Japan 2025 Photos Part 6 - Aomori road trip

The second day in Aomori was our road trip day. I haven't driven in Japan before and wanted to give it a shot, but also there was a shrine about 35 miles into the Japanese countryside that I really wanted to experience; The Takayama Inari Shrine.

So we picked up our rental car and headed out onto the road. Starting from the center of Aomori city, through the busy business and retail part of town, onto the highway where we saw piles of snow still on the ground and into the countryside where we would eventually be surrounded by empty rice fields.

After a brief stop at Family Mart and tourist gawking at how rural of an area we were actually in (granted, how rural is it really if we're less than 35 miles from the city center...) we arrived at Takayama Inari Shrine. Like other Inari shrines Takayama features a tunnel of Tori gates that pilgrims walk through in order to get to the top of the shrine. The snake of gates being a stunning view both from way above and while making our way up the curvy hill.

Unfortunately while spring was arriving in Tokyo and much of the middle of the country Aomori was far enough North that early April everything is still mostly dead. So while the shrine and pathway of gates was beautiful... the sight was limited by the still dead trees and plants that are supposed to accentuate the beauty of the shrine were still dead and weeks away from bloom.

But the Shrine was still beautiful, the drive was still an adventure, and if we ever find ourselves in this part of the country again in a better season we have an excuse to return to the shrine and maybe even explore more of this part of Aomori prefecture. But, we jumped back into the car and were on to our next destination: Aquarium Asamushi.

The well designed and kept aquarium had a lot of staples that Americans would normally see including Penguins and Dolphins but there was an emphases on sea life from the local Mutsu Bay as well. It turned into a nice calm treat to end our first drive in Japan. Since we were going on a weekday and arrived late in the afternoon the Aquarium wasn't crowded and we ended up having large exhibit sections almost completely to ourselves.