The Rolling Stone

This is the final post for the trip, and apologies that it’s a little delayed. I didn’t quite get it finished before our flights home, and now that I’m back, the business of normal life resumes. But I’m staying up a bit to cover off our final day.

On our last full day in Japan, back in Tokyo, we have one last thing on our must-see list: the Museum of Fire.

Because of Hayley’s volunteer work in in the Rural Fire Service she has a strong interest in firefighting. When we were in Thailand we came across a fire station and she chatted to a firefighter there (and got to sit in the fire truck 🙂). That was a happy accident, but for Japan Hayley had made plans.

The Museum of Fire in Tokyo gives a history of firefighting in the city and is attached to an operating fire station. Initially I had thought this would be something primarily of interest to Hayley. But then I found out that the history of organised firefighting in Tokyo stretched back to the Edo period and was originally the responsibility of Samurais. Samurai firefighters! This I had to see.

Arriving at the museum we first went around the side to the fire station entrance. Hayley called out the one of the firefighters and a couple of them came over, including a woman who had her small child at work that day. Hayley had brought a gift: a teddy bear dressed in the Rural Fire Service uniform with a message on its hat, that she had written in English and Japanese, explaining that it was from the RFS Valley Heights Brigade.

They were delighted with the gift and a conversation ensued in a mixture of Japanese and English. I mostly couldn’t follow it of course, but it seemed to touch on how difficult mountain-side fires were. They gave us some badges with a cat firefighting mascot on them and we were shown into the museum. It was a lovely piece of cross-cultural interchange.

The museum was great. The lowest floor had a series of fire trucks starting with with the early days of automobiles which had wooden ladders and wicker parts on their pipes, and going up to a modern truck that even included a firefighting bot. (Somehow it reminded me of K9 from Doctor Who.)

The next floor up showed different specialist equipment and Hayley and Xavier got to dress up.

Those floors were fun, but I was keen to get to Floor 5 that covered the Edo period. It was just as interesting as I’d hoped,

It starts with a diorama showing an Edo period street with firefighters at work. They mostly used the destructive method where houses and other buildings in the path of the fire were torn down to create a firebreak.

A number of traditional outfits were displayed:

There were maps of Tokyo showing how organised the whole set up was:

Recreations of all the standards of the different fire brigades:

The equipment they used:

Plus a number of artworks depicting firefighters:

Perhaps my favourite was this:

It depicts a real incident where a firefighter at a Sumo match got into a fight with one of the wrestlers and used a fire bell to summon friends to help in the fight. He was exiled for this crime, so it was taken quite seriously. However I can’t help but be amused by the notion of samurai firefighters brawling with sumo wrestlers. Life is so much stranger than fiction is allowed to be. If you put that scene in a historical novel, reading would likely regard it as ridiculous.

Having had our fun at the Museum of Fire we whiled away our last hours in Tokyo shopping and people-watching in the very crowded Harajuki district. Then it was back to the hotel, packing our bags and getting an early night.

The next day our flight was at 2:30pm, so we had a fairly leisurely check out and trip to the airport. This time the taxi fare didn’t appear to bankrupt us! 🙂

The long flights back, along with the three hour stop-over in Manila airport, were no more terrible than these things normally are. Multiple security checks at Manila were mildly annoying, but did pass the time a bit. For the rest of it Xavier and I ended up playing uno with a complete stranger who asked to join our game. Also, we did get a window seat for one flight which Xavier thoroughly enjoyed.

Finally we arrived back in Sydney and Dad drove us and our bulging bags back home.

This was our first overseas trip as a family. Overall I think it went great, with lots of variety in what we experienced and very little going wrong. I hope my posts about the trip have given you an idea of what our travelling has been like, and also I hope they have been entertaining as well. See you in the real world 🙂