The other week I went to Daisen Park to have a look around. It is right next to the Kofun burial mounds but I discovered that you can’t get much of a view of them. The park itself does, however, have some nice bits and pieces. There is a very nice Peace Tower that I struggled to get a good photograph of. Round the back of this were a bunch of old guys playing Shogi (a Japanese version of chess). One of them was particularly keen to speak to me despite the rather large language barrier.

My favourite part of the park was the Japanese Garden. It was like a smaller version of the garden I visited in Hiroshima two years ago and was equally as good. This was the view looking out over the pond.

This is a larger view looking back. You can see the Peace Tower in the background.

While I was there a couple appeared to be having some wedding photo’s taken (although it could have been some other form of photo shoot). The garden certainly made a picturesque location.

In school I was giving feedback on student worksheets that included the sentence “If you come to Sakai you should ________.” A number of students mentioned the Kofun so I came back a week later to visit Sakai City Museum and learn more about them. Like I said earlier you don’t actually see much as (a) they are off limits and (b) they can only really be appreciated from on high. This Wikipedia page gives an idea of what they look like. This kind of detracts from their significance. They are actually larger in terms of surface area than the Pyramids of Gaza. The Japanese Government wants them to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site (a designation that the Japanese seem particularly keen on).

The museum does a really good job of describing a lot of the detail with a fair amount of information in English. There are also some really good aerial photos. It also has some other sections on life in Sakai with little English. All in all it was a good trip. Under the museum was a children’s area that included reconstructing plastic mock ups of broken artefacts with magnetic edges and a delightful Childrens’ Play Tomb.