We diverted off the extremely well beaten path to the fairly well beaten path to the island of Naoshima, famous for its yellow and black spotted pumpkin for a couple of days. We stayed on the quieter side with a severe lack of restaurants, made up for by art. We stuck to the outdoor / free / cheaper stuff, like the iconic yellow pumpkin which us adults managed to catch for the golden late afternoon light. We only had a short, generally quite polite line of a few people to wait for a pic.

On the other side of the island, near the main ferry point, is the black & red pumpkin that you can get inside of. Esti quite liked this one, and his extra perky bunny ears 🐰

The towns on the island have many beautiful old style Japanese houses and gardens, making it lovely to wander about aimlessly. (Just need to ignore the kids’ whining about how “boring” it all is)

And there’s random art / sculptures / cute stuff scattered about too of course:

We did pay for a bunch of exhibitions called the Art House Project, which was a bunch of old houses each converted by an artist. A couple of these you need to reserve in advance and one only takes one person at a time – so that was fully booked. You can try to read up online about these things, but obviously they don’t give much away generally, but the idea of sending the kids in by themselves to something that we don’t know what it actually is was not appealing anyway!

We did do the other reservation one (Kinza) and it was pretty cool. Only I had read up about it being something about light and dark. Spoiler alert!! You go as a group into a completely pitch black room by feel, no lights allowed, phones must be off and you must be silent. You sit for a while and then very slowly it lightens just a bit and you are directed to step forward to the light. While I don’t pretend to be an art person, it certainly generated a lot of conversations afterwards about what people were thinking in the dark! (Personally I was thinking how my local No Lights No Lycra organisers would have been so jealous of that complete darkness 😆)

The other houses you just wandered in, maybe a few minutes wait at most. They were random to say the least, so we didn’t even take photos in some. One was about numbers and clocks and there was a shallow pool of LED counters that counted down from 9 at different speeds. Another had a statue of liberty in the (two storey) house.

An honourable mention must go to to what was the most over-hyped one. We lined up for 20 minutes – which in Japan terms isn’t long but the only supermarket was closing at 4 and not open over the weekend so we had a deadline!! – and every group (two to four people) were given a torch and a two minute time limit! Very curious about this thing by the time our turn came… it was a tunnel with a glass staircase from some muddy water that led up to the temple above:

Needless to say that we easily made it out within the time limit.

Our second night here we had THE BEST FOOD we’ve had in Japan, which is a pretty high bar! Unfortunately we took zero pictures – obviously too busy eating. (nom nom nom) All I have is this picture of me attempting to treat the curry stain on Z’s arm as she reached across the table for something delicious. (which is really a very poor substitute for the AMAZING meal)

As we left, all ferries were delayed due to fog. I figured this sort of thing had to happen at some time during our trip but I did not expect it to be in Japan – but I guess even Japanese efficiency can’t control the weather! As luck would have it, we were leaving as a major art festival (Setouchi Triennale 2025) was just beginning and we got to experience the welcome: firstly some taiko drumming at the port.

I had tried to find a professional taiko show to see in Japan as Z had done taiko in primary school but they are very hard to find since COVID, but here we had one just appear in front of us! (not professional but they were quite good)

At the train station on the mainland, they were giving out welcome origami including spinning tops, there was a band, cool chalk art, a weird blue platypus (Ico-chan: the mascot for the local subway card ICOCA) and a bunch of cute little kids waving flags as a welcoming committee!

Thanks Art Island and a whole lot of luck for getting to experience some of this festival without the crowds 🙏