So I left Kyoto and headed to the “Art Islands”.  I got the train to Uno Port then head to Naoshima Island. It is hard to describe what this island is like it is very small, and used to be an old fishing town. The Island has a few art galleys on it which are really unexpected. It is hard to describe what it is like cycling around a relatively empty island (i rented a very bad bike) and coming across these amazing museums.  Some of the art is great like world flag ant farm, which is an ant farm made up of the worlds flags, as the ants go through it the flags change、and you can see the tunnels where the ants have been.

On Naoshima I went to the following musuems:

Chichu Art Museum

Lee Ufan Museum

Benesse House

This was a lot of art for one day! The Benesse House was open till 9pm so I went back again to look at it at night time.  Unfortunately you are not allowed to take pictures inside the museums but the buildings they are spectacular. There is also random art dotted around the island.

I stayed on the island for one night at the Seven Beeches which was simple but clean and had AC. I had dinner at and BBQ restaurant my hands got quite hot until I got given the tongs to turn the food with, before I was using chop sticks. It was a good meal though.

After my stay on Naoshima I headed directly to Teshima with a fairly new museum that had just opened in 2010. This was basically a big concrete structure which you walked into with two “windows” at each end. What bubbled up from fountains and sort of flowed around like rain drops on a window.

The weather over the last few days has been unbelievably hot and sunny.

After the day on Teshima I headed directly back to Uno.  I stayed at Uno Slope House this was the owners old family home.  Max the owner spot fluent English and it was really interesting to learn more about Uno an how it has changed from a major port to a much smaller one due to the building of a bridge which connects the mainland which has reduced the amount of traffic using the ports.  Max also talked about the heavy industry which is on some of the inland sea islands and the problems this causes. After talking with Max for a bit I borrowed one of the bikes he has and cycled around Uno for a bit and got some dinner in a Ramen bar where I met the other guest at the slope house he was from the USA. More information the Benesse history on the island can be found here. I think want makes the island so special is that the art is so unexpected and because it is quite an effort to get there it is relatively quite which is nice, its one of those places you want to tell everybody about because it is so amazing but then again you don’t want to tell anyone about it! I found about about these Island through Rachael Dadd I am not sure how I found about her music but commissioned her to make an apron for Ruth whilst she was living in Japan , which is very nice.

Max drove me and the other guest to the station where I got the train back to Kyoto here I visited the Kodai-Ji Temple it was amazing how peaceful it was inside the temple, being so close to the city center. Tomorrow I will head back to Tokyo met up with Cliff again and do some USA planning.  I think this is the blog with the most links so far happy clicking.