Golden Week Osaka

We arrive to Osaka to a rainy morning. Infact the first day in Osaka was about the only day that we had poor weather over all of golden week. We've been told that in Japan May is a good month for nice weather, but James and I are convinced that the Japanese have found away to engineer good weather over golden week. (According to James they did invent the technology to create clouds by dispersing a certain type of metal into the atmosphere)

After dropping our bags off at our hostel, and having a much needed shower, we hung around with Phil and Thomas, A couple of friends from Canada and France, respectively. It was nice to be able to speak some French for once.  Osaka is flour country in Japan, and so I was on a mission to eat as much flour based food as possible in Osaka. To that end we all decided to hit up a dirt cheap Udon place we saw on our way from the subway. With freshly made udon whipped up infront of us by a team of old timers for around 300 yen, we couldn't have gone wrong. 

Despite the overcast day we made an afternoon of visiting Osaka castle and wandering around that part of Osaka. The pictures don't quite do the castle Justice, but even in the overcast day the gold gleams, and the minimal palette of the grounds (White skies, black roofs, white walls and newly green trees) is very striking.

Osaka Castle was once the largest in Japan, and It still is probably the second or third largest.
Definitely a cool place to go if you are in Osaka.  The grounds of the Castle are a nice place to take a walk, if nothing else. Some of the stones that are used in the foundations at the main gates are simply massive. Over all the grandness of the construction make Osaka one of my favorite Castles to date.

We got lost around Shinsekai and wandered around Kuromon "Blackgate"  market.
It was a good place to hide from the rain, and check out all the fresh fish and meat that we would later pay way too much money for.

 

Apparently this is where the cities restaurateurs go to get their supplies. There are fish and seafood galore as well as bakeries and pastry shops. I bought some nice looking french bread, but despite the looks it tasted like all the baguette I've had in Japan: Plastic. We even saw a blow fish for about 11 600 yen. Or was it 116 000 yen. I don't remember.

In the evening we hit up Shinsekai for some food a drink before meeting up with the Girls from the other placements. At night Shinsekai is basically just street after street of Izakaya and Kushi-katsu places. The very south of Shinsekai around where our hostel was is where all the Japanese working class guys seem to go to get their fill of fried food and drink. It gets abit seedier around this area, and that means the food is a bit tastier! If you're lucky you might even get accosted by a drunk Japanese guy at 10 o'clock in the morning the next day.

Yay for the underbelly of Japan!

The crown Jewel of Southern Osaka: Dotombori. Easily the most happening place I've been in Japan, the streets are filled with couples and groups of bachelors or their female counterparts going out for a drink. If you go to certain streets you'll pass by all the Japanese Hostesses and their "Pimps". And cutting through the middle of it is a lovely Canal, where the neon lights and big ads get even bigger reflected in the water. After meeting up with the Girls from the other placements, and their new Japanese friends we all went out and took a look around to find a good Izakaya. Luckily our new friend Taichi knows lots of Izakaya owners so he brought us to a cheap place owned by his friend. Any plate of food or drink for 300 yen. Not a bad deal.

The ubiquitous and exspensive Kani restaurant chain, With its distinctive Animatronic Crab!
Dotombori by night  is very different from Dotombori by Night, But regardless of what time of day it is, Osaka Is a really cool city, with alot of character, and alot to see and do.

Matsuyama

 Leaving Hiroshima, we manage to catch the second last ferry to Matsuyama by the skin of our teeth. Then we pass  an incredible two hour ferry ride through the islands of the Inland sea  with the sun setting along side out boat. The Mountains loom ever more purple in the distance, until as the sun has set they are barely distinguishable from the sky. It was a sublime journey, if a short one, and one of the most memorable landscapes of the trip for me.

We arrive at Matsuyama Ferry port just after dark,  The shores of Shikoku are quiet and still.

 Probably the main reason any foreigners come to Matsuyama is to go to Dogo Onsen. Dogo Onsen is supposedly the Oldest Onsen in Japan, with a history that stretches back over 3000 years. After a long day of exploring Hiroshima, and getting all the way to Matsuyama, the only sensible thing to do was to go to the Onsen as soon as we got into the city.

We met a handful of helpful locals who helped us to get to the city from the port, and then a lovely international student from Malaysia offered to guide us through the city towards the onsen. She ended up leading us towards the Castle instead of the Onsen, but with some help from another local we managed to get on the right tram to Dogo.

We got to Dogo with barely ten minutes to spare before final entry. Let me tell you there is nothing more rewarding for the struggle to get there than plunging into a hot Onsen. If you do find yourself in Japan, you MUST find some time to go to one

An Onsen is fundamentally a Hot Spring but there are many types of Onsen. Dogo is very simply an old and grand wooden bath house with a collection of large communal baths made of stone, their water fed from an underground spring.

We have gone to others with various baths and outdoor facilities, places where you could spend a whole day sitting around relaxing.

The one common feature you will experience in a Japanese Onsen: Every one just walks around totally naked. It certainly takes a minute to get used to just stripping down and sitting round in a bath with a bunch of naked Japanese men of all ages, but after the first 20 minutes at Dogo, it started to seem perfectly normal. Every Onsen since has felt perfectly natural.

Dogo Onsen in the day. 

We stayed in the Sprawling and charming Matsuyama Youth Hostel. As close as it is to Dogo Onsen, it was very hard to find in the dark. After getting some desperatley hurried directions from the staff at the onsen, I ran through the night looking for the hostel. (It's amazing how well you can focus and on a Foreign language when you have 10 minutes until your youth hostel closes and no idea how to get there)

I had to stop and ask for more directions from a local family, and being helpful Shikoku-ans  they ended up driving all three of us to the hostel.

The castle was brilliant in the late April Sun, with flowers in full bloom and the greenery glowing

The next day we spent climbing up the large hill in the middle of Matsuyama. On top of this small mountain sits Matsuyama, which is the only castle we've seen that hasn't been turned into a musuem on the inside. The Castle retains its wooden construction. However, about a dozen signs through out the castle describe each part getting hit by lightning and burning to the ground.

The wording in English gives one the impression that the various wings of the Castle were each struck by lightning near the end of the 1700s. In reality there werent a dozen lighting stikes, but probably one which burned down about half of the castle.

The view from the Castle was pretty fantastic. Why don't we have hills in Toronto!? Only valleys. 

Brief as it was, I really liked my stay in Shikoku. The weather was fantastic, and Matusyama is a really quaint place. A smilar sized city in Canada would be really boring, but in Japan it's compact, there's plenty happening and it's still a very exciting place. 

Golden Week Begins: Leaving Nagoya and Hiroshima

Finally it's here. The week of consecutive holidays (most of which are on weekends) and our chance to explore central honshu. Golden week. James and I wait for Simeon at the subway (naturally) so we can head over to have dinner and catch our nightbus to Hiroshima.

Before enduring our eight hour bus ride, we met up with Trinda and Su, previous volunteers at our hospital, and Takeshi, a friend of mine from Canada.

Kaitenzushi merits a whole post by itself, but this is a nice picture of our last night in Nagoya.

Riding a bus anywhere isn't all that confortable, but riding a
night bus in Japan is a new world of discomfort for westerners.
There is very little leg room, but luckily we found the
 reclineing release, and we had the seats at the back of the bus.

Apparently I slept

 Getting ready to explore Hiroshima, map in hand. Anyone travelling through Japan without access to a Japanese cellphone would be wise to buy a comprehensive map. Public access to wifi is not uncommon but only accesible if you have an account with a japan phone company.

It was hard not to smile in this Picture with the weather and mood of golden week. However we are standing in front of a monument to the destructiveness of Atomic Weapons. This building is the Gen-baku dome, or "Atom-Bomb Dome". It was almost right underneath the point where the Bomb went off over Hiroshima on August 6th 1945.

Because of the ferroconcrete contruction of the Building, and the angle of the blast its y framework was mostly spared.  On the other hand everyone in the building was instantly killed and the whole structure gutted by fire. Moreover, almost every building in Hiroshima was either knocked down by the blast, or burned down in the ensuing fires.

It is hard to reconcile Hiroshima's past with its present. The city is green, vibrant and full of people. On the other hand, the building pictured here still stands as a reminder to all of us of the dangers and horrors of nuclear war.

We met a man in Hiroshima Named Mito. He was in his third trimester when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, his mother kilometers from ground zero. He suffered poor health his whole childhood. With luck he survived years of illness and he spends his days now educating the people who come to Hiroshima on the truths behind the Bomb, and its aftermath. He presents a very revealing and unequivocal image of the consequences of the Bomb, as well as the cover ups  later enacted by the Occupying Americans and the Japanese government.

The question of nuclear power and the use of its byproducts is even more relevant today with the Fukushima incident and its consequences for Japan and the world still poorly understood. . The Initial horrors of the Bomb in Hiroshima are Now Ghosts of the past. The horrible mutations and sicknesses of its aftermath are also very distant. But look at Neonatal wards all over Iraq and Libya where thousands of kilograms of radioactive material has been dropped inside bombs, and the images of the months after August 1945 come rushing back.

On a less serious note we went to Miyajima! Probably one of the most scenic and atmospheric places I've been so far, and one of the most famous sights of Japan! We went at sunset and lowtide, so we got to walk around the base of the Tori gate.

Miyajima is also one of two places In Japan where there are domesticted deer walking around. Like Nara the deer just walk up to you and... try to eat things out of your pockets. We met one who has a particular fondness for paper. He actually picked things right out of my pockets with his mouth. James managed to catch some of my battles with the deer on video:

 http://youtu.be/qQrt0OFW6b4

We stopped by the hiroshima prefectural Museum of arts on out way out.
The Museum is home to a famous Dali Painting which, if you've seen any Dali Paintings,  you probably know as the Painting of the dripping clocks.  The Staff wouldn't let us take any Pictures of the Painting, despite my explications and requests in Japanese, they just kept on babbling in English about "No Photos".

I did take this one though, of some Japanese screen art. I wasn't supposed to but I wanted to break their arbitrary rules.