing joggers on Saturday afternoon I suppose.
After the crowded castle, we wandered around a little while sipping on convenience store sake, took a picture of the old school / museum, closed for renovations:
after which we went back to the center of town, got another shrine stamp, went to a small craft beer place and had a pint, then walked to the station. Its still a pretty small station and hasn't had the renovations that other similarly sized stations nearer Tokyo have had of late, so there wasn't much to do there. We went to a collection of mini restaurants all in one building and went around eating and drinking, kushi-katsu, takoyaki etc.
The next morning we went to the castle again. This time the weather was overcast, there was no wait to get in though. Here are a couple more sunny pictures of the castle and a few gloomy ones.
We stayed the night in Matsumoto in the Richmond hotel, a standard hotel for Japan, nothing special, but the breakfast buffet was in the family restaurant called Gusto on the ground floor. If you don't really like eating natto and cold fish for breakfast, Gusto is about as close as you can get to a western style breakfast, which suits my constitution very well.
We went to another Shrine not far from Matsumoto on Sunday after the castle and then went to a JA (Japanese Agriculture supermarket, which all sell local produce). Nagano is famous for fruits and we bought a lot of vegetables and fruits there pretty cheap and the taste was excellent.
For a day trip, Matsumoto is worth it and the castle is very famous and milling with foreign people, there were none anywhere else around the city, so I suppose the castle is a day trip from Tokyo for many people. Quite a nice place.