Hakone Park

Hakone Park

Less than a hundred kilometers from teeming Tokyo, Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, internationally famous for hot springs (including Owakudani), hiking and outdoor activities, majestic natural beauty and fabulous views of nearby Mount Fuji is deservedly one of the most popular destinations for visitors and Japanese alike. Well served with and by mass transit, including on Lake Ashi, the big park offers tourists a range of choices in addition to scenic outlooks, including the opportunity of lengthening their lives by seven years!

According to legend, consuming eggs cooked in the restorative waters of bubbling, malodorous Owakudani, situated in the area around a crater made during in the last eruption of Mount Hakone perhaps 3000 years ago, has wonderful result. Smelly, sulfurous odors pervade the place where the special eggs, boiled in the geo-hot water (reputed to prolong one's life by approximately seven years, bus accidents aside) are for sale. The hot, mineral-rich water turns the eggs matt black (a pretty unusual look for eggs: “have a Gothic Easter”) but the taste is fine and the color doesn’t even go through the shell, much less to the food matter.






With a good guidebook in hand or a cabled-up laptop Goggled to any of the numerous sites offering diagrams of Hakone’s lavish transportation grid, visitors can trace access from, typically, Tokyo, to the park. Driving is, naturally, one way to scoot around the scenic curves cut into the landscape, driving around vast arcs gaining altitude and curling out again and again for seemingly every time more spectacular views of Mount Fuji. The sprawling place offers—aside from longevity, no mean benefit in itself—biking, hiking, and rope ways or gondolas. It’s served by rail and a funicular. Water taxi and tour boats cruise Lake Ashi (with busses dropping folks at stops, to connect with the rail head).

Indeed, there seems to be a clear difference in cosmology or “world view” between the United States and some other nation’s notion of park space and Hakone. One way to view park space is to reduce or avoid the evidence of the “hand of man.” In Hakone it’s as though engineers have fanned out to wrestle that rascal nature to the ground: it’s under control with rail, and pavement, and cast concrete and strung cable; parking lots, and sluice ways, and hard packed outlooks. It all really makes it extraordinarily easy to access the place.

Board Games

Beijing Board Game Players


Board Games

Board games, that is, rule-bound games played on table tops or floors, and involving role-playing, chance outcome, or skill, evolved very differently in the United States than elsewhere. When we traveled in China and Tibet, it was easy to see folks enjoying the traditional games which formed the foundation of some of these pastimes. Today, such games may be said to be central to American leisure and political culture.

In part all of that is because of the unique origins of the United Stated as a nation. Immigrant patterns and labor demands created a setting in which many of the globe’s wide variety of game styles—contributed from Africa, Asia, and Europe—arrived fully formed and at almost the same time. In part it’s because this presentation of all the world’s game forms itself took place in the midst of a quickly changing epoch of technological innovation and social evolution. Throughout China, Tibet, and Japan it’s easy to see enormously well beautiful, expensive, and of course well crafted board sets for sale. You can also watch people on the street, given a spare moment, fashion a game from a bit of discarded cardboard and bottle caps and set-to for an impromptu competition.

Leisure Studies scholars and Gaming Specialists understand that in spite of the enormous apparent variety in board games, just a few basic principles underlie all of them. Some games involve creation of a role-playing environment, some involve skills (and, thus, some play can be “skillful”), and some involve various mechanisms approximating random number generation. In the last sort, players “play” against the unknown future outcome of that device – often a die, a pattern of cards, or mechanical instrument of some kind.

In order for a “game” to exist, these basic features, ordered in some way, are then bound by rules of greater or lesser complexity. Games can then be made to model “real life,” after a fashion, by carefully combining elements of role-playing, skill requirement, and chance outcome components. In the New World, Go, Mah Jong and Chess, various European card-based games, African games such as Awele, Bao, Dakon, and others of the Mancala group, and games enjoyed by Native Americans were played in traditional forms by new groups of players, and were also hybridized. New, variant forms were then played.

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Chinese Drawings

Chinese Drawings at Bangkok’s National Museum

During our visit, the Bangkok National Museum, which is generally dedicated to preserving Thailand’s cultural heritage through its varied collections of art, anthropological, archaeological, cultural, and ethnographic material displayed in the Palace of Wang Na (near the Grand Palace, which itself hosts the remarkable Green Buddha), we enjoyed a wonderful traveling exhibit of contemporary Chinese drawings. Bangkok’s little visited museum is a quiet, rewarding break from the hubbub of a great city. It features 2-d art, traveling shows, a small sculpture garden and studio, and a café.

The Gallery of Thai History is located in the Sivamokhaphiman Hall, the Prehistory Galley at the rear of the building, the museum’s History of Art collection is in the south and north wings while the minor arts, including such interesting objects as the Royal Cremation Chariots and various ceremonial objects are on display in other buildings within the compound. Importantly, the center also hosts traveling exhibits and other work. On our visit a charming display of local portraits celebrating the monarch was there, as was the collection of Chinese drawings.

Contemporary Chinese Work

Several large, tranquil, and entirely suitable spaces were set aside for the suite of Chinese drawings on display some time back at the Bangkok National Art Museum. These included a selection of large works, such as a set from Chen Xinmao’s “Historic Book Series,” (2001), as well as drawings by Li Huasheng (1999) 197X196 cm; Bai Ming (2003) “permeating-corresponding-overlapping,” 140X267; and Shen Quin’s “mountain” (1986) 150X130cm. Although a thorough critique of this moving and excellent is far beyond the scope of this brief article, perhaps the most obvious element communicated was the powerful negotiation taking place between deeply traditional ways of “dealing” with paper, especially with pigment and with ink, the emerging and dynamic political situation of the Pacific setting, and the extraordinary vitality of creative forces available. Perhaps it’s easy to imagine that all creative energy is flowing toward the technical edge of the methods envelope – digital imaging and electronic reproduction of various kinds. These artists are handling utterly basic materials and entirely formal and elemental questions with astonishing creative resolve.

Wang Huang Shen’s multiple media “Civilization Sacrifice” does involve more than just the traditional media (as do some other of the show’s drawings). And, indeed, I found it to be the most impressive construction-assemblage in the presentation among many strong representative pieces. Other objects may very well be more suitable for particular spaces, especially smaller environments or long term exhibit. Civilization Sacrifice, which involved debris, found articles, drawings, electronic media, and performance, as well a music, in part focused on the terrorist act which destroyed the twin towers in New York. However, as is always the case, Wang Huang Shen’s large assembly spoke to larger issues as well.



The museum is open Wednesday-Sunday 9.00am.- 4.00pm. with an admission fee of 40 bahts; the telephone numbers are: 66 -2- 224-1404 , 224-1333 , 221-1842; fax. 224-1404 , 224-9911
It is located near the Phramane Grounds, the Thammasat University, and National Theatre
Use bus # 3,6, or 39