A Quick virtual tour

Double twins at the Tajimi International Exchange Association party, 2017.

Click me for a virtual mini-tour

Industry and nature. In many ways, those two words summarize our image of Tajimi. While the two forces may seem to be in conflict, here, in a strange way, they seem to co-exist in harmony.    

An old lady in an old photograph, packaging china. Since ancient times, the clay in the mountains surrounding Tajimi has provided excellent raw material for pottery, and the kilns, in turn, has served the traders in the centre of the city with goods that were sold with great success all around the country.  

tajimi - a town full of secret worlds

Tajimi is a not too small, not too big town in Gifu Prefecture, in the centre of Japan's main island, Honshu. When you step out of the station after half an hour's train ride from the metropolis Nagoya on the East coast, what you see doesn't seem too different from many other towns in the Japanese countryside. You might even say it looks quite dull.

However, if you take the time to explore, you'll find one treasure after the other. I have been given the task by the Tajimi Tourist Association to present the city to you from the perspective of a foreign resident - quite an unusual thing to do for a Japanese company. What I have found after my first couple of years living here, is that there are hidden treasures everywhere, but you need to know where to look for them. That's where this site will help. You step into a plain looking old building, and suddenly you find yourself in a spaghetti house with a typical post war interior serving old-style Showa-style spaghetti dishes.

Take a short trip up in the hills, and all of you sudden you stand in front of a beautiful, massive Zen temple, surrounded by ponds in a serene garden. No hoards of tourists ruin the impression here. Climb another hill nearby, and enter a pottery workshop - pottery is the pride of Tajimi. A bit further down the road you, in the forest on the left side of the road, you will an old kiln, hiding in the greenery. Pottery has been produced in kilns like that for a thousand years in these hills.

It is these surprises that makes the town and its surrounding areas so much fun to explore. One really cannot find all these great places without guidance, and that is why we put together this site. Here, you have the super power to jump kilometers in an instant. With the help of VR, you can teleport yourself around the city and its surroundings to experience interesting places and people, from the comfort of your living room. These experiences are sprinkled around the site, in the feature articles, or on pages like this one. If you haven't done so yet, take a mini-tour by clicking the button at the top of the page. 

Happy teleporting!

Hans Karlsson
​Site Author