Science in my time off.

April is one of the prettiest months in Japan. The weather is mild and not too humid. The rain hasn’t quite kicked in yet and the Sakura flowers are in bloom. Naturally I’ve spent almost all of it locked in a temperature controlled, artificially lit environment. Oh the things we give up for work. Still it went well, we took some good data and I learnt a new Japanese word (夜勤).

Still after 10 days of working nights, that expression rolls off the tongue so wonderfully it's a shame that the sentiment behind it is so unpalatable, I had to drag myself down the mountain to do something. Naturally the wonderful weather we’d experienced whilst stuck inside the ring evaporated with the coming weekend.

 

And so did my original plans to play Frisbee. Curse the heavy rain. Thankfully a couple of friends had a back up plan. One of them had taken a passing interest in astronomy and wanted to visit a nearby planetarium. Since I’d been working nights I’d spent a fair bit of time staring into the night sky and I needed a chance to get off the hill.

The planetarium is located in Akashi, home of the famous bridge and interesting octopus based dishes. We stopped for a little Thai food before departing to the hall of space. It’s only about 15 minutes from the station but it is bordered by an interesting little park containing a few shrines and a lot of graveyards.　On the way up I also came across this odd little shop called rosemary. The weird woollen puppets for some reason made me think of the herbs and rosie and Jim. I think the whole day was just one big nostalgia trip from then on.

I do love a good planetarium, it invokes some fond memories of Liverpool when I was 5 or 6 years old. There was a major lack of English on most of the displays however, I’m pretty sure the target audience was children as nearly all the Kanji came with furugana.

I don’t remember too much of the planetarium show sadly. I was so knackered that I fell asleep shortly after the instructions of how to locate 北極星 (the north star), well it was warm and comfy in those reclining chair.

The building itself is a large cylindrical tower, again flashbacks of a childhood spent wandering lighthouses, giving a nice logical flow to all of the displays. My favorite was a temporary exhibit dedicated to solar eclipses. Mainly this is because the kanji for eclipse 日食 literally means “Eating the sun”. I love taking kanji at face value. It’s also interesting going to places like this with natives, the language is so specialised that they couldn’t read some of the words.

The whole complex is on a hill overlooking Akashi and when you climb to the top of the tower, via a spiral staircase with illustrations of all 88 of the constellations, you are rewarded with some epic views out on Akashi. Thankfully by this time the weather had cleared up a bit and we could see all the way out to Shikoku. It was a nice little trip with good company and a good little recharge for the batteries.

Mata ne.