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.