After I made sure I was fairly drugged up on cold medicine, I left the hostel in search of a historic open air museum that Takayama is famous for... but I got sidetracked. I'm still not completely sure if it was fate or not, but as I ascended a hill in the direction of the museum, a sign caught my eye:
A teddy bear / eco consciousness museum. Not entirely sure how those two vastly different categories could be possibly combined in a museum setting, I decided to pay the five hundred or so yen to give it a quick look-through. And so began the weirdest half hour of my life. Once inside, I turned the corner and...
OH GOD BEARS. Everywhere I looked, there were little sets of beady eyes staring back at me. There was even a bear wedding scene, as can be seen in the photo below. "Now wait Ben," you might say. "These bears are sort of cute." That's what I thought at first too, and the first bit of the museum was fairly interesting, to be honest.
There were displays of teddy bears throughout the decades, with some from the early 1900s that I was particularly fond of.
It was here that the eco bit was tied in, with a small section of the museum dedicated to Smokey the Bear.
But then I reached the baker bears display:
These photos don't really catch the essence of the scene playing before me, so I took a video. Slowly rolling that dough...
I would like to point out that I was completely alone in this museum, which made it even more eerie. A also encountered some very relaxed polar bears:
Michael Jackson Bear:
French Pinup Girl Bear:
As well as a huge patchwork bear that filled the entire room:
The last few displays were sort of cute...:
... but the damage had already been done, and I left the museum quite bewildered, unsure of what I had just witnessed.
