Hikone Castle

We went to Hikone Castle this afternoon. It is one of the four national treasure castles in Japan. During the trip I found all the inside structure are build by wood, but the whole castle still existed for a long time. How well Japanese did the maintenance during the years! Since we didn’t get tour guide and the museum was closed until June 1^st. I didn’t learn a lot about this castle, I hope I can learn more about its history and the decorations inside—I guess most of them are store in the museum. The other interesting I found is most of “Japanese Unites” have their own mascots. We saw mascots in companies like Fujitec we visited this morning, we saw mascots in government departments such as Tokyo Customs and Metropolitan Traffic Control Center, and even Hikone Castle this type of scenic spot has their own mascot! I guess the existing of those mascots may because of the animation culture of Japan. But I do not really understand the reason why Japanese are like those kind of cute characters that much.

Furthermore, I saw a lot of Japanese students visited Hikone Castle this afternoon. They look like higher level in primary school or junior school, were lead by their teachers and tour guides. This also happened in Tokyo, the day we went to Disneyland. But the age of students looks younger than students we saw today. I am so jealous of them because in China, schools rarely offer chances to students to go out by groups. I’ve heard from others before I went to Japan. Usually, Japanese schools organize their students to travel for study once a year, from kindergarten to high school level. I think the students always can learn a lot of thing during the trips. The trip to Disneyland may give a chance for them to play with their classmates and develop the friendship with them; it is also a way to release the pressure from students. The trip to Hikone Castles can help them to make that period of history more vivid. And some other types of “travel for study” can help students to expand their eye horizon, increase the knowledge about culture, language, and history or other types of knowledge in different fields. Based on the large population in China, I may understand that Chinese school want to avoid the accidents that may happen during the trip. However, like people cannot avoid the car accident by not drive cars if it can be helpful to our life. The things they need more consider about, is how to avoid the accident happen, but not avoid to organize students to learn things from real life.

 Hikone Castle's mascot.

 Hikone Castle's main building.

Student groups in Disneyland.