A Railway Museum and a Dazzling Light Show in Japan’s Alps

0

Myoko Happiness Illumination fills a ski slope with wondrous blinking LED lights and tech music.
Myoko Happiness Illumination fills a ski slope with wondrous blinking LED lights and tech music.

I’m walking down a hill looking at what I have 1.5 million LED lightbulbs all arranged and undulating to create dragons and incredible forms on the sides of a ski slope. It’s called Myoko Happiness Illumination, and in an ‘only in Japan’ kind of way, it was a thrill!

On the way up to the slope.
On the way up to the slope.

This is about the most Japanese thing I can think of–a combination of ancient history and techno music and the blinking LED lights.

You walk up a long long tunnel filled with lights and then you come across a couple of projectors. A timer counts down to a fantastic show bounced off the wall of water, samaurai swordsmen, dragons, and then another one bouncing off the side of the hotel.

Today was another day of extraordinary things in the north of Japan we took the Shinkansen, the country’s newest high-speed train shot us up here in about 200 miles an hour.

Railway Museum in Saitama.
Railway Museum in Saitama, Japan.

We also visited the railway museum in Saitama, a former locomotive factory that’s been turned into an extraordinary museum filled with railcars and locomotives. A highlight was a place where they projected videos of the view from the front of the view from the train and kids drove the trains, controlling the speed and blowing the whistles.