This is now my second (or maybe third) attempt at trying to finish this post over the past two weeks, it just seems that every time I sit down to finish it I am bombarded by distractions, these distractions go mainly by the names of Facebook and Youtube. I also happened to come across a great position as Travel Abroad Manager at one of the SUNY schools that will be opening in January, so I decided to apply for it, which resulted in the slightly more productive, but far less entertaining distraction of writing a cover letter and updating my resume. But that's all done now and I'm finally going to tell all of you about the trip I took about 3 weeks ago to Hiroshima and Miyajima. Of course, I've done more things since then, but nothing pops up in my mind as being blog worthy besides my trip, which was amazing, so I definitely don't want to hold out on my dedicated readers by failing to give details.
Since my memory is starting to fade a little, I'm going to look through my photos to help jog my memory... for once in my life I actually remembered to take my camera and to actually use it! So, first I took the Shinkansen into Hiroshima. When I left Tokyo it was beautiful out, but when I reached Hiroshima four hours later it was all crappy and rainy. I decided to think of the weather as "setting the mood" since my first stop was the A-dome and Peace Memorial Park. After getting off at the bus stop I immediately saw the dome looming over the trees. I walked over to one side of the dome to get a better look and came across a group of western students (American I think) standing in front of the fence. I decided to take advantage of English speaking people while I had the chance and asked one of them to take my photo in front of the dome. Immediately after she took my photo I was hit on by a weird Japanese guy. I thought this was incredibly inappropriate considering where we were, but he asked if I'd take a photo with him and I agreed because the girl who'd taken my photo a moment ago had done a bad job and I thought I might be able to crop out Creepy McCreeperson if this one turned out better. After he got his photo with me he gave me his contact information (I did not ask for this) and I gave him a fake number, which I normally would feel bad about, but in this case I just wanted him to leave me alone.
I continued on around the dome. The building itself was mesmerizing, I just could not stop looking at it and I think I took far more pictures than what was actually necessary. It's just amazing how a place can be beautiful and terrifying at the same time. In front of the building was a big plaque explaining what had happened, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the A-dome itself is worth a million. The dome is located alongside a river and I walked down the path and crossed a bridge into the peace park where the Children's Peace Monument and Memorial Cenotaph are located. I went over to the children's monument first. The monument is a giant bell with a statue of a girl standing on top with a folded paper crane rising above her. The statue was modeled after the story of Sadako Sasaki, a little girl who suffered from leukemia brought on by the radiation of the atomic bomb. Sadako believed that if she folded a thousand paper cranes she would get one wish, to be cured. She died, at age 13, before all the cranes were completed, but her friends and family continued making cranes and the movement spread. Now, children from all over the world send cranes to the peace monument and many of them are put on display in waterproof cabinets that surround the statue. From there I walked over to the cenotaph which is covered by a large arch. If you stand directly in front of the arch you can see the A-dome through the center and the peace flame that stays continuously lit. By this time my shoes were completely soaked because it had been raining the entire time, so I headed in to the Peace Memorial Museum to dry off. The museum, as I had expected, was not an easy thing to experience. I saw scale reconstructions of Hiroshima before the bomb and the very little that remained of Hiroshima after the bomb. I saw models of people with their flesh melting off their bodies and a stone step with a white body sized mark where a person had been instantly burned to death while sitting outside the library. I sometimes have difficulty imagining and fully comprehending the terrible things that have happened in just the last 100 years. Going to places like this, like the Holocaust Museum in D.C., Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and Ground Zero, make history real for me and they are what remind me of how important it is to remember what's happened in the past and to learn from those mistakes. It's a shame that not everyone has the opportunity to visit these places, I think maybe if they did then there would be greater motivation among members of society to enforce change in how things are done today.
After I left the Peace Memorial Museum I decided to head over to my youth hostel. I am a big fan of HI (Hosteling International) so I had booked a room with the Hiroshima HI Youth Hostel a few days before my trip. I had to take a bus and then walk up a big winding hill to get there, which was a bit of a pain since it was still raining, but the hostel was comfortable and on the first night I was the only female guest so I had a big room all to my self. I also had the bathroom to myself. It is rather common for hotels and hostels in Japan to have a public bath area, so, just like at the onsen, all the women bathe in the same room in front of each other. I've been to several onsen at this point so I'm not too uncomfortable with the whole nudity issue anymore, but I have never actually gone to one without a friend, and being the only gaijin in the room has the potential to be a little awkward, so I was quite happy that since I was the only female at the place there was no one else in the bathing area.
The next day I took a ferry out to Miyajima, a beautiful mountainous little island that is overrun by small friendly deer that come up to you if they think you have food. Miyajima is most famous for Itsukushima Shrine and its floating torii gate. The torii gate does not actually float, but it is built in the water so that at high tide it appears to be floating. The large orange torii gate with the shrine and mountainous backdrop really is quite breathtaking and has been designated as one of the three most scenic views of Japan. The shrine itself is also quite extraordinary because it is built on beams above the water. As I was standing on the boardwalk of the shrine taking pictures, something crazy happened, I heard someone say my name. As I was traveling alone and hours away from Tokyo, one can understand why I would be rather shocked to hear someone calling me. I turned my head and standing next to me was a friend from college who I had not seen since we graduated. I had known she was in Japan teaching for another big eikaiwa (English school) but I had no idea where she was living and we had made absolutely no plans to meet up, so running into each other on this tiny island was truly one of the strangest things I've experienced. She was there with her Japanese co-worker and I ended up spending the rest of the day with them and doing much more on the island than I ever would have had I not run into them. First we got lunch at a little restaurant that I never would have discovered since it was off the main route and then we decided to climb the island's highest mountain, which I was planning to just go up to via cable car. The view from the top was spectacular and there was a very old and very beautiful shrine at the peak that I really loved and would not have seen had I come up by cable car. The entire day was wonderful with great weather and great company. At the end we came back down the mountain by cable car which we had to sprint to in order to catch the last car in time. At nightfall we got to see the floating torii gate being illuminated, it was lit so beautifully that it seemed almost as if it were glowing.
On my last day in Hiroshima I decided to do one more thing before getting lunch and taking the shinkansen home. I settled on visiting the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art because it was very easy to get to by cable car. There were some interesting exhibits and I actually just wish there'd been more to see because I got through the gallery a lot faster than I thought I would. As I left the museum and began walking down the path towards the road I stopped because I suddenly realized there were about ten cats meandering around the little area I was standing in. I'd noticed before that Hiroshima seemed to have a lot of strays but I hadn't quite realized the extent of the situation until that moment. Normally I absolutely love cats but being surrounded by that many wild ones is a little unsettling, on a side note, Hiroshima cats have abnormally short tails, so that was a little strange too. After getting some Indian food for lunch (Japan has absolutely amazing Indian food) I headed back to Hiroshima Station and took the shinkansen back to Tokyo.
I took the next two days off for Yom Kippur, which I spent a ridiculous amount of money on for tickets to services and a seat at the breaking of the fast, but I'm glad that I did. Living in Japan as a foreigner you feel exactly that, foreign, so sometimes it's nice to go back to what's familiar. One thing I've really come to be thankful for, especially since moving to Japan, is how being Jewish brings culture and tradition into my life. Japanese people have such an incredibly rich culture full of cherished rituals and festivals and it's made me realize that a lot of Americans don't have that. Luckily for me, Jews do, and I feel really thankful that I'm not missing out on the opportunity to feel connected to others by following customs that have existed for thousands of years and keep our identity as a people (the CHOSEN people) alive.
