Not far from my place is an incredible toy museum. It specialises in tin toys, automata (animated toys) and German wooden toys - especially nutcrackers. It seems strange that Arima, a famous onsen town, would be home to these beautiful little objects... but seeing as I'm only a few kilometres away, I'm not complaining!

This exhibit shows the process of making the body of a tin robot. It's surprisingly involved and makes the sometimes exorbitant price of even new tin toys understandable. Then there's also the antique value added if it's an old piece. I've seen a little Japanese fighter plane in a store (I'd guess from the 50's) for over 200,000 yen - that's over $2300 Aussie dollars.

Here's an amazing old battleship. Seems cute, but seeing it reminds me of my Dad's memory of coming over to Australia on a ship as a little boy, with lights out at night to avoid the attention of Japanese warships. Why do violent things make such cool toys!?

This is an example of automata. They involve winding a handle to make a scene come to life - often with humorous results. This one isn't funny, just quirky - sometimes it's just the uncanniness of the action that captures your attention. I want to try and get into making these things.

Here's a beautiful nutcracker from Germany, complete with nut in open jaw! Sorry if that's obvious, it took me a while to notice it.

Okay, maybe I'm going a bit overboard with the manhole covers, but just suffer one more... this one was on the walk to Arima. I was interested because it has Koshien Stadium on it (the one where the high school baseball was held) - showing that I'd crossed into Nishinomiya City. I live right near the boundary between it and Kobe City. Anyway, nothing earth shattering, but it was news to me as I made my way to Arima. I tried to bike it there, but was defeated by a whopping big hill, so I opted to park the wheels and continue on foot.

Once in Arima I saw this little scene and really liked it for some reason. I think maybe it's the letters and the bike. There are heaps of really cool old bikes like this here - it makes me want to learn to ride one. You'd expect to see all the whiz-bang modern Japanese bikes, but they seem quite rare... maybe because of the price, but I suspect the older style is more popular anyway. Now we're closer to the part of Arima that the tourist buses come to. It's nestled among steep, heavily wooded mountains. They make for nice scenery, but are a bit of a pain to walk around for too long! Lots of sloping paths and flights of stairs.

Did I mention that there are mountains and trees?

There was a kid practicing pitching his baseball against the stone wall just to the right of this shot. Nice little scene.. it seemed really natural but also incongruous at the same time, if that makes sense. I wonder how old this place is?

Not happy, Jan!

I'll leave you with this and to ponder why I would have taken this photo... (chortle)