Spending the Night in a House Built During Meiji Era in Taiki Town

Taiki is a beautiful countryside town with gorgeous landscape, home to kind and loving people. Here you won’t find fancy restaurants or famous hotels, instead, you will be able to immerse yourself in the simple life and learn how little you need to be happy.

I have been to Taiki town a couple of times before but always to the seaside area during summer, and every time I came, I was always astonished by the beautiful nature.

This time, Dani and I planned to spend the night in Taiki. Taiki town has about 20 guest houses, and at each house, visitors can have various experiences of ”Minpaku“. We chose to spend the night at a house that was built during the Meiji Era.

While Mrs. Kato and Mrs. Yoshida were preparing our dinner, I continued my tour around the house. Such a delicate touch in the decoration. And I found more decoration using the kanji of the Inoue Family. Mrs. Kato and Mrs. Yoshida wanted to preserve their memories in the house as much as they could.

They also had all these cute dolls in different shapes and styles decorating the entire house. Mrs. Kato told me that they put up the decoration depending on the commemorative occasion of the country, so the next occasion was the Doll’s Festival, “Hinamatsuri”, which is held to celebrate the health and happiness of girls, and the dolls represented the Emperor and Empress in traditional clothes from the Heian period.

The rice was ready

And so were the side dishes! These are local production for local consumption dishes using fish and vegetables caught in Taiki-cho!
What an amazing dinner prepared by Mrs. Kato and Mrs. Yoshida! I had no words to describe how amazing this dinner was. They kept saying it was simple but that’s what made it special, everything was made especially for us!

We even had a special dish. We ate “inoshishi” (wild boar) meat for the first time! A friend of Mrs. Kato who is a hunter just caught an “inoshishi” and gave her some meat. She prepared sukiyaki-style wild boar. Needless to say, it was exquisite!

And this is what a traditional bathtub called “Goemonburo” in Japanese looked like during the Meiji Era. I felt a little scared to go inside, it looked like an infinite hole, but once inside, it was so refreshing.

We also wore the traditional Japanese pajamas, something similar to yukata.
And we said our good nights to the ladies and went upstairs to our cozy tatami room. Can a room be more Japanese style than this one? I don’t think so! Shoji sliding door and koushi-mado, Japanese style lattice window. We went to sleep feeling like we had stepped back in time to old Japan (a Japanese period drama we had seen on TV).

We woke up early the next day and Mrs. Yoshida took us for a walk to the nearest shrine. It was raining and a little bit foggy, I thought we would be bugged by this weather, but on the contrary, it gave a beautiful touch to our view of the mountains.

In less than 15 minutes, we got to the only shrine in Japan dedicated to the head, called Koubenomiya-yomo-jinja. People come here pray before a job interview, or before brain surgery, and parents come to pray for their children do well at school. I’m definitely coming back again and praying side-by-side with our youngest son Yuji who is now a Junior High School student.

The details of Japanese shrines always fascinate me.

The shrine is located by Karako river. After praying, we went to check the crystal-clear water of the river and the waterfall.

Such a peaceful, calm and beautiful place where the shrine is located.

Koubenomiya-yomo-jinja(Shrine)

https://koubenomiya.or.jp/

We headed back to the house for our Japanese style breakfast! They gave 2 options, a more western style with bread, or a Japanese style with rice and mis soup, and of course, we chose the Japanese style.

For breakfast, Mrs. Kato used the irori to grill our fish!
And look at our breakfast! Again, no words to describe the amazing, delicious breakfast we had, a breakfast made specially for us.

Tourist attractions covered by this article