BBQ at Showa Memorial Park

In order to reach the location of KCP’s school excursion for this semester, I had to ride the hour train to Shinjuku, then a full hour further west, past Mitaka (home of the Ghibli Musuem) and to Nishi-Tachikawa station. I arrived 15 minutes late, didn’t think to ask one of the teachers where the classes specifically were gathered, and proceeded to wander around the gigantic park blindly for about half an hour.

I finally arrived, forty-five minutes late, to the “BBQ Garden”, where all the classes were assembled around their respective grills. I found my class, explained why I was late to about everyone in my class individually, and proceeded to not take part in the cooking of food whatsoever.

I’m not afraid of cooking at all, but I’m way over my head when it comes to cooking Korean food. First off, I don’t know the first thing about it. The second thing is that the average Korean male seems to know a whole lot more about cooking than the average college student in America. In my dorm last year, you would be considered “the guy who knows how to cook” if you could scramble an egg without getting shell in it. During the discussions in class the previous few days, and during the actual cooking process, the Koreans were all passionately involved in the cooking process. Arguing about the heat of the grill, carefully choosing the right proportions of vegetables and meat, passionately debating the value of one mushroom over another. I decided to look busy by taking pictures, and nobody ever asked for my help. A win-win.

As for the food itself, it was great. When one of the cooks finished a batch, they would put it on the tarp and everyone would pick at it for about a minute before it was all gone.

It was also a chance to talk to a lot of my former classmates and teachers. It was a pretty fun time all in all, until I decided to take up one of the Koreans’ challenge to eat a very spicy pepper, which proceeded to wreak havoc on my insides for the rest of the day.

Being a park, there were lots of things to do. I found a basketball court and hung around it for a while, waited for the current game to get over, and then proceeded to play for about 2.3 minutes before we were called back to the grill. Here’s a picture of me watching the game, with my “someone set a screen” face.

After the food, we were split up by level and did some activities. Level 4 had a dodgeball tournament. It was different from American dodgeball, in that there were two squares next to each other, with the teams in the center. Five people from each team were lined up around the opposite team’s square. There was only one ball, but other than that it was like normal dodgeball. The first few games were not going to make it on ESPN Classic any time soon. No intensity whatsoever. It was almost frustrating. Then it was our team’s turn. Because the only penalty for getting out was that you had to go around the perimeter of the other team’s square, but could still play, I decided just to try and catch every ball. And because the ball that they used can best be described as “floppy”, it was pretty easy. With some minor strategizing, like standing on one side of the square with the ball so everyone hid in the corner and then tossing it to a teammate closer to the bunch, it was pretty easy. We wound up winning the tournament pretty easily.

Were I in America, I would probably be in the lower half of talent. But here, everyone kept going up to me and telling me how awesome I am at dodgeball, and that I must do a ton of sports. I wound up winning MVP of our team. The whole thing is actually really silly, but fun in an ego stroking way.

After the day was over, and most of my classmates went to do their favorite national pastime (drinking party), Encaron, Sehan, Li and myself (man their names look weird in roman letters) went to a Japanese garden that was inside the park. The park was so huge, I’m surprised there wasn’t a zeppelin parking lot tucked in somewhere.

It was magic hour (the time before sunset, when the direction of the light makes the colors look better) so I tried to get some photographs. There were a ton of things to take pictures of. I’m normally a person who tries to find the one, best angle and take the best possible picture, but I was torn between a ton of different places. I kept walking about 10 steps and thinking “whoa! that’s even better!” As a result, I got a few pictures that I’m pretty proud of. As always, check flickr for a larger batch of them.

Kawaguchiko

You may remember my hijinks a while back when Trisna and I attempted to go see Mt. Fuji and the weather did everything in its power to prevent us from enjoying it. I decided to try it again, because I still have exactly zero pictures of Mt. Fuji. I decided last Friday that I would go on the next day if the weather was good. On Saturday morning, I looked out and the weather looked great. Not a cloud in the sky. So I took the train over to Tokyo station, and then got on a bus to Kawaguchiko (one of the five famous lakes north of Mt. Fuji). As I was on the bus, I took a good hard look at the sky and realized that instead of being clear, it was actually completely overcast. Not sure how you screw that up (future tip: look for shadows), but I did. I wasn’t completely disappointed, because it looked to be breaking up a bit, and perhaps it would be all the way clear by sunset.

It took about 3 hours in total to get there, which really doesn’t seem that long anymore after my 18 hour trip from Hiroshima to Tokyo. Having an iPod helped. When I arrived at Kawaguchiko station, I just figured that I would kill some time until the afternoon and then start looking for pictures.

First I stopped for lunch. I should say I was stopped for lunch, because I was flagged down by someone representing a nearby restaurant/museum. Of course she started the exchange by reciting a memorized greeting and showing me a poorly designed menu written in English. I don’t know why Japanese are unable to write in English and understand basic design principles at the same time, but it seems like you can have one or the other over here. I wound up eating there anyway since I’m a sucker and the food didn’t look too bad.

At first I politely answered in English to all their questions. There’s certainly an impulse to want to say some really complex sentence at the beginning as sort of a way to say “okay, stop it. I can speak Japanese.” but I resisted initially. Eventually it got kind of frustrating and I broke the ice. After ordering and some light banter, some employees literally gathered around my table and asked me questions. See, this is the main difference between Tokyo and every other place in Japan. In Tokyo, gaijin are such old news. Although most Tokyoites I’ve talked to seemed genuinely curious when they had the opportunity to talk to me privately, in public they adopt the facade of unaffectedness. But here in the country, even in a touristy place like the foot of Mt. Fuji, the opportunity to talk to a gaijin seems exciting. It’s kind of nice when people seem excited to talk to you.

I got some suggestions of other things to do around Kawaguchiko aside from look at Mt. Fuji, because I certainly wasn’t going to be able to do that for a while. I stuffed my pocket with pamphlets and went on my way.

I passed some time by going to a museum which featured a bunch of photographs of Mt. Fuji. I was trying to notice some compositional trends between the way people photographed the mountain. I noticed that a lot of people saw fit to place the mountain centered on the X axis. That’s typically a compositional no-no unless you have good reason, and I did notice that the ones that had it off-center looked the most impressive. Most of the photos were good, but they weren’t my style. My style is… well, you’ll see when I take a picture, if I ever do.

After that, I also went to a museum devoted to automatic music machines… Yeah. It was very cool, in all honesty, and there was even a string quartet that gave a short concert, but the novelty wore off pretty quickly. After both museums, I was back outside, it was about 2:00 and the weather had not improved. In fact, it was looking a little worse.

Determined to get something accomplished during this trip, I decided to just walk around the entire lake. It’s a pretty big lake you see, and it took about an hour just to get to the furthest point, where it began to rain.

I stubbornly kept going, determined to finish the complete circle. No I didn’t have an umbrella. That’s silly. All the while, I looked in the direction that Fuji should have been. On a normal day, it would have looked like this. On this day, it looked like this.

After about a full hour of rain walking, I arrived back in the area around the station. The rain stopped just as I approached town and I decided to get dinner. I passed the restaurant I ate lunch at and the flagger-downer saw me and we discussed the ups and downs of the previous six hours. As it turned out, eating dinner at that restaurant seemed like a really good idea, so I did. They gave me a towel and allowed me to stand next to their heater and everything.

So, yes, I am now on strike two for my Fuji trips. There was something redeeming about this most recent trip though, and it’s not just me stubbornly trying to imagine value out of something because I spent time and money on it. I know one thing, I’m not leaving this country before I get one picture of Mt. Fuji that I’m really proud of, so I’ll keep coming back until I do it right.

Approaching

I usually try to tie together my posts with some sort of central theme, but I’m going to throw that out the window because I’ve got some disconnected things to cover.

Although I worried a fair deal about the oral exam, it went better than I could have hoped. The teacher basically asked a bunch of questions that I happened to have interesting responses to (what I did during summer vacation, my job, how I studied before coming), and the time passed before I knew it.

But while I have moments like this where I can flow like a veteran, I have other moments where I can nary put together a sentence without looking like I studied from a survival phrases book. Like today in class, which is a bad thing because we’ve got another oral exam tomorrow. I don’t think this one is weighted as much as the one I already took, though.

I also said my goodbyes to a number of the Americans who took their final exam today. Most are leaving tomorrow, including my next door neighbor Stephen and Matt Wujak two doors down. I don’t see the Americans much on a weekly basis, but I’ll likely discover how much I owed my sanity to them in the coming weeks. So it goes, I guess.

I’ve got about two and a half weeks left in this dormitory room until it’s time to squeeze all my stuff back into my suitcase and head over to my homestay. For those family members on pins and needles to know more details about this, I got a bulleted list of information from Michiko-san today as well as two letters from the family.

The Tanabe is a family of 4, with two daughters, one six years old and one who was born in January of this year. The husband works for “a company” and the wife is a nurse who is currently on maternity leave. One thing that I heard from an American who had a bad experience in the homestay was that the family often forced her to spend time with the kids without any regard for her need to do homework. I doubt this would be a problem for various reasons, but if you crave something to worry about, there you go.

One thing I was thinking about is how to squeeze everything into a day. Before coming to Japan, I imagined this situation, where I have a school that demands a lot of attention, a job that would like me to work as much as possible, and a homestay that I’d imagine would like to spend some time with me as well. I also want to spend some time by myself as well. What will likely happen is that I’ll have to wake up earlier than I do currently in order to accommodate the 45 minute commute time. After school gets out at 12:15, I would have lunch and go straight to work and work for my maximum 4 hours. That would put me at about 5:00, where I could get home before 6:00. They say they eat dinner around 6-7, so that’s what I’m trying to aim for. The wild card is how many special classes I want to sign up for. I’ve had a ton of fun in both special classes (calligraphy and intermediate kanji) and there’s a part of me that wants to do a special class every day of the week next semester. The problem with that is that I would then get out of school at 1:15, which would mean I could only work for about three and a half hours before having to go home. I might decide that this is fine. I might decide to start working on Thursdays to compensate. I might not decide to do special classes every day.

It’s hard to anticipate how the homestay would actually be. What I can do is paraphrase the letters I received, which were both very nice and written on stationary (Japanese love stationary.) The letter from the wife (Rina) says that their family is looking forward to having me, they want to eat and go out together, and want me to teach them some stuff about America. She also included a letter written in (very good) English. All in all, they seem so excited to have me that I’m almost worried about disappointing them.

In addition, there was a letter from the six year old daughter, that was quite frankly very cute.

She also included a separate letter written in English. According to the “stat sheet” that I got from Michiko-san, the daughter (Serin) is interested in English. So I’m sure there will be a fair amount of pro bono English teaching, but luckily I’m not a grumpy person who doesn’t mind doing that sort of thing.

Beyond that, it’s all speculation. Like everything KCP does, it’s likely to be very good. I feel like the bad experience I heard was more of a fluke, and to be fair, I only heard one side of the story. I have a good feeling about the homestay, and am sort of looking forward to somebody caring when I get back to my room.

One trade off I’m making by doing a homestay (which my boss Peter swears that I’ll regret) is that I won’t have as much time to do whatever I want at the spur of the moment. That’s probably true, but as intrepid as I would like to be perceived, and as exciting as it would make this blog, I haven’t been taking as much advantage of that freedom as I could be.

One thing I did do was head over to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building in downtown Shinjuku, where the rumor was that there is a free observatory on the 45th floor. It was a decently clear day, as there had been a downpour the previous day, so I decided to make the trek. As it turned out, there was indeed a free observatory, and it was indeed very cool. Because my panorama from the top of Mt. Misan in Miyajima turned out nice, I decided to try something similar here. Although it wasn’t a panorama; the picture is actually square shaped. But it’s stitched from 20 separate pictures. The final image is 11963 x 10013 pixels, or almost 120 megapixels. Click on the picture below to be taken to the full size image, and sorry if it kills your computer.

Hiroshima, Miyajima

Let’s address the elephant in the room right away. Hiroshima is not famous because of its okonomiyaki. You’ve heard about it because it became the first victim of nuclear warfare on August 6, 1945. Did I mention that it was my country that dropped the bomb?

A number of people talked to me before summer vacation and asked me my plans. When I said the word Hiroshima, their eyes widened a little bit. Encaron looked at me as if I had just told him I was going to rob a bank. Tanaka-san asked why I would want to go there, somewhat suspiciously. I’m not completely sure of the reason myself. I just thought it was important.

The museum didn’t open until 8:30, so we wandered around the city until that time. The most striking thing about the city was how much it looked like every other city I’d been to. I don’t know what I should have expected, but I expected to see something. We meandered through the grounds housing Hiroshima castle and found a rectangle of bricks that was once a military building. On that Wednesday morning, with nobody around, it looked almost hidden. Just a rectangle of bricks and nothing more.

As we got nearer to the peace park, and nearer to the center of the city, a familiar feeling returned. Being a tall, white, blond foreigner in Japan, you get stared at. It wasn’t like the country in China, where they would stare straight at you, not breaking away when you met their eyes. Here they did it politely, discreetly. Just scanning an oncoming crowd you could watch the direction of the eyes shift the second you looked at them. I had gotten somewhat immune to it after two months in Tokyo, but it was back. Perhaps due in part to my own self-conciousness, knowing full well the question that those people were asking themselves, no matter how far back in their minds.

You don’t need a sign to tell you when you’ve reached the park. At the far edge is the A-Bomb Dome, a skeletal building that has been preserved to look like it did immediately after the bomb. At one time, it was one of the few standing structures in a field of rubble. Now it is dwarfed by skyscrapers, and passed by commuters. Even here, tourists take pictures of themselves in front of it, flashing smiles at flashing cameras.

There are many more memorials around the park. A large reflecting pond housing a flame that will burn until there are no more nuclear weapons. A stone arch covers a cenotaph with all the names of those killed by the bomb. The tone of the park is not all somber, though. Nearby, people line up to ring the peace bell. People from all over the world donate paper cranes in remembrance of Sadako Sasaki. It is called the Hiroshima Peace Memorial for a reason, and not the Hiroshima Grudge Memorial. World peace is a concept that is so easily caricatured. On a bumper sticker or out of the mouth of a beauty pageant contestant, it seems like a laughable, abstract ideal. Here, it feels urgent.

We entered the museum the moment the doors opened. Tickets only cost 50 yen. The first section traced the history of Hiroshima before the war, the actions of Japan that led to war, the development process of the bomb, and American justification for dropping the bomb. If you’re wondering about objectivity, I was amazed by the fairness. It struck a balance somewhere between complete acceptance as instigators in the war and Hiroshima as a star-crossed tragic Shakespearian character, being led along the tide of time, reacting rationally in the present, but still meeting ultimate destruction as a result of the actions of a higher level. After the second section, which explored in more detail than anybody could want the aftermath of the bomb, there was a sign reminding visitors that though many Japanese suffered from the dropping of the bomb, the Japanese military caused deplorable acts as well that deserve memorials built to them.

It’s easy for a conversation about Hiroshima degrade into a political argument about America’s justification for dropping the bomb. If convincing yourself that it needed to be dropped offers you some closure, then so be it. But anger at the United States is not a prerequisite to go to the park and empathize with some humans who attempted to live their lives, enjoy their friends and family, had hopes and dreams just like you. It’s not about who to blame, so much as it is about experiencing the scale of modern warfare, and being able to employ something other than cold rationality when evaluating the actions of the past. I’m perfectly fine if you come to the conclusion that everything was justified in the long run, but at least attempt to objectively view the situation instead of hiding behind a defense of total war apologetics.

Hiroshima is a place to go and think about something that deserves to be thought about. Resist the urge to come to a conclusion immediately. When I came back from the trip, someone asked if I had fun in Hiroshima. No, I didn’t have fun at all. But there are many reasons to go places that are more compelling than to just have fun.

***

After eating at the same okonomiyaki restaurant, where I had, and enjoyed, cheese okonomiyaki, we headed toward Miyajima. As long as I have known about Japan, there has been one sight that struck me as a perfect symbol of everything great about Japanese aesthetics: the floating Torii at Miyajima.

On their own, torii gates are impossible to get tired of. When they’re in the middle of a bay, maybe at sunset, and huge… they’re awesome. Without knowing where it was, I knew about the floating gate in Japan long ago and had always wanted to go there.

You get to Miyajima by a ferry operated by JR. We could theoretically ride on it for free with the Seishun 18 ticket, which is why I wanted to arrive at Hiroshima early enough that we could include it in our day, but we would have missed the sunset if we went the day before. It was about 2:00 when we finally crossed the water toward the big, green island and the floating torii gate came into view.

The island was pretty busy, and the deer were out in full force. It isn’t as if deer are incredibly popular everywhere, but we just happened to go to two of the most famous deer spots in Japan on consecutive days. We hung around the area of the floating gate for a while. It was high tide and I had to get my pictures in.

As Trisna and I walked toward the second main attraction on the island, a shrine that also appeared to be floating because it was built directly above the water, we heard somebody talking to us, looking for a trashcan. He had a French accent, seemed to be in his late 20s, and was just a really friendly guy. We talked a bit and went through the shrine together.

It turns out that his name is Guillaume (pronounced a lot easier than it’s spelled), and he was from Canada. He had done a ton of traveling all over the world with the strategy of going wherever he feels like and then finding someplace to sleep wherever he ends up. Way too many things for me to worry about, but it seems awesome in its way.

Since I wanted to stay until sunset to get pictures of the shrine, we had a great deal of time to kill. Lucky for us, there was a hiking trail up to the highest part of the island. Guillaume must have decided that he liked us, because he accepted our invitation to come along. The first part of the path was much like Enoshima, with many shrines alongside of a very wide staircase. But soon things started to get a little more rugged, and started to feel much more like the familiar feeling of hiking.

It took quite a while before there was any payoff, but after about an hour we could start to see some really great views. The island is ridiculously green and bushy from the outside, and it was every bit as lush from the inside out. The entire time, we only passed Americans or Europeans. I guess Japanese don’t hike too much. I think about two hours had passed before we reached the very top. We joked about how likely it was that there was somehow going to be a vending machine at the top, and there actually was. We then headed to the very top observation platform, and the view was, well… I stitched together about 8 pictures to create this panorama image posted below. Click on it to be taken to a high quality size and be able to appreciate it. The city of Hiroshima can be seen on the far left.

We headed back down after dwelling for a while, found a free bus that saved us about 10 minutes, and were soon back at the bay. By now, it was low tide and you could walk up to the gate if you wanted to. We joined the masses who were taking pictures all along the base of the gate. Up close, you could appreciate how it organic the shape of the gate was. It didn’t look like a cheap reproduction, but it was made from giant trees and painted a very vivid shade of orange that was somehow not kitschy. The sun began to decline, Guillaume started talking to another French-speaking couple, and I decided to stake out a spot for prime picture taking. It took a lot of waiting, but I finally got the shot I wanted.

Soon it was completely dark and we decided to get going. Guillaume hadn’t planned to spend as much time at Miyajima as he did, but he said he was glad to have met us because he had more fun than he would have just wandering around alone. He wound up staying at the hostel we were staying at for the night, and I didn’t get a chance to say good bye because it would be inhuman to wake someone else up at the time we decided to leave the hostel in the morning.

I spent a total of 17 hours on local trains that day, all the way from Hiroshima to Tokyo. At one point I was ready to cave and buy a ticket for the Shinkansen, but the over 10,000 yen price tag was slightly prohibitive. After that, I felt absolutely no shame in laying around the dorm for the remainder of the summer break. I went to work and did homework, of course, but this was a pretty draining trip emotionally and physically. In retrospect, everything worked out perfectly. There were no issues with our hostels, the weather was perfect every day, and it wound up being good that we got to Hiroshima late on Tuesday, or else we never would have met Guillaume and he never would have met us. I guess someone figured they owed us a good trip after the ill-fated Fuji-Yoshida attempt. I was able to check off quite a few things on my list during these few days. And I still have one more day left on my Seishun 18 ticket…

Nara, Himeji

It was a given that I would have to take advantage of this summer vacation somehow. A total of 9 days free, 4 days left on my Seishun 18 ticket, and an entire country to carve my way through. It was a priority to carve a gash as far down the island as I could. In order to take advantage of the Seishun 18 ticket, which allows you to travel as much as you want in not-necessarily-consecutive days, you need to have designated travel days where you can really get your money’s worth. Ideally, the final destination would be about as far away from Tokyo as possible, while still being close enough to return in one day on the trains.

One thing about the Seishun 18 ticket: yes, you can use as many trains as you want in a day, but only the local trains that stop at every station and the next faster one that maybe shaves 5 minutes off an hour trip. So, while you could travel from Tokyo to the furthest tip in four hours by using Shinkansen or faster trains, it takes a lot longer to get anywhere the local train way…as you will see.

I found out that Trisna wanted to go on a similar trip, so we just decided to go over together and then separate on the trip back. The plan was this: leave really early on Sunday, head over to Nara. We would stay overnight at Nara and then leave in the early afternoon and head over to Hiroshima on Monday. We would stop off at Himeji castle on the way. We’d spend one full day in Hiroshima, and visit Miyajima island. I would head all the way back on Wednesday while Trisna stopped over in Kyoto. I made the hostel reservations and meticulously planned out the stations and transfers we would have to take, with a general estimation of how long it would take.

On the day of, I got up at 4:45 in order to catch the first subway train to hit Nishi-Waseda and aimed to arrive at Tokyo station around 5:30. I had to run to reach the closing doors at the subway station, but I made it. Things went smoothly all the way to Tokyo until I realized that I had remembered to bring socks, but forgotten to bring my Seishun 18 ticket. Doh. I reached Tokyo station anyway to consult with Trisna about the options, determined there really was only one, and I was on the next train back to my dorm. Train rides take longer when you’re hating yourself.

We finally left at 8:00. Tokyo station to Atami (1:40), Atami to Shizuoka (1:15). We ate lunch at Shizuoka. Shizuoka to Hamamatsu (1:15), Hamamatsu to Ogaki (1:50), Ogaki to Maibara (:35), Maibara to Kyoto (:55), and then Kyoto to Nara (:50).

We arrived at Nara around 6:00 and quickly found the hostel. It was called Nara Ugaya Guesthouse, and had a pretty nice atmosphere. The guy working there was pretty nice to us, was patient with the less-than-stealler language skills and recommended us to a good Ramen restaurant. There was a map on the wall with the hometowns of everyone who had stayed at that hostel. I put one very lonely pin in the area of Nampa, Idaho. After dropping off the bags we had been lugging around since the morning, we headed to the aforementioned Ramen restaurant.

We followed the instructions exactly, and it led us to a place like this. Some may look at this and think “dodgy,” but in my experience the best food to be found are in these creepily out-of-the-way places. A lot of bad food, too, but you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The restaurant looked like a place that probably wouldn’t have passed health inspections in America, but there was a healthy crowd there despite the late time we arrived. I asked what the spiciest thing they had on the menu was, and they named two options, one of which was Kim Chi Ramen. I ordered the other one. While waiting for our food, we talked a bit to the waitress, who seemed surprised that I could speak and seemed to think that Trisna was Japanese. It was an ongoing theme through the trip. People would always address Trisna first and then be surprised when she responded with less than fluent Japanese. I personally like my own situation where if I can formulate a “sumimasen” they seem impressed.

When the food was delivered to us, I was a little unsettled that she gave me the Kim Chi Ramen. I didn’t care enough to have them change it because it took like 10 minutes to make and it looked good regardless. I guess all the talk about Kim Chi tasting like feet is just bad press, because it was really good. Of all the Ramen places I’ve been to here, it was the best I’d had so far.

A couple sitting next to us eventually started talking as well. They asked where we came from, where we were going. They recommended that if we went to Hiroshima, we should order the okonomiyaki. Oh great, just what I wanted to hear. But wait! Hiroshima okonomiyaki is different from normal okonomiyaki, and generally regarded as the best in Japan. So, okay, we would have to go at least once.

After dinner, we attempted to get as much sightseeing as we could during the night. We wanted to go to Miyajima island, which is about 40 minutes from Hiroshima, before dark the next day, so the less time we had to spend in Nara in the morning, the better.

We started going from place to place, based on a map that Trisna received from a travel information booth. It was very nice weather — none of the humidity of Tokyo and a very light breeze. There weren’t many tourists out, so it was nice. By the end of the night, we had actually seen about 70% of what we wanted to see total. I did some more long exposure photography with varying degrees of success. My favorite shot was this one of a gazebo on a pond that I didn’t digitally retouch at all.

We headed back at about 10:30, because we wanted to leave the hostel at 5:30 am the next morning. In our 5-bed shared room, there was only one guy asleep at the time. When I woke up at 5:10 the next morning, all the beds were filled. Trisna wanted to take a shower, so we didn’t end up leaving until closer to 6, but it gave me a chance to use the free computer in the lobby. It’s amazing how quick you start to miss that thing.

In the morning it was just about as desolate as it was in the night. We cut through the park that houses most of Nara’s attractions and went to the most remote area first. The shrine at the end was nice, but I liked the path that we had to walk to get there better. It was like what people dream of when they think of the world’s best place to take a morning run. I did not run though, which is why I managed to enjoy myself, but especially in the weather it afforded one of those rare “it’s good to be awake at 6 am” feelings. I did not feel that way even at 7:45 am walking across campus, past the dumpsters behind the dining hall, to my fitness class over at NNU.

At the shrine, we were the only people there except for a guy who had just finished raking the rocks in preparation for tourists. We were able to witness what happens to all the omikuji (pieces of paper with fortunes on them) that people tie up in the shrines. Deer eat them. This is probably just in Nara, which is famous for deer being everywhere. The deer are not afraid of people at all, and will often solicit food from them. I was told that the best time to visit Nara was in the late morning or early afternoon, after the first round of tourists had satisfied the deer’s hunger (take that sentence out of context). I found them to not be annoying at all. Maybe it was too early, but they never approached either of us, but they wouldn’t run away and allowed you to pet them if you felt so inclined.

We hit up Nara’s major tourist attraction, the great buddha before the crowds arrived. Two of my HDRs are from here. The exterior of the building is here, and the interior is here. A fun fact that I just learned while researching this post: this is the largest wooden building in the world. There were probably five people in the entire place when we arrived, so we had it almost to ourselves. No hustle and not even a little bit of bustle. Apparently this great buddha is even bigger than Kamakura’s buddha. (14.98 meters vs Kamakura’s 13.35) The main difference is that it’s indoors, and being much further away from Tokyo, has a much less touristy (though still touristy) vibe.

When we left, the tourists were coming out in droves, including several field trips for junior high students. On our way back to the hostel, things were noticeably busier and we decided it was time to start heading toward our next destination.

The good thing about the schedule was that the first leg was harder than the second. On Sunday we traveled about 10 hours with no interesting stops. Monday we had a 7 hour train ride scheduled with one place we could stop at for lunch that I really wanted to go to. So, it was Nara to Osaka (:55), and Osaka to Himeji (1:00), home to Himeji castle.

I wanted to go to Coco Ichiban, a chain of curry restaurants in Japan that lets you choose the spiciness level from one to ten. We found one and headed to it. Trisna had never been to one before, and I cautioned that three was as much as I could handle while still enjoying the meal, but she jumped to five. They actually won’t allow you to have anything higher than that until you can prove that you can handle level five. I sweated through my level three while she fully enjoyed her five without even touching her drink. I guess it’s par for the course when you grow up in Indonesia.

We had to keep our visit to Himeji castle shorter than I would have hoped, but we still spent a good amount of time there. Himeji castle is mostly famous because it’s the most complete of Japan’s feudal castles. For me, I wanted to see it because it was used as a filming location for my favorite movie of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s Ran.

As a castle in its own right, it looks very majestic. If it were possible, I would have tried to hit this up at either a very early or very late hour in order to avoid the huge crowd, but the weather was perfect so it wasn’t bad.

I don’t know how to make our trip from the entrance gate to the top of the castle and back to the gate sound terribly exciting, because it was mostly very cool visually. I can see why it’s the most visited castle in Japan, and I wish I could have spent some more time there. It deserves to be more than something you just check off a list.

An HDR I took from the top of the castle looking on the grounds and the surrounding town is here.

It was getting to be about 2:00, and we were in danger of not reaching Miyajima by sunset. In retrospect, I should have just decided that we wouldn’t be able to go there that night and stayed in Himeji for a few more hours, but we gave it a shot. Himeji to Okayama (1:30), Okayama to Hozaki (1:30), Hozaki to Hiroshima took about two hours. It was after 7 by the time we arrived, and the sun was long gone. Miyajima would have to wait for the next day.

We found our hostel, that was more like a cross between a hostel and a hotel. It was actually rated as the 8th best hostel in Japan by people who I would imagine are qualified to make that judgment. After dropping off stuff in our rooms, we asked where to get yakisoba (which is what I wanted). The receptionist said that most okonomiyaki restaurants also sell yakisoba, and said there were a ton of said restaurants in the second floor of Hiroshima station.

There were many restaurants in the second floor of the Hiroshima, and most of them specialized in okonomiyaki. We went to one that seemed busy, assuming that all the people there had a better idea of which one to pick than we did. I ordered yakisoba, and Trisna got a squid okonomiyaki. She said it was really good. My past experience with okonomiyaki coupled with the word “squid” made me doubtful. She said she wanted to go there one more time before we left.

I grabbed the top bunk in my hostel room and set my alarm so we could reach the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum as soon as it opened in the morning.

Some Pictures

While I’m working on the entries for my trip down to Hiroshima, here are some pictures to tide you over. Click on them to go to the Flickr page where you can get larger versions.

Todaiji in Nara

Great Buddha in Nara

Himeji

Hiroshima

Great Torii at Miyajima