TV Japan recently started running a show called "Hometown Treasures," which might better be called "Small Town Oddities."
This week's episode profiled a little town in Hokkaido which had some kind of town-wide project in which they made musical instruments out of cardboard: slide whistles and pan flutes made out of cardboard tubes, a cello, some percussion instruments, and a couple didgeridoos. I don't know if the whole town was involved, but they sure had a representative cross-section of the population there in the grand finale of the profile, in which everyone joined in to play the most hesitant, whistle-y version of "When the Saints Go Marching in" that I've ever heard. I didn't catch the name of the town or else I'd have dug around for a link.
I started paying closer attention and got more details on the next town, Momoishi in Aomori Prefecture, which is distinguished by having a Statue of Liberty (they have other stuff too, even a theme song, but it was Lady Liberty that they featured on this show). Their story was how they were looking to erect a statue of a feminine deity and they weren't satisfied with any of the design proposals or with a Kannon image like in Takasaki. Then someone noticed that, hey, Momoishi is on the same latitude as New York City! So why not have a Statue of Liberty? The rest, as they say, is history and their park is graced with a 20.8 meter tall (including the pedestal) quarter-scale Statue of Liberty who is affectionately known to the townspeople as Momo-chan, which translates as "Peachy" if you're going phonetically or "Miss Hundred" if you go by the "momo" in Momoishi. The American werewolf of the town has written about the park. He's right about the manly features on Momo-chan. I think that the sculptor may have modeled his statue after a Japanese cartoon of the Statue of Liberty.
322 words | September 20, 2005 08:24 PM | Real true story