\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.moroha.net\/images\/obama_ramen_sm.jpg\" "\\"Obama")
\nThat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an advertisement for Obama Ramen. Unfortunately my timing was a bit off and the right edge is cut off by a telephone pole.<\/p>\n
Except for my quest to find an internet connection, the first few days here in Imazu were pretty uneventful. Usually we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re too jet-lagged to do much anyway, so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fine with us. Yesterday though, we took a trip to Fukui Prefecture with Ryoko\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s aunt and uncle.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve blogged a little about Fukui Prefecture before a few years ago, when we went to visit the nuclear power plant located on one of the many peninsulas there. Interestingly enough, that is right next to the city of Obama, which has gained some notoriety due to the name of the U.S. President. We didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go to Obama (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been there before though when my father came to meet Ryoko\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s parents. There isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t much to the city, to tell you the truth), but I did manage to take the following picture as we were driving through Tsuruga, a nearby town:
\n
\nThat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an advertisement for Obama Ramen. Unfortunately my timing was a bit off and the right edge is cut off by a telephone pole.<\/p>\n
The first place we went to was the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum. It turns out the only place where dinosaur fossils have been found in Japan are in Fukui Prefecture, and to commemorate it the prefecture has built what I can only call a truly, truly excellent museum. I like to go to natural history museums anywhere I go, and this is one of the best I have ever seen. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s built inside of a giant metallic sphere, which makes the museum easy to spot from several miles away, and makes for a really impressive ceiling once you get into the main body of the museum.
\n
\nRyoko took a lot of pictures of the museum, but the inside is somewhat dark and flash photography was forbidden, so all the pictures there look like crap. So I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll try and describe what made it such an excellent museum.<\/p>\n
First of all, if you go to a dinosaur museum, you want to see lots of dinosaur skeletons. Well, they are there a plenty. All the famous ones like T. Rex, Brontosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, etc. One of the big attractions was several full-size dinosaur facsimiles with skin, eyes, etc. that were animatronic! There were 3 velociraptors attacking a medium-size dinosaur. There were speakers inside too so that they also roared as they moved around. Eren (she turns 3 in September) was absolutely terrified. I had to pretty much run through the exhibit with her to go see the rest of the exhibits.<\/p>\n
Also all the exhibits had very detailed explanations and didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdumb down\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 the science at all. This would have been problematic for me since \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdumbed down\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 science would be much easier for me to read in Japanese, but almost every exhibit had English right next to the Japanese. 100% of everything wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t translated into English, but probably at least half of everything was, and it was excellent scientific English, none of this \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcEngrish\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 that is all too familiar to Westerners in Japan.<\/p>\n
For me the most interesting part was that the special exhibit, as many museums have special exhibits that change every few months. The theme of the special exhibit was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Did Dinosaurs See Flowers?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, and was about the evolution of flowering plants as compared to the dinosaurs, mammals, and insects. What made it so excellent was that there was a graduate student on hand that would answer questions about the exhibits. We spoke in Japanese for Ryoko\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sake, but he had excellent English and could immediately give me the English terms for difficult vocabulary that I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know in Japanese (i.e. the names of the geological epochs, the various biological classifications, etc.).
\nAside: I would have been lost without his help, since some of the Japanese technical terms are very non-obvious to a Westerner. The names of the dinosaurs are fairly easy, since they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just the English names pronounced in Japanese. The epochs though, are strange. Triassic is \u00e4\u00b8\u2030\u00e7\u2022\u00b3\u00e7\u00b4\u20ac, which translates to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthree tatami period\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 (tatami are the woven grass mats that floors are made of in Japanese homes, although the character can also be used as a measurement of area, where 1 jou equals the area of one tatami mat, about 3 feet by 6 feet). I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not really sure where that translation came from. The 3 is obvious with the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctri\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in Triassic, but I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know Latin to guess the meaning of the suffix, and I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have internet access to look it up. Jurassic is a little easier in that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just \u00e3\u201a\u00b8\u00e3\u0192\u00a5\u00e3\u0192\u00a9\u00e7\u00b4\u20ac, or the Jura Period. Cretaceous is again strange, being \u00e7\u2122\u00bd\u00e4\u00ba\u0153\u00e7\u00b4\u20ac, which means \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcchalk period\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 in Japanese. I would guess that creta means chalk or something similar in Latin and that there is some good reason why the geological period is named after chalk (lots of chalky mineral deposits associated with that period, perhaps), but since such things are not generally known, it means that these words do not have obvious translations that you can guess by just looking at them.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I talked to the grad student for almost an hour, asking him about all sorts of things that have always bothered me a bit about dinosaurs. How were dinosaurs able to get so big when there aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t\/weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t equivalently-sized land animals in other periods? Were dinosaurs slow, lumbering behemoths, or were they quick and agile like we saw in Jurassic Park? About the size of dinosaurs, the grad student told me that a lot of the paleontological community views it as a silly question. He pointed out that first of all, the dinosaurs did exist and flourish for millions of years at their size. So the questions of how they were able to stand, walk around, etc. are pretty silly because they obviously did. Now as to why there aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t any animals of that size today, he pointed out that even the biggest dinosaurs, like the brontosaurus, supersaurus, diplodocus, etc. weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that much larger than the current largest land animal, the African Elephant. In a way, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right. The brontosaurs have their extremely long necks and tails, but the actual main body of the dinosaur is maybe only 50% larger than an elephant\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s body.<\/p>\n
So the museum was great. I would have liked to have spent several more hours reading all the exhibits, but the girls were tired and getting restless. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re ever in Japan and go over to Fukui prefecture (no one goes to Fukui prefecture, everyone goes to Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka), this museum is great. I would have loved to have my brothers and parents there, they would have all loved it too.
\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.moroha.net\/images\/karisa_eren_petting_dinosaur.jpg\" "\\"karisa")
\nThis is Karisa and Eren at one of the children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s exhibits, where they have a robotic baby dinosaur that you can play with. I was really impressed with its programming, it would react to being petted by cooing and wagging its tail, when you picked it up and held it it would fall asleep, and it would avoid bumping into walls when it walked around.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.moroha.net\/images\/tall_dinosaur.jpg\" "\\"tall")
\nThis is one of the full-size dinosaurs. That tree is 50\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 high!<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.moroha.net\/images\/dinosaur_museum.jpg\" "\\"dinosaur")
\nWith the poor lighting it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a very good picture, but when I tell you it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a circular dome, from the curvature of the wall you can get an idea of the size of the place and the impressive unsupported ceiling. Also if you stood in the right place you could easily hear a conversation at the other end of the hall, and whenever you spoke you would hear your own voice echoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Except for my quest to find an internet connection, the first few days here in Imazu were pretty uneventful. Usually we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re too jet-lagged to do much anyway, so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fine with us. Yesterday though, we took a trip to Fukui … Continue reading