When I get home, and people ask me what Japan was like, I’m going to tell them that I had a blast. I’m going to tell them the country is deeply cool, once you get the hang of doing things, and that everyone should go. I will, however, mention that the weather sucked, and that I’m trying to figure out who I offended in a previous life to be so cursed.

I woke up this morning to the sound of howling wind. I didn’t really think anything of it, because it seemed so familiar — exactly what I was used to hearing on the prairies in a windstorm. Then I realized where I was, and what the wind meant. Looking out my window I saw rain whipped into small vortices in the alley below; judging from the trees, this was a Force 10 storm that is bearing down on Nagasaki. After yesterday’s adventures in the rain, including the six inches of water on the road I had to cross to get back to the streetcar station, I wasn’t really looking forward to going out but figured since the odds were good I wouldn’t be coming back here anytime soon I owed it to myself to at least go do something. So I got dressed and waited for the elevator.

That was when I saw a 4×4′ chunk of aluminum siding go flying off my building.

“Umm.. yeah.. Maybe I won’t go out today..”

I did go out, however — for about ten minutes. Long enough to walk around the covered shopping arcade across the street and confirm that the majority of Nagasaki residents had decided to punt and go home, shuttering their shops at 11:00 in the morning, and abandoning Nagasaki’s largest shopping district to the wind, which tore up and down the urban canyon walls, tugging at my clothes and blowing grit in my eyes. Back at the hotel, I decided to make arrangements for a taxi to the station very early in the morning (my train goes at 06:30). Half-jokingly, I said, “So where’s the nearest liquor store?” If I can’t go outside, and I’m stuck here all day, I might as well have fun while I’m at it…

“Oh, I think the weather will get better after lunch,” the girl at the desk said. “Please wait; if you’re patient, you might be surprised.” Yeah, right, I thought, but what the hell, I’ve already written this day off, so anything I get to do is a bonus at this point. I went back upstairs and joined the Red Sox-Yankees game already in progress on NHK. Impressed that the Sox were winning, I settled in for 45 minutes of MLB, during which time I watched Schilling cough up a run, Arroyo cough up another, and saw the most blatant example of interference on a play I’ve ever been witness to. How A-Rod got ruled safe in the first place is a total mystery to me, but the umpires at least got the call right eventually. This was one instance where I would have really liked to be able to hear the inanities of the Fox announcing crew, if only so I could have figured out what the hell was going on. NHK showed a bunch of replays, and like I said, it was pretty clearly interference, but the specifics were.. elusive. That was about it for me and the ball game, since the housekeeping staff kicked me out of my room.

But that was OK. The front desk staff was right: The weather did get better. Sort of. The rain stopped, but the wind picked up. I made my way over to the Siebold Memorial Museum, a monument, of sorts, to Philipp Franz von Siebold, the Danish physician who more or less singlehandedly introduced western medicine to Japan during the 19th century. Siebold came to Japan in 1823 and assumed responsibility for the health of the Dutch population on Dejima, in Nagasaki harbor, the single European enclave in Japan at the time. He also began to collect information about Japan through his dealings with the Dutch traders and interpreters from the city; soon, Japanese physicians began to show up in Dejima to hear his lectures, and eventually he was given permission to enter the city, treat Japanese patients, and train Japanese physicians. He opened a clinic and school in 1824; in 1828, he was suspected of smuggling after trying to leave the country with a map, and kicked out of Japan. He spent three decades in Europe writing about his experiences, and in the process became the west’s foremost expert on Japan at the time. Siebold’s Japanese daughter, Ine (who was left behind when he got kicked out) was taught by Siebold’s students and became an obstetrician, the first female practitioner of western medicine in Japan. She later became court physician, and assisted in the birth of Emperor Meiji’s child.

It’s a small museum, housed in an elegant brick building on the side of a hill near the site of Siebold’s former home and clinic. The upstairs gallery was closed, so I could only see about half of the exhibits — not that this took long, since there’s very little by way of English signage and you need to follow along with a four-page handout you can pick up at the admissions counter. I think I liked the collection of medical research on display — an intricate (for 1825) drawing of the left side of the arterial circulatory system, for instance, would look really good on my wall, though I suspect I would have been even more impressed had I been able to read Japanese. Siebold’s collection of surgical instruments are also on display, which makes one realize that, um, the basic tools of surgery haven’t changed all that much since the 1820s.

The weather was still holding, so I headed over to Glover Gardens on the other side of town. If you’re lazy, Glover Gardens is the place for you: An escalator takes you from street level up to the admissions desk, and then rolling sidewalks take you all the way up the side of the hill, from which you have a fabulous vantage point to view Nagasaki’s waterfront. The official explanation is that elderly people might find the climb too tiring. I buy it, sort of, but given the state of the weather and the shape my body is in after two weeks of non-stop traveling, I’m also predisposed to be lazy.

(Glover Gardens gives you a much better understanding of the valley in which the city lies, something that probably didn’t help matters much when it came to the thermal pulse of the nuclear bombing.) I didn’t realize this, but Nagasaki has a very big shipbuilding industry — I don’t know why I didn’t realize this, since it was one of the main reasons why Nagasaki was selected as a target for the bombing, but the size of the Mitsubishi graving docks still surprised me. Geographically-speaking, Nagasaki is one of the world’s great natural shipbuilding harbors.)

Like the Siebold Museum, you can appreciate a lot of Glover Gardens on an aesthetic level, but don’t come here looking for a lot of detail; there’s precious little English signage on a lot of the artifacts and you sort of have to connect the dots based on your knowledge of 19th century European antiques. Which isn’t really hard; when you see a sign that says “Sitting Room” and then notice all the little Japanese labels on things like the chairs, the china hutch, the rug.. you can figure it out. Again, however, a lot of the interpretation is left up to you, and I suspect there’s something fundamentally missing from the experience as a result of the linguistic difficulties. Still, it’s the only place in Japan where you’ll see the first western-style wood home, the first western-style stone home, and a number of other houses belonging to Europeans living in Nagasaki during the 1800s, before Perry showed up to kick the door in. At the top of the gardens is a very interesting display in the Mitsubishi Number 2 Dock House, where sailors used to stay while their ships were in the dock — it is, presumably, a collection of ships (both in the model and painting forms) that the Mitsubishi yards had worked on over the years. No English signage, though, so this is just a guess on my part.

It’s a fun place to spend an hour or two, and the view is really good. The usual mob of kids was running all over the place; nine of them — 9 of them — wanted me to take their pictures standing on a viewpoint overlooking the harbor. Which meant that YT had to juggle nine disposable cameras in addition to my bag full of EOS gear and my jacket. Then I had to pose for pictures with all of them. Why, I’m not entirely sure, though it may have had something to do with the fact that a gaijin that’s a good two and a half feet taller than they are is something of a novelty in their world.

Something blew into my eye at Glover Gardens. Up on the hill we were getting the full force of the 95+ kph winds in the wake of the typhoon, and I thought for sure I was going to lose at least one of my contact lenses in the gardens. (It would have been my left lens, which is OK if not great, since my left eye is the “strong” one. Strong, in this sense, means “not totally useless, just mostly useless, compared to its twin on the other side of my head.”) Eyedrops found, eyedrops bought, eyedrops instilled, and everything was much better.

I walked along the waterfront towards Dejima, the artificial island built in Nagasaki harbor in the 17th century to contain foreign traders and really the only place in Japan you could run into foreigners during the isolationist period. It’s a tiny, tiny place; you can see why there were only ever 200 people here, at most, as part of the Dutch trading contingent — it just isn’t big enough. Even 200 might have been pushing it, but remember I’m afraid of crowds and need my space, so take that evaluation with a grain of salt. Dejima is in the process of being restored to its former glory (?) and only a handful of buildings are in the same state as they were, and even fewer are actually open. An new-old warehouse has a display on the reconstruction process and talks about how hard it was to apply modern construction techniques to old designs (and at the same time strengthening them against earthquakes and typhoons). The restorations are very well done; other than the brand new wood in the buildings (and that big blue Swedish store look as a result), I doubt you could tell they were built in the past decade.

There’s a museum here on Dejima, but — and you knew this was coming, didn’t you? — there’s precious little English signage. As with almost every museum I’ve been to in Japan, the displays have long blocks of Japanese text and about two lines worth of English. So while the Japanese may say something like, “This painting depicts the arrival of Pietr de van den Huevel in Dejima in 1826 bearing gifts from the Royal Dutch household to the shogun, and his preparation for his trip to Edo accompanied by sixteen porters, a cook, a doctor, the Dejima administrator, and twelve oxen,” the English version will say something along the lines of “Arrival of Dutch trading ship. Crew prepares to leave for Edo.” It’s.. informative, but not necessarily in the same way it is for the Japanese.

Also on Dejima is a very cheesy movie about Dutch life on the island — what they ate, what they did for fun, how they spent their time, who was allowed to come and go — which is largely redundant if you’ve been through the museum and can use your imagination a little and have done some pre-reading (which I had). Still, it features a Japanese actor in a bad wig in front of a green screen which was then spliced into old artwork depicting life on Dejima, and makes extensive use of the first person, singular, to describe events as he walks through the inanimate screens. It’s very strange. English isn’t a problem here; headsets are available in English, Chinese, Korean, and Dutch (which makes sense, even if it was weird to see diacritical marks over notionally English letters for the first time in a couple of weeks).

Typhoon TV: I’ve spent a chunk of the evening watching the NHK evening news, and, like CNN with hurricaine season in Florida, the coverage never stops. It’s about as informative, too, especially given
that it’s in another language.

(I can imagine it now:

“Tell me, Hiroshi, what’s it like out there in Okayama right now?”

“Windy, Megumi!”

“Hiroshi, have you spoken to any of the evacuees?”

“I have, Megumi! They say they’re tired of being evacuated and wish the typhoon would just go away! Many are concerned about the safety of their homes and the welfare of their shops. I spoke with one elderly man who told me this was the sixteenth typhoon he’s been through in the past 70 years, and I’m standing in water up to my ankles!”

“Good stuff. Thanks, Hiroshi. We now go live to the NHK weather center where weather specialist Akira Morioka is standing by to give us the latest on Typhoon 23’s current position..”)

Is Japanese TV news as insipid as American TV news? I can’t tell. But it’s fun to pretend.)

The big difference, of course, is that in a country as small as Japan a typhoon in Kyushu is a big deal for everywhere else. Whereas people in Massachusetts — never mind Washington — don’t need to
worry about Hurricaine Zelda (or whatever we’re up to now), high winds and a shitload of rain in Kagoshima is a serious concern for people in Tokyo, since chances are good that’s where the storm’s heading next. So NHK is forgiven for doing the wall-to-wall coverage thing with this story; save for the on-screen graphics and the language issue, you’d think you were watching CNN’s wall-to-wall hurricaine coverage: Lots of scary pictures from all over southern Japan of flooded roads, fallen power lines, flipped-over trucks, giant waves.. You watch TV. You know what this sort of thing looks like. I don’t need to spell it out for you.

Probably the most distressing part of the evening, from the perspective of someone who has a long rail journey ahead of him tomorrow, was the part when they started showing pictures of trains. This is where the language barrier stopped being annoying and started being truly aggravating. “JR blah blah blah blah, Hakata-eki blah blah blah, shinkansen wa blah blah blah deshita. Sanyo shinkansen no blah blah blah ikimashita blah blah no deshita; Tokaido shinkansen blah blah blah Shin-Osaka blah blah blah Tokyo-eki no blah blah blah deshita.” One could argue, fairly convincingly, that I know just enough Japanese to know I need to worry — too much to be blissfully ignorant and think, “oh, look at the pretty pictures of the wet trains”; too little to be able to make sense of what I’m seeing. The word for “cancelled” is torikeshimasu or kyanseru shimasu, neither of which I remember hearing, but I had to look it up after the newscast was over, so that doesn’t really help.

I think that’s enough for today. I have to be at the station by 06:1 tomorrow morning to catch my train back to Hakata, and that means I have to be up by.. way early. Yecch. Assuming, of course, the blasted things are running. Why is it that every time I have to travel there’s some kind of natural disaster? Alien attack up next.

Yeah, I should have let Mother Nature win that one. There’s wet, there’s “caught in a typhoon,” and then there’s what happened to me today. I set out for the Peace Park and attached museum in a fairly strong rain that got a lot worse before I made it out of the park. After Hiroshima everything on the nuclear war front is a little muted; my guidebook says that if you’ve been to the bigger museum in the north, much of what you encounter in Nagasaki will be redundant, and that’s a pretty fair assessment. I liked — if one can be said to like anything in this category — the memorials and museum in Hiroshima more, thought they generally did a better job of explaining things and telling stories.

The hypocenter of the explosion in Nagasaki is marked with a tall dark granite obelisk that I’m sure is much more impressive and interesting on a nice day. In the rain, it just looked tall and wet. To the northwest, a fragment of the grandest Catholic church in Asia (at the time of the bombing) stands intact. Unlike Hiroshima there isn’t a single iconic representation of the bombing in Nagasaki; the church wall fragment is probably the only thing that qualifies, and it hasn’t received nearly the amount of attention as genbaku-domu.

There is comparatively little detail in the Nagasaki museum about the history of the city, though it notes (as almost everything I’ve ever read about the city) that it was the first city in Japan to open up to international trade in the 17th century, and that it had a large foreign population, and that it had a large Christian population. More on this later. There are some very well-done exhibits that demonstrate exactly how big the fireball was, how the fires spread, where the blast pressures were, and, ultimately, what the radiation distribution patterns looked like. I had some minor techincal quibbles (for instance, they’re alpha and beta particles, not rays, and neutrons are neutrons, not neutron rays. A neutron ray is a comic book weapon and doesn’t mean anything. Neutron emission, on the other hand, is a serious problem.) For displays that don’t spare a lot of gruesome detail, they’re comparatively thin on scientific data — though the section on human effects had some excellent micrographs of both marrow and gastric epithelium. (They helpfully provided control samples of both so that people unfamiliar with micro pathology could see the difference. Sadly, the vast majority of people will walk away from this display and think, “Wow, that looks really.. different.” Which is perhaps to be expected: I can’t think of a quick way to explain what a neoplastic cell looks like, and why it’s bad, and how it’s different from a normal cell on microscopy.)

Hiroshima is a more emotional museum. Nagasaki is a more in-your-face place. There really need to be warnings on the exhibits — kids don’t need to see this kind of stuff. I barely wanted to look. Chances are you’ve seen at least some of the footage and photographs, so I don’t need to elaborate. Whatever you’ve seen in a book or on TV, it’s way different when it’s been blown up to wall-size. If Hiroshima was designed to make you sad, Nagasaki seems designed to disgust you. Which might very well be the point.

Still, the Nagasaki museum has a number of things to recommend it, not the least of which is their excellent collection of what I’m calling “altered objects” — coins, glass, clothing, personal items that were caught in the blast and generally melted. The bottles, the coins, the porcelain.. it’s remarkable how they survived the blast force, but succumbed to the heat. The one that will probably disturb most people is the human hand that melted into a glass bottle and then fused with concrete, though I think if the label didn’t mention anything 95% of the visitors wouldn’t be able to tell. Ditto for the helmet with the skull inside. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, or what you were looking for, you’d never be able to say for sure.

Towards the end is an exhibit dedicated to Dr. Nagai Takashi, a physician in Nagasaki at the time of the bombing. He lost his wife in the attack, and developed leukemia himself, but wrote prolifically and worked heroicly to treat his patients even as he lost his own fight against the cancer (he died in 1951). Stories like this help to put the bombing in perspective — 75,000 died immediately, and another 75,000 were injured, but those numbers are so large as to defy understanding. A personal tragedy, on the other hand..

Also included on special exhibition is a collection of photographs from Hisashi Ishida that show various sites around Nagasaki in the aftermath of the bombing. Ishida was a judge in Nagasaki at the time, and his 120+ photographs provide some of the most comprehensive documentary evidence of the devastation as seen through local eyes. As journalism they’re remarkable; as art, they’re captivating. Chances are you’ve seen at least one of his pictures without knowing anything about it; they were taken after the fires were out, and the dead were collected, and the reconstruction begun. They record the urban landscape that was left after the bombing, without the obvious human elements. (It’s easy to take a picture of a badly burned human and turn it into a statement about the evils of nuclear war; it’s something else to show a flattened Nagasaki Medical College and do the same.) They’re great pictures.

Unfortunately, the Nagasaki museum was — you knew this was coming — overrun by school groups, all of whom were going through the exhibits at as high a speed as possible and without any regard for anyone else in the museum. I don’t know if my school outings to museums were this disruptive to other patrons, but I’d like to think we were better behaved than these kids. They banged into me. They barged in front of me to see the displays. They yelled at each other. I watched two elderly women make their way through the museum — with people of that age, you really have to wonder whether they’re hibakusha or not, don’t you? — before being engulfed in a tidal wave of teenagers. This wasn’t the museum experience I wanted; I can’t think this was the experience they wanted, either.

Both museums make the point that while there might have been good military reasons for attacking Japan with nuclear weapons, those were not the only reasons for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There’s a not-so-subtle critique of US defense policy in the closing days of World War II — that at least part of the reason the United States decided to use the weapons was to justify the enormous expense of the Manhattan Project and to point out to the Russians that, yes, they worked, and you’d better pay attention to this in the post-WWII world. There was a fair volume of correspondance that suggested that the United States needed to warn Japan first, give them an opportunity to surrender or face nuclear attack. The counterargument, of course, is that Japan never would have surrendered, never would have given up the fight, and so a long and bloody battle for the home islands would have ensued, resulting in more deaths than the two attacks combined. (I’ve heard versions of this argument from a number of nuclear apologist authors, and I always bought it, until I realized that in rejecting the Potsdam Declaration Japan may not necessarily have been rejecting the idea of calling a truce — Potsdam promised nothing to ensure the continuation of the Emporer’s reign, which was known at the time to be a pre-condition to Japan’s surrender.) It is, of course, impossible to say what would have happened had there been a warning issued. But I can’t help wonder what might have happened had things played out differently.

The overriding message of both museums is, obivously, that mankind must never again use nuclear weapons — a laudable goal, and one that is really hard to disagree with, certain neoconservatives with their hands far too close to the reins of power for my tastes notwithstanding. Both cities are devoted to the antinuclear cause, and activists of all stripes like to both cite them and hang out here to pester tourists. (This was more of a problem in Hiroshima than it is in Nagasaki, probably a result of the crummy weather here.) The thing to say here is that, of course, it would be nice if we were able to stuff the nuclear genie back in the bottle so we wouldn’t have to deal with this legacy of destruction and the freak-out over Iran and North Korea (something that takes on a whole new dimension when you’re practically within rock-throwing distance of that strange land). But while we’re making that kind of a list, I’d like to have a lot of things I’m never going to get, so it’s pointless to wonder. I’m familiar with a lot of the chronology and the history of the development of nuclear weapons, and of the strategy behind their use (or at least the theory of the strategy behind their use) and hindsight being 20/20, the whole idea was insane. How we ever got out of the Cold War without blowing ourselves up is a total mystery to me. How we’re going to get out of the present ra — which, despite many assertions to the contrary, doesn’t really have any good historical parallels — is also a total mystery to me.

But the hell of it is, having been to these two places, I can almost understand why the Cold War strategy worked. Until you come here, nuclear war is an abstract thing, the consequences of which are pictures and models and statistics. It’s not really concrete — wasn’t really concrete for me until I came here. I’m not saying this is what happened, but I think that, knowing full-well the consequences, knowing the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, made it less likely for guys like Kennedy to pull the trigger. If you look at the history of the Cuban Crisis you can see how many times it would have been damn simple to just fire a couple of nukes off, and blow it all to hell (and, if you read Scott Sagan’s book, you’ll realize how damn close it was on a couple of occasions thanks to stupidity and accidents in the command and control networks). It was a poker game with the highest stakes possible, but the stakes were high, and the Soviets and the Americans knew they had to get it right, because they both knew the consequences of getting it wrong. I don’t know how well I’m explaning this idea, so I’ll try again: The fact that the consequences of getting it wrong were so high necessarily meant that all parties would do everything to prevent it from going wrong in the first place. (This is, to borrow from Sagan’s work, an example of “high-reliability theory,” and is echoed in much of his research on the nuclear command and control systems.)

Oh, yes. The peace park. Um. Good intentions aside, the giant statue at the end of Peace Park is.. awful. I’m sorry. I can’t think of a nice thing to say about it. It’s this green dude, with one hand pointed at the sky, and the other stretched out towards the horizon. I have no idea what it’s supposed to represent. It’s really confusing. I mean, okay, the Cenotaph in Hiroshima isn’t hugely representative of anything, but at least it works as part of a larger motif (the peace flame and Genbaku-domu). This.. is just there. I’m willing to give a large part of the blame over to the weather, but Hiroshima’s park seems much nicer. I’m not enough of a landscape architect to explain why, just that it feels better to the soul. (I think it’s the preponderance of concrete and tile in Nagasaki.)

As I was leaving the peace park the sky opened up and dumped gallons of water on me. If it’s possible, it was raining even harder than it was in Tokyo, and I got even wetter. It was in this state — cold, wet, tired, and vaguely annoyed at the crowds in the museum — that I ran into precisely the same mob of kids at the streetcar stop. Or maybe it was another mob; I can’t tell. The uniforms all look alike to me. Giant lineup for the streetcar. I stood on the street, in the rain, periodically being poked by kids trying to sneak by, for 40 minutes, getting progressively wetter. Eventually I managed to climb aboard a streetcar (not the one I needed) and we took off for Nagasaki Ekimae. Well. My agoraphobia, under control for the past two weeks, came roaring back with a vengance as I was packed into a hot, humid, stuffy streetcar full of people. I looked at my watch and realized I had broken my promise to myself: Don’t be on public transit during rush hour. Which is precisely what I was doing.

I don’t know whether getting an umbrella jammed into my crotch was punishment enough or just added punishment. After I finally made it back to my hotel’s stop, I walked the other way down the arcaded street, looking for both an Internet cafe (3rd floor, private booths with doors, open 24 hours a day, if you get my drift). Found it, logged on, checked my mail, posted the brief update you saw here on Tuesday. Went around the corner to the tonkatsu place my guidebook mentioned and had dinner.

A word about tonkatsu. You can find this in North America, sometimes, at Japanese restaurants with good menus. Trust me when I say it is a thousand times better here. For starters, every tonkatsu I’ve ever had in Canada is ridiculously overcooked; the coating here fell apart in my mouth, and the pork cutlet almost melted. Also, the sauce you’re likely to get in North America isn’t anywhere near as good as what’s provided in a proper tonkatsu place — you get a small mortar and pestle. Dump in some sesame seeds and grind them up (the smell of grinding sesame seeds is phenomenal). Add some Japanese-style Worcheshire sauce and stir. It is so good. Tonkatsu is supposed to come with a kind of dressingless cole slaw, but you generally get your own bottle of dressing which, though a little on the gingery side, is also surprisingly tasty. So, so good.

After dinner, a quick trip to Daimaru, the department store across from my hotel, looking for another bag. I have enough stuff that another bag is going to be extremely useful from hereon out, and considering I have essentially one more travel day ahead of me, now seems like a good time to buy the thing. You buy a bag in a Canadian department store, you think, “Ah, they’ll put a sticker on the side so security knows I paid for it.” Not so much over here: I bough a suitcase, and the saleswoman wrapped the bag up and put it into another bag. WTF! I know I’ve complained about the packaging situation here before, but this was absurd.

Came back to the hotel, took off wet clothes, spent an hour drying socks and shoes. Watched Game 3 of the Japan Series, cutting back and forth to a commercial-less Fox feed of the NLCS (damn, that was a nail biter, eh?). Wrote update.

I only took 14 digital pictures today and 23 stills. It was too wet to do any other photography, and even if it wasn’t, the light was flat, boring, and unappealing — “mother of all softboxes” effect, which would be great, except you don’t need a softbox when you’re doing landscape and architecture photography. As I type this, my entire photographic kit is sitting near the air conditioner vent drying out but even with this I think everything’s going in for some servicing when I get back to Canada (the body especially is going to need a CLA; I may just dump my lenses in a box with many silica gel packs and crank the heat on a bit to draw the moisture out).

God, I want tomorrow to be better in the weather department. Toyo phoned earlier this evening and said, “Geez, typhoons just seem to follow you around, don’t they?”

“Don’t give them any bright ideas!”

Oh yes. Hey, kids! Pop quiz: What’s a sure-fire way to not make friends with the people who are staying next door to you at an old-fashioned wood-frame ryokan? That’s right! Get it on when the walls are thin enough that the person next door to you can hear everything! I’m serious. I woke up at 01:30 this morning to moaning from the next room over, and I lay awake for almost 45 minutes while this went on. I wanted to bang on the wall, but then I’d have to admit I’d been listening, and..

I dug out my earphones and my Nomad and jacked the tunes up.

At the communal sink this morning, I gave the guy a hard look. He was confused until he saw me go back into my room. Then, the moment of dawning realization.

He at least had the good sense to be embarrassed.

It was raining when I left Fukuoka this morning. It rained all the way to Nagasaki. By the time I made it to Nagasaki it was pouring — Tokyo-in-a-typhoon raining, I mean. I gave up trying to find my streetcar in the rain and hopped in a taxi; instead of shlepping my luggage all over the place and getting soaked while I tried to find my hotel, I got to ride in air conditioned comfort and go directly to my room, where I was informed that the weather sucks because — surprise! — there’s a typhoon coming.

“There’s a typhoon coming?” I asked, incredulously.

“Yes. Scheduled to arrive tomorrow,” the girl at the desk said.

“Oh, you have to be kidding me.”

“Not good for vacation?” she asked me.

“No. Yes. Bad for vacation. This is my second typhoon,” I told her.

“You had a typhoon the last time you were in Japan?” she asked.

“No, I had a typhoon in Tokyo two weeks ago. Earthquake, two typhoons.. ugh.” I asked her for advice on “indoor” things to do in Nagasaki. She laughed at me.

That said, I don’t think I have a lot of choice here. I already lost two days of my itinerary to crappy weather in Tokyo and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose another day and a half here in Nagasaki because of that bitch Mother Nature. (Warning: Attitude may change depending on moisture content of pants.)

I hauled myself out of bed — well, ok, off the floor — and my bags down to the Miyajima ferry terminal. On the JR ferry back to Miyajima-guchi I ran into Todd and Kristine from yesterday. Todd apparently thought I was putting one over on him, and had to check the score himself when he got back to his hotel that night. It turned out they were staying at the Jukeiso, same as me.) “It was even worse than I imagined!” he exclaimed. I smiled sadistically. “3-0! I’m glad I’m not in Boston!” Once again it was hard to muster a lot of sympathy, given what happened to my Mariners this season. I did, however, resist the urge to bug him about the Nomah trade.

Jukeiso is, by the way, exceptionally nice. It’s a good example of the “new/old” style of ryokan — a concrete building with solid floors and walls, individual bathrooms and bath tubs, and that austere look you mentally associate with staying in a ryokan. I liked the place, even if I found the front desk clerk a little bit on the standoffish side, and I can’t stand the fact that the maid practically offers to iron your socks. (I hate being doted on.) It was really nice to come back from my photographic expedition last night to discover my bedding laid out on the floor, a reading lamp installed near my head (something more ryokan need, in my view), and a pot of tea left on. Also, they put out a sign welcoming me by name, and stuck a Canadian flag in the flag holder on the front desk counter to recognize the diversity.

Todd and Kristine dragged our too-heavy lugage across the JR station to the appropriate track to catch the train back to Hiroshima. “Don’t pack what you won’t carry,” Kristine said, huffing. “Yeah,” I puffed back, “but the problem is that for some reason I keep accreting stuff as I go along!” She sighed. Apparently not content to suffer the woes of being Red Sox fans, they decided to hurt themselves physically by having a bad schedule. “We’re carrying presents for friends of ours in Tokyo. They’re heavy. We’re going to Tokyo last.”

They picked an interesting way to do and see Japan — they flew into Narita, but almost immediately thereafter flew to Okinawa and got acclimatized there, taking advantage of JAL’s “rail pass for airplanes,” as Todd put it. I was insanely jealous of them, especially after Todd describes the snorkling opportunities down there. “It seems to me like the best way to get over the travel shock is to do it in, say, Kyoto,” I said, “but Okinawa sounds like a much better idea.” Note to self: Do this next time. Why didn’t I think about going to Okinawa? Oh, right — the issue with public exhibitionism found at beaches. Also, cheapness.

We rode the train back to Hiroshima. I taught Kristine some basic survival Japanese phrases. Every time I think my Japanese is bad and awful and totally inadequate to get around, I am reminded — usually by talking to other foreign tourists — how much of an advantage I have simply because I speak some. “All I know is “gomenasai,”” Kristine said. “It seems to be useful.” (It is.) I taught her how to say “do you speak English,” “do you have an English menu,” “does this train/bus/streetcar/tram go to (wherever),” that kind of thing. I also explained the finer points of, um, pointing to the things you want to buy, including the ever useful, “I want that (point for emphasis).” They didn’t have a small, pocket guide to the language, so I gave them my back-up Lonely Planet book, for which they were grateful. I was grateful too — it’s 225g I don’t have to carry around anymore.

Todd and Kristine were going to the Mazda plant for a tour, which sounded like fun, but I decided I’d rather hang around Hiroshima for the day. My train to Hakata wasn’t until 16:34, and we made it back to the city at 11:20. We parted ways, and I went looking for a locker to dump my stuff in. For Y600, I was able to get everything — everything! — into a giant locker at Hiroshima station and wander the city carrying nothing on my back for the first time in.. a long time, I realized, because I discovered how many accessory muscles hurt now that I didn’t have weight on my shoulders. Pectorals, deltoids, triceps, biceps, intercostals.. it was unbelievable. Everything hurt. Everything. I was half-assedly thinking about availing myself to my hotel’s massage services once I got to Narita on Thursday afternoon; on the basis of today’s experience, I’m thinking about it a lot more seriously.

So I wandered around Hiroshima for a while, had lunch, got bored. Sat in a park and read the Japan Times cover to cover (learned about a photo contest I’ll be entering as soon as I get home), and ate oranges. Went back to the station and meandered through the Asse department store. (Seriously: Best. Name. Ever. Though it’s a testament to the length of time I’ve been here that I didn’t even think about this being pronounced as anything other than “ah-say.”)

Caught Hikari 367 to Hakata. There’s something about the shinkansen that makes me very sleepy. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m willing to bet it has something to do with the gentle rocking motion of the train. Granted, I didn’t sleep all that well last night, so maybe I was just tired, but I think there’s something to this theory, since every train I’ve taken has seemed to feature at least 1/4 of my car fast asleep. We pulled through some frighteningly industrial parts of Japan — Tokuyama, for instance, doesn’t seem to be anything other than a giant chemical plant. I’m serious! I couldn’t see anything other than industry, industry, industry, and in particular industry of the type that makes environmentalists go bonkers simply because it looks so damned polluting. Tokuyama’s factories — well, factory, I guess — was one of those maze-of-pipes deals, with stacks and a flare and enough tall columns that made me think I was looking at some kind of refinery. (So to be fair, I’m sure that Tokuyama’s industry probably is very polluting.) I must have missed the part about the underwater tunnel from Honshu to Kyushu, or else it got lost in the myriad of tunnels you pass through on that segment of rail line.

Arriving in Hakata was kind of anticlimactic. It was pretty dark by the time we got to the station, and I was underwhelmed. The funny thing is that this is ancestral ground for me — my dad’s mother’s family comes from this neck of the woods. Granted, the last one immediately related to me left in 1914 or so, so the connecton is tenuous at best, but still. Amusingly, I did not come to Fukuoka for that reason — I came to Fukuoka because it’s the end of the line for the shinkansen, and I thought it might be interesting to stop here for a night rather than just push straight on to Nagasaki.

By the time I made it to my ryokan, it was raining. Are you surprised? I got my four good days of weather, and I got a killer sunset last night on Miyajima, and the deal I made was “stay nice until Sunday, and then you can go to pot.” And that’s more or less exactly what happened. Which is too bad, because Fukuoka is supposed to be a hell of a party town, though frankly I don’t know if I had the energy to do anything other than collapse. Needing food, I asked the ryokan-keep for suggestions. “Try Canal City,” he said, referring to the giant mall complex a couple blocks away. “Walk to end of block, turn reft, and rook for rasers.” Look for what? Lasers? “Can’t miss.”

“Yeah, but –”

“Can’t miss it. Raser right.” I know it’s mean to snicker about this kind of thing, and after two weeks you’d think I’d be pretty inured to it, but it was a funny conversation.

He wasn’t kidding. Canal City has managed to fashion itself into something of Fukuoka’s main tourist attraction, which strikes me as a little strange given that it’s nothing but a really big mall. It’s like, if you went to Vancouver, and asked someone for recreational or sightseeing activities, and they said, “Oh, why don’t you head out to Metrotown?” (Whoops! Did that one already!) The effect overall is very North American — kind of like Vegas, and I’m not just saying that because of the (a) SEGA “gaming” parlor (really a thinly veiled casnio, but without the legalized gambling, only you can gamble) and (b) Bellagio-esque water fountain displays. Glen Miller and Peter Gunn. Can’t beat it.

Blew a couple hundred yen playing Japanese video games that don’t make any sense and yet were strangely fun anyway; my favorite, I think, was the one where you have to bang on a taiko drum in synch with dots on the screen. I have no idea what the point is, but if you do it right there’s a nifty beat that emerges. (You can see this game in Lost in Translation.) Several younger Japanese youths were taking their turn on a boxing simulator (put on a glove, throw a punch, and.. well, I don’t know what happens next, since they all got three punches and lost). Finally broke down, after two weeks of seeing signs advertising “Pachincko and Slot” places, and played a little pachincko — the appeal of which, I’m sorry, is totally lost on me. Except for the illegal gambling aspect of it, I mean. How and why an otherwise interesting bunch of people will sit, lab-rat-like at a pachincko terminal for hours is a total mystery. I don’t get it.

I had dinner at a teppan place that also specialized in okonomiyaki, which has been described as the Japanese version of pizza. This is a stupid description. It’s much more like a pancake with a lot of stuff thrown in for good measure. Mine had shrip, squid, shellfish, and something else in it along with the staples of cabbage and other vegetables, and it was very, very good. My last exposure to okonomiyaki came years ago, when I was very young, and I remember it as being way too savory for my tastes back then; either it was badly done, I misremember, or my tastes have changed, because this was awesome. I’m going to have to learn how to make it myself.

Note for potential visitors to Japan: If you really want to impress your waitress and the guy who cooked your food, make a point of telling them, “Kore wa oishii deshita!” before you leave. The waitress’ eyes got about the size of dinner plates, and she bowed very, very deeply. I don’t know why — did they spit in it? Was it supposed to be gross? This puzzles me. (This was also maybe only the second time I’ve wished that you can tip in this country. Which made me realize that back home I tip because I’m expected to, not because I think the service is all that spectacular. The attitude here seems to be “this is my job, and I’m going to do it in as excellent a manner as I can, and I get paid for it so I don’t expect anything extra.” I’m not going to say “in stark contrast to Canada, where…” but by all means feel free to think it. The service is superb, and the food is universally good, so I’ll let you wonder what might warrant special recognition. (Yes, the okonomiyaki was that good. Wow.)

After searching for the better part of a year, I finally found a pair of red shoes. Yes, I had to come halfway around the world, but I found them. I have, for those of you who didn’t know, been looking for a pair of red leather shoes, and when I say “red,” I don’t mean “burgundy.” I mean “red.” Shut up. Anyway, I finally found a pair that were exactly what I wanted, so I went into the shoe store, and pointed. “Uhhh.. shoes o kudasai,” I said, unable to remember the word for shoes. (Which turns out to be kutsu.) “Hai, hai,” the salesdude said. A string of rapid-fire Japanese followed, wherein he probably extolled the features of the shoes, and the viritues of owning them, but that’s just a guess. Then he looked at my feet. His eyes went wide. “Ohhhh! Ashi wa totte mo okii desu yo!” I was pretty sure I knew what he was saying, but felt I needed to make certain, so I gave him a blank look. “Feet!” he managed. “Too big! Not fit too big feet!” He gestured, making the international sign for “huge” with his hands.

Damnit.

Here are some random things I’ve been meaning to write about for a while:

• In Hiroshima I encountered a species of rice boy even more pathetic than the ones we have in Canada. I’m sure you’re familiar with the kids who buy Civics and whatnot and then add 25 pounds of vinyl tape, 8-inch exhaust tail pipes, cut their springs, and generally spend more time making their car look good than worrying about performance. Well, the kind I ran into here is a bike rice boy. He rides a motorbike that looks an awful lot like the crotch-rockets many of my MVA patients seem to ride, except.. there’s something weird about the engine noise. It sounds like it’s coming through a coffee-can muffl–hey, wait a minute, that’s a 50cc engine noise! I have no idea whether this was a 50cc engine or not, but there’s no way it was more than about 150. None at all. I know what those things sound like; this was not it. And then I looked a little more closely and realized that everything on the bike was aftermarket accessory, and moreover didn’t really do anything. (Here’s a tip: I’m pretty sure that having rivets on your exhaust pipe doesn’t help your performance.)
• I’m totally shocked by the amount of weird muzak here. At Hiroshima station I encountered a muzak version of Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground. What the hell? The Japanese seem to be very heavily into lounge music right now; I’ve run into a lot of Sinatra and Tony Bennett, as well as a great deal of 1950s rock hits. One corner of Hiroshima station seems to play a muzaked “Stand By Me” over and over again (that can’t possibly get irritating at all). “Eruvis,” as he is known around here, is also very popular. This confuses me: You’d think they’re going to figure out Jesus Jones next week, but then you realize that it’s not because they’re behind on their music imports — this is a choice.
• Canal City has this thing called “Raumen Stadium” which sounds a lot more like Iron Chef than it is in real life. Seriously, it’s eight ramen noodle stands within about a 50 foot radius of each other, and I would have had dinner there except that the whole place had an awful smell, kind of like simmering pork stock crossed with bleach. I can’t stand the smell of pork stock (which is why I don’t make it) and when you throw bleach into the mix.. yecch. Instant appetite killer. (Later, while wandering around Nagasaki, I encountered the same smell around ramen joints, which makes me think it’s a property of the noodle joints themselves rather than the locale.)
• Something I’m going to miss when I get home: The amount of neon and strobe lighting they have here. I’m sure that if I were epileptic I’d feel differently about this, but the number of stores that use strobes as part of their advertising is great. It’s sparkly! It’s pretty! It’s not nearly as awful as it seems!
• Something else I’m going to miss: Nobody here seems to care if you drink in public. Beer, I mean. There also doesn’t seem to be a prohibition on drinking early in the day — try ordering a beer before noon back home, and see how many dirty looks you get. (I have not, however, tried to publicly drink beer in the morning.) It’s a non-issue here, which is kind of nice, as opposed to a sign of a problem. Even when it’s very clear you’ve been up all night, and have been waiting since you came off-shift at 06:30 for the pub to open at 11:00 so you can have a few before going to bed. Yeah, that explanation doesn’t go over very well. They still think you’re a drunk.

(In theory I was going to post this Sunday night. In theory. My ryokan allegedly had wireless connectivity in the lobby and, sure enough, hallie could find a wireless network. Unfortunately, hallie was unable to route packets over the local network destined for anywhere outside the local network. Also, a DNS server seemed to be missing. So while we could ping the gateway we couldn’t get out over the gateway, which meant that a planned update fell by the wayside. Oh well.)

(And can I just say, in a move that will probably cost me what is left of my h4x0r credibility, that I really do like LiveJournal, enough to pay for it? Sorry, gang.)

One could argue, convincingly, that I came to Japan to take this picture — and that now that I have taken this picture, I can go home. One might even be right in making that argument: Miyajima was set to be the high point of my trip, the thing I was looking forward to most, and visually it did not disappoint.

Miyajima is a lot like Banff. It’s pretty, it has some spectacular natural attractions, and it is overrun with tourists and deer. In particular, the tourists seem to enjoy pestering the wildlife, something that I again question the wisdom of. Canadians know better. There’s a reason it’s called wildlife, after all; teasing deer and foxes does not strike me as a particularly safe thing to do, but I suppose you can’t really argue with the locals, who seem to think that taunting deer is perfectly OK. The deer here are just as bad as they were in Nara, only without the benefit of cute cartoon iconography to ensure you don’t make them angry or jealous.

When I say that Miyajima is overrun by tourists, I mean that in the most literal sense of the term. There were thousands of tourists on the island today, thanks to it being a Sunday and a particularly nice Sunday at that. Most everything on the island is geared towards day trippers, which has some interesting side-effects: Everything shuts down at 17:00. I mean everything. There are no restaurants open on a Sunday night here. The vending machines stop working. I foolishly turned down dinner at my ryokan, thinking that I’d be able to find a meal more cheaply and conveniently somewhere else. Hah! Not so much. It’s now too late to do anything about this, so I guess I’ll just have to cope. Good thing I had a reasonably late lunch.

The local culinary specialty, as befitting a small island in the Seto Sea, is anago: Grilled conger eel. This has a texture and a taste that reminded me a lot of trout. J., you would have really liked this, although the hundreds of tiny bones make it almost impossible for you to forget what you’re eating. You are, apparently, supposed to just eat the bones. They don’t hurt the way fish bones do. I figure that, if nothing else, I got a little extra calcium today. (Anago, for those of you keeping track at home, is way better than unagi. I don’t particularly like unagi; I could eat anago.. well, maybe twice a month, tops.) Miyajima restaurants also do a brisk business in grilled oysters (of all things), and these too are very, very good (if very pricey). I sat next to a quartet of Frenchmen (and women) at lunch, all of whom ordered shrimp tempura — we call this “wussing out” — and all of whom ate it with tartar sauce. I don’t get it.

Something I’m coming to learn about domestic Japanese tourism: The Japanese apparently believe that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing in very large numbers. Tour groups with hundreds of members flooded the island early in the afternoon, and i was left thinking, “Jesus, don’t they ever do anything alone?” I realized the answer was “no, probably not”; this is, after all, a society in which individualism is not exactly considered an especially positive trait. I knew this ahead of time, but had no idea that it would apply to sightseeing. I think the best part of mass tourism is the number of services that have been established to service this demographic — the thing that stands out in my mind is the point on the walkway with benches and a platform for a locally-supplied photographer to take group pictures in front of the floating torii. It seems kind of stupid, but at the same time, I guess it’s a really efficient way to see whatever it is the conventional wisdom says you should see.

Something else I’m coming to learn about domestic tourism in Japan: The Japanese have fabulously good taste, at least in their clothes and architecture and building design. That said, however, they have one glaring blind spot. The inside of those buildings, however, particularly those intended for use as residences, must be full of junk. There is an appallingly large selection of total crap for sale to tourists everywhere I’ve been. At Todai-ji, in the shadow of the giant Daibutsuden, you can buy bottle openers — bottle openers! — with a picture of the Buddha on them. The shops in Miyajima are full of this kind of crap — cheap plastic trinkets to commemorate your visit to one of the three most scenic places in Japan according to whoever). I got some e-mail wondering about what I might be buying for myself, souvenir-wise, and the answer is “very little,” since I’m bringing home all my film and pixels, and that’s more than enough of a souvenir for me. (I notice I’m buying more stuff as time goes on, though, on the theory that perhaps I’ll realize at a later date I didn’t get something for someone I should have, and will then have the ability to fix that problem. If not, hey, I get some cool swag for myself.) Real Japanese, however, don’t seem to have that problem. The kitchier the better. I realize this is probably a horribly unfair generalization, but what can I say? It feels true. Someone has to buying this stuff, and I can’t imagine that many old people from the South come to Miyajima. Plastic katana. Rubber nunchucks. Cheap snow globes. It goes on and on and on.

Miyajima claims (at least, according to a sign I saw) to be the birthplace of the modern rice scoop. If you’ve never been in a proper Japanese kitchen (or even just a kitchen belonging to someone that makes a lot of rice, mine, for instance) before you probably have no idea what this is, so I’ll describe it: It’s like a big spoon, but flat and wide, and used for scooping rice out of the rice cooker and serving it wherever. I honestly don’t think you can make rice without one, but I also don’t think you can make rice without a proper rice cooker, so my judgment may be clouded on this. Miyajima has what they brag is the largest rice scoop in the world — it’s, like, 20 feet long and comes with an informational display, explaining how some local resident once got the bright idea to take a spoon in the shape of a lute and use it to serve rice. I don’t know if I believe this or not — it seems a little wacky to be true — but that’s what they say. It’s like, I dunno, the big hockey stick in Duncan, or the giant easter egg in Vermillion. Why it’s here is a total mystery to me. Needless to say, you can buy commemorative rice scoops in shops all over the island; if I had to pick a souvenir from Miyajima that would describe its souvenir industry, it would be the rice scoop.

(There’s probably some kind of significance to this, but I have no idea what that is, if it is anything at all.)

You ride a two-stage cable car up Mt. Misen. The first stage consists of Rocky Mountain-like gondolas, with inscriptions that ask you to remain calm if the car stops, and emergency radios with severe penalties threatened for misuse. It’s a vertigo-inducing ten minute ride up to the halfway point, where you board a more conventional cable car system with about 30 people who will soon become your close, personal friends. If you’re larger and taller than the average Japanese.. you know where this is going, so I won’t even bother saying anything else.

Up on Mt. Misen I ran into a couple of Red Sox fans from Boston. “Sorry about what happened today, dude,” I said to the guy. Todd got a panicked look on his face. “What happened?” “Arroyo apparently couldn’t make it out of the second, and it was 19-8 for the bad guys in the bottom of the ninth the last time I saw anything, which was a couple of hours ago.” Kristine, his wife, had to talk him down from the cliff. “3-0 in the series. The Sox have got to get their act together.” The word schadenfreude popped into my head, unbidden. Why was I enjoying twisting the knife? Oh, I know why: “Cheer up. At least your team made it into the playoffs. My team never made it out of last place in the division.”

“Oh, are you a Montreal fan?” Kristine asked. Good guess, but wrong, since the ‘Spos did in fact make it out of last place in the NL East (and managed to stay out of the cellar for a while). “No, I’m a Mariners fan.” This ellicited a moan of sympathy; at least they had the grace to commiserate. I had to admit that upon learning the news of Boston’s whuppin’, I was crestfallen. I don’t really want another year of listening to Red Sox fans whine about curses and destiny and who deserves a World Series and who suffers more as a city (remember, sports fans, until the Storm won the WNBA championship last week Seattle hadn’t had a sports championship in anything since the 1970s), but. Boston fans like to pretend their suffering was sung by Homer; the Mariners, by contrast, are among a very select group of teams to have never actually made it to the World Series; the Sox, at least, have 1986 to look back on. Should they actually win it all, Red Sox fans will be totally insufferable. At the same time, as is required of all baseball fans not actually in New York, I hate the Yankees, and anything that causes them to lose will make me happy.

Mt. Misen has an amazing view of the Inland Sea and, off in the distance, of Shikoku, the forgotten fourth main island of the Japanese archipelago. It is home to a colony of monkeys who, unfortunately, were off feeding in the forest when I got there. However, you can look at the signs that ask you to not feed them (so they don’t become junk food addicts), to lock your personal effects up (because these monkeys are kleptos), and to not look them in the eyes (because these monkeys.. go monkey on you when you do something like that). The pictograms are, in true Japanese style, absolutely hilarious. Mary, an attractive single mother of 36 from the Bay Area, and her nine year-old daughter Kaitlyn were disappointed the monkeys were in the forest. “I thought they were supposed to hang out around the cable car station,” Mary said. “It’s too bad they’re not here.” Mary, Katilyn, and I walked along the meandering path up to the summit of Mt. Misen, a 30-minute hike for those with good legs, and much longer for those with bad legs and/or children in tow. We came around a corner, and there, lumbering along on the ground, was a red-faced monkey. Katlyn squealed with excitement. The monkey didn’t think much of this, and ambled right through our little group, disappearing into the woods. I got a couple of good pictures, sadly with the wrong lens attached; after changing for my 100/2 and setting Av mode at f/2.8 — perfect for capturing small primates, you’d think — we saw no more monkeys.

It was the lens change. I know it.

At the bottom of Mt. Misen I ran into a group of US Navy sailors on leave. They were pestering the deer, Japanese style. The guy was trying to get the deer to come over and sniff his hand even though it was empty. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” I said to him. He shrugged. “It’ll be fine. C’mere, deer.” This worked, sort of, but then the deer realized what was happening, got pissed off, and tried to bite him. I don’t think teeth were involved, but the lips of deer are apparently very strong. A lengthy string of US Navy-grade profanity followed.

“I told you it wasn’t nice to tease,” I said. He looked unconvinced. Must have been a city boy.

Itsukushima shrine is open again! Remember how I was complaining it had been damaged in that typhoon (not the one I survived) and was under repair? Well, enough repairs have been done to allow visitors back in, though the scaffolding and tarps (a) made me think of leaky condo fix projects back home and (b) wrecked just about every really good scenic vantage point from a photographic perspective. It is easily the coolest shrine I’ve been to so far in Japan — Miyajima was, is, considered sacred and back in the Bad Old Days commoners were not allowed to set foot on the island, so in order to visit the shrine they had to alight from boats straight onto the shrine itself, which is built on pilings in a small harbor. The torii guards the sea approach. When the tide is up, the shrine really does look like it’s floating on the water, which is a very cool effect (albeit a damn hard one to capture on film; all the pictures I took make the shrine look like exactly what it is — a shrine built on pilings). The sacredness of Miyajima had some interesting historical effects. For a long time, no one was allowed to be born or to die on the island, so people in
danger of doing either were rushed back over to Miyajima-guchi where they could do their dying or birthing in a not-so-sacred place. Even today, there are no graveyards on Miyajima — which is strange, considering that 22,000 people make this tiny, 31-square kilometer island home. I found no evidence of a hospital, but I did see two local ambulances.

It’s a little like.. I dunno, Pender Island crossed with Banff and kitschified about 200%.

But it’s very, very pretty.

As I write this, the Seibu Lions are beating the Chunichi Dragons by a score of 6-3. Daisuke Matsuzaka is on the hill for the Lions. I’ll say this right now, even though my qualifications as a scout are suspect, at best: He’s the real deal. If he gets posted, the bidding for this guy is going to get stupid, and the team who wins the negotiating rights is going to be very happy with their investment (assuming he stays healthy; I don’t know enough about the mechanics of throwing the gyroball and Matsuzaka’s use patterns to say anything intelligent on the subject, not that anything else I’m saying on this subject is especially well-informed). The shuto is a vicious pitch, and Matsuzaka’s seems particularly nasty. You know how Barry Zito’s got that curve that comes in nice and high and then just rolls off the table? That’s what the shuto is like. Only worse, because it breaks away from a right-handed hitter so sharply
that they’re swinging at stuff that isn’t there anymore. There’s one strikeout I watched in super-slow-motion on the NHK replay and I swear to god the batter should have made contact. It was like that movie, It Happens Every Spring. Ball’s there, bat’s there, but suddenly the bat head is all the way around and the ball is in the catcher’s mitt, and you have no idea what the hell just happened.

Whoa. Nasty, boy, nasty.

Here’s something else: I haven’t watched a whole lot of TV since I got here. My hotel in Kyoto had CNN, which was nice, but it was CNN and thus prone to driving me nuts. (When I checked in I got Larry King interviewing what’s-her-pickle, the teacher who slept with her student. I don’t want to watch this! But it’s in English, so I did. Mary Kay Letourneau, that’s who it was.) But aside from that, there hasn’t been anything to watch. The Japan Series is the first time I’ve had the TV on in the same way I might have it on back home. Baseball is baseball, but I can’t understand the announcers or read the on-screen graphics. I have no idea what the consensus on this broadcast crew is, but if they’re as bad as, say, Rex Hudler and Tim McCarver, being unable to understand them might be a good thing.

(I should point out that even that isn’t as big a deal as it seems: When something looks like “[bunch of dead bugs] .320 [more dead bugs] 38 [more dead bugs] 64” it’s pretty obvious what you’re looking at,
and even if you can’t tell what the HR and RBIs are, this is still a player with a little pop.)

(Of course, in writing that, I jinxed him. He gave up back-to-back singles, the second of which advanced the lead runner to third. On a 2-0 pitch to the third batter, Matsuzaka surrendered a three-run home run to deep right, which tied the game at 6-6. Still, he looked good doing it.)

Fukuoka tomorrow. Nagasaki Tuesday. Home Friday. I almost can’t wait.

I’ll be leaving for Miyajima in the morning, beginning the third-to-last leg of my trip before turning around in Nagasaki and coming back to Tokyo on Thursday next week. Unfortunately, this also marks the end of my guaranteed Internet access — while I’m sure I’ll be able to find access, I cannot make any promises as to my ability to update on a regular basis. Given how hard typing on Japanese keyboards has proven for me I’m likely to shy away from that, so unless I can stick a flash drive into a USB port and upload entries that way, you may not hear from me until I hit my hotel in Narita four days from now. Think happy thoughts for me, OK?

Meanwhile, if there’s anything that’s really pressing — like, say, requests for stuff to be brought back, or messages, or whatever — you’d better phone. (080-3451-3828, for those of you who aren’t writing things down, figure out how to dial it on your own, ok?)

G’night.

Part I: About Last Night

It was my fault, really. Just shy of two weeks in-country, and I still haven’t gotten the hang of crossing the street. The best advice is PJ O’Rourke’s tip for driving in England — think of yourself as a well-dressed socialist: “Keep left, look right.” For the first couple of days I repeated this mantra to myself, and even felt comfortable enough with the traffic and pedestrian patterns here that I was happy to try jaywalking (some intersections that are signal-controlled here would barely qualify as a driveway back home, and I’ve been sorrily tempted to try jumping across rather than walking). But from time to time I’d get to an intersection where traffic would be coming from an unexpected direction, i.e., it was coming the wrong way. You step off the curb, as a North American, and you instinctively look left. It’s a kind of operant conditioning at work.

How it happened would be funny if not for the potential for serious injury. The Japanese drive like maniacs in the city; it’s a total miracle there aren’t more traffic fatalities here. (I say this knowing nothing about the incidence of road mayhem on Japanese highways.) I was crossing Aioi-dori, standing at one of the trolley platforms in the middle of the street, on the wrong side of the road as far as I’m concerned, and waiting for the light to change. It turns out I was standing just a little too close to the edge for safety’s sake, because a Hiroshima municipal bus came through the intersection at about 10 km/h. The mirror, sticking out from the side, caught me in the left shoulder.

I should stress I wasn’t hurt. The impact, however, spun me around and knocked me to the ground, to much gasping by the assembled knot of pedestrians. The bus stopped immediately, the driver hopped out, and much apologizing ensued from both me and him. Within minutes the police had arrived, summoned by.. I don’t know who, actually, but their response time — on foot! — puts Victoria PD’s to shame (that’s assuming there’s actually a member from the traffic section on, and they’re not too busy handling calls, and there aren’t injuries, and they actually feel like attending). Nobody spoke English, which made the whole thing hilarious; my biggest concern, and the thing I wanted to make clear to everyone, was that I was perfectly fine and didn’t need an ambulance or a trip to the hospital. I made the international sign for “OK” (note: not actually international; don’t try this in some parts of the middle east or you’re liable to get shot), waved my arm around, did some range-of-motion checks that were partly to demonstrate that I was fine and partly to establish to my own satisfaction that I was fine. I got a stern lecture from the senior police officer in what I’m sure was the importance of looking the correct (i.e., right) way before crossing the street. Like I said, it could have been a lot worse.

Part II: After The Fire

Here’s a good way to spend a day in Peace Memorial Park while the sun is out: Wake up. Realize feet do not want to move and that your body feels the way your 84 year-old patients who’ve broken their hips probably feel. Marvel at how if you were home you’d seriously think about spending the day on the couch watching football (or coercing other people into giving you backrubs). Spend too long in the shower with the water cranked up hot enough to make you look like a scalded and angry lobster while the 800 mg of ibuprofen you swallowed works its magic. Get dressed, pull your photo gear together, and leave the hotel. Walk the two kilometers or so to Peace Memorial Park (only about 1,000 meters as the crow flies but you can’t walk that way). Finish off two rolls of film by playing with deliberate underexposure and trying to punch the contrast on some B&W pictures way, way up there. (Here’s a hint: You’ll need to dial in at least one more stop overexposure than the TTL metering thinks you need when you’re working with a 25 filter to get its full effect — your camera’s meter gets confused because of spectral sensitivity. So set ISO 250 with 400 film and fire away.) Run into two Russian girls from St. Petersburg who want you to take their pictures, then spend an hour wandering around the park with them, chatting in Brokenglish and Frussian.

I thought about how strange it was to be in Peace Memorial Park, in this city once deestroyed by a nuclear weapon, wandering around with Russians. I couldn’t help think that twenty years ago their government would probably have been happy to blow my country up on general principles. (Anyone who thought Canada would have gotten out of that war unscathed was an idiot.) This was Lena and Natalia’s first trip to Asia, and they were having fun, even if their Japanese was worse than my Russian — which they were surprised to hear pop out of my mouth. It’s always fun to spot the tourists babbling to each other in another language, and then go up and say a few words.

(Here’s a mean trick I’ve started to play: Young Japanese kids figure out very quickly that you’re not from around here, and so every time I’ve sat down to watch them play, or walk through a park, I inevitably get yelled at in English. “How’s it goin’?!” is usually what they say. For a while I replied in English and gave a thumbs-up, but lately I’ve taken to replying either in Japanese or — better yet — Spanish. They have no idea what’s going on. I’d say the Spanish is more fun, but what do I know?)

My new Russian friends were, like every Russian I’ve ever known, fatalistic about their world. I asked Lena about Chechnya, Beslan, terrorism, and what she thought of Putin. “Putin’s a thug,” she said. “But what else are we going to do? It will either work or it will get us all killed.” Natalia piped up. “What good is a government that can’t protect you?” I opened my mouth to offer the standard libertarian reply to that comment, then closed it because I didn’t see how it could have made any difference. I can make that argument precisely because it is based on a history that these women didn’t share — Russians, Lena pointed out (in case I didn’t know), don’t have a tradition of democracy or freedom. Natalia was almost ready to write the whole democracy experiment off, but Lena was trying to stay optimistic.

“I worry,” Lena said. “But I don’t want to die, and I don’t want other people to die, either. The communists kept this sort of thing under control; it’s not hard to think they might be better.” I said I couldn’t really comment one way or another. “The only thing I know is what has worked for my country, and we’ve managed to do OK for ourselves by it — we’ve never had a terrorist attack, and aside from border skirmishes with the Americans, we don’t get attacked by other countries.” The women were surprised to hear about that, so I told them about the series of small wars British and American forces fought over Canada during the 19th century. I couldn’t tell whether it impressed them or not.

“Perhaps the reason no one attacks you,” Natalia said when I had finished, “is because you’re just not that important.” I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not, but she probably had a point.

Lena got hungry so I aimed the girls in the direction of the Sogo department store (“go up to the seventh floor”) and walked over to the Cenotaph, a saddle-shaped arch over a coffin that contains the names of all confirmed victims of the bombing, as well as an inscription I found oddly moving: “Let all souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.” Many of the smaller memorials in the park were about allowing souls to make the transition from this world into the next; I found the Korean Worker’s Monument especially telling in that regard, talking about the need of “the souls of our compatriots, brought to misery through force, [being] able to rest in peace.” How true, I thought. I shot some pictures and thought that perhaps my presence and incessant moving around was somehow a distraction from the solemnity of the place, but every time it came to mind I was confronted by Japanese tourists snapping pictures with their cameraphones or posing and waving in front of the arch, and promptly felt better about it.

Tracy saw me changing lenses and film on the steps in front of the Cenotaph and came over to talk. She was 24, from Eugene, and lonely. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone in almost a week!” she complained. I commiserated and told her about my ecstasy on arriving in Kyoto to find other Canadians to talk to. “I flew into Kyoto on Monday, and I’m still not used to this place.” How long was she here for? “A month,” she said. “I’m starting to think that was a mistake. It gets better, right?” She was confused by the culture shock — after having spent her 19th summer backpacking around Europe, she expected Japan to be a breeze, and was surprised to discover how much harder it was to survive here. “At least in Europe it’s basically the same alphabet, and if all else fails most people there at least understand English.” Tracy more or less repeated every complaint I had when I got to Tokyo, and I assured her that things do, in fact, get easier as time goes on.

We walked over to the Children’s Memorial. Tracy had some origami paper and she showed me how to fold a crane (I’ve never been able to do it, and promptly forgot five minutes later), which we left at the base of the memorial itself. Like most kids of the nuclear age, Tracy had been exposed to Sadako Sasaki’s story at an early age — in elementary school — and she and her classmates had at the time spent a week folding cranes to be sent to Hiroshima. So many cranes arrive, apparently, that the city has erected bus shelter-type booths to hold them all, and maintains a registry of donations. I pawed through them, looking for cards and tags to give clues to their origins but gave up after I realized I didn’t really care — the fact that so many people thought it was important was enough for me.

Tracy suggested we head over to the museum; we split the cost of an audio guide and wandered around for two hours looking at the exhibits. My guide book — well, all the guide books — will talk about how powerful the museum is, and how moving the displays are, and it’s true, but for me the saddest moments were the ones involving the personal effects of the victims. In the same way that the most moving part of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington are the small offerings left by friends and family at the wall (because they so clearly mean something to everyone involved even though the connection may not be obvious to the rest of us), the preserved possessions of those who died tell a different, more personal story than the physics or the chronology do. I was OK with it all until I came across Shinichi Tetsutani’s tricycle. He was almost four that morning, and had been riding his favorite toy in front of his house when the bomb fell. He died two days later, and his father felt that he was too young to be buried alone in a grave far from home, so Nobou buried his son in the backyard with his tricycle and helmet. Forty years later, in 1985, Shinichi’s remains were moved to the Tetsutani family grave, and Nobou donated the trike and helmet to the museum, where, in 2004, they managed to seriously screw me up for about ten minutes. Tracy caught up to me in this state and we stood there for a while, looking at the tricycle. I couldn’t explain it. She squeezed my arm and nodded, once.

You need a hug when you’re finished with the place.

The museum does a good job of showing what life was like that morning, and what it’s been like since. The parts about the reconstruction of Hiroshima are nothing short of remarkable — the speed with which the city was rebuilt, the heroism of those who rushed to help, the horrors of what they saw. (A part of me wonders what sort of stories are told about, say, the aftermath of the firestorms in Dresden or Tokyo, whether they are significantly different from the ones told here or not.) Especially well-done — well, ok, from a layman’s perspective — is the section on the physical and medical effects of the bomb. A very cool display explains radioactivity by letting you play with a G-M counter and a 37 kBq strontium-90 source. “Is this safe?” Tracy wanted to know. I pointed at the sign on the display that said it had been carefully designed to make it perfectly safe. “Yeah, but how do you know for sure,” she said, not really trusting anything with the word “radioactive” attached to it.

Me, I don’t worry about this stuff. “Strontium’s a beta-emitter,” I said. “You can shield against beta quite nicely with a few milimeters of Plexiglass. Which is what this is.” Tap tap tap. She was unconvinced. The display, though, was fun; you could move the sensing tube closer or further away from the source, and watch the count go up and down (a very good demonstration of the inverse square law, maybe the best one I’ve ever seen — actually, come to think of it, it’s the only one I’ve ever seen, since I’ve only ever been taught the inverse square law mathematically). Next to that was a description of how fogged x-ray film in the vault at Red Cross Hospital was instrumental in proving that the blast had been nuclear in origin.

(A very good book could be written about the work of Japanese scientists in the wake of the bombing who tried to figure out exactly what had happened. There’s a story I once heard about how they analyzed the fallout soon after the blast and determined, correctly, that it was impossible for the United States to produce enough U-235 to make more than one bomb every six months or so. It was just their bad luck that the Nagasaki bomb used Pu-239 instead. I have no idea whether this story is true or not, but it’s interesting nonetheless.)

A chunk of part of the museum (not a large enough part, in my opinion) is given over to the medical effects of radiation, including a lengthy explanation of the keloid problem in bomb survivors and what happens when a fetus is exposed to a lot of radiation (microcephaly with developmental disabilities, primarily). Cross-sections of keloids are on display, much as they would be in a pathology collection; the most frightening thing was the anterior section of what looked like T10 to L5 or so (I couldn’t tell exactly). Sliced down the middle it’s supposed to show what depressed bone marrow looks like. I doubt 99% of the people visiting the exhibit would be able to tell you the difference — but I could. Normal bone marrow looks like jelly. This thing looked like a sponge, the result of the hematapoietic cells having been destroyed. The micro slides were even worse — I’e seen some really depleted marrow samples, but this was something else. We’re talking about nearly complete suppression. Spooky.

One part that I would have liked to explore more (but coulding, owing to a language barrier) was the narratives told by the survivors. What stories do they tell? How is this event depicted in art? There were Japanese-language videos and animations available, but no English translations. Which is too bad, because the small fragments I did see made me think there were fascinating stories inside.

The museum’s message, over and over again, is that nuclear weapons are bad, and that we’ll all be better off without them. It’s an overly simple message, but one that’s hard to disagree with anyway. I was thankful that the museum wasn’t a lengthy denunciation of nuclear energy as a whole (though there were people on the bridge leading to the park who were happy to add place names like “Chornobyl” and “Tokaimura” to “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” in an all-encompassing complaint about nuclear). I mentioned this to Tracy, who seemed surprised that otherwise seemingly sensible people could be enthusiastic about nuclear energy. “Even if you set the power generating issue aside,” I said, “I’m willing to bet you that nuclear has saved more lives than it has cost.”

“How do you figure?”

“Think about all the applications nuclear has in medicine — everything from cardiac stress testing to thyroid scanning to cancer therapy to the simple x-ray is derived from the same science that made what happened here possible. It’s just technology.”

She conceded the point. “I never thought about it in those terms before.”

“Most people don’t,” I said. “Nuclear medicine is one of those jokes — two words that should never go together. But there are some very smart and very talented people who are making thousands of lives better because we figured out how to use the power of the atom. It’s not all weapons and power reactors, even though that’s what gets the press. But ask anyone who has had their cancer sent into remission by radiation therapy what they think of it!”

We walked over to the National Peace Memorial Hall, just northeast of the museum. Weirdly, I liked this place better — it wasn’t so interested in telling the overreaching story of the bomb as it was in telling the individual stories of the bomb. A beautifully designed hall of remembrance is your first introduction to the hall, with an exit leading to a 3×4 bank of video monitors. Each monitor shows nine pictures, nine victims, and the images change constantly. It’s brilliantly done. You get a pamphlet when you walk in, and there are scanners attached to terminals where you can scan the bar code and find out about “your” victim; mine was a 30 year-old woman who was caught out in the open 1,500 meters from the hypocenter and who died three days later. You can search the database of victims, and I learned that 12 Sugimotos perished that day (this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since it’s not exactly an uncommon surname here). Upstairs, more terminals tell more stories; I thought, again, that the most remarkable stories were the ones of the people who survived the blast by being far away, and who then streamed into the city to render aid — the soldier who found a crying four year-old and reunited her with her mother after a week of carrying her around on his back, the weatherman for the Japanese Navy who was pressed into service tending to the wounded and who developed problems later in life and concealed the fact that he had been at the bombing, the doctors and nurses who worked frantically in the face of futility to save those who could be saved, and to ease the pain of those who could not. Strangely, many of these stories are told in a voice that almost suggests embarassement — the equivalent of “you’re welcome” in Japanese is do itashimashite, which literally translates to “what have I done to deserve your thanks?” Many of these stories are told with that kind of phrasing in mind — they don’t seem to think they did anything heroic or amazing in the face of that kind of suffering.

Tracy was getting tired so we parted company at this point. I wished her luck on her travels northward; she thanked me for an enjoyable afternoon. I walked back past the A-Bomb Dome, past the hypocenter, and thought about what I had seen. This entire area had been completely destroyed, knocked flat and the rubble burned, killing thousands. How do I reconcile what I’ve seen with what I’m experiencing right now?

Part III: Ceremonies of Light and Dark

I disappeared underground to Sogo with this stuff on my mind, wondering about what it meant, and thinking about how strange it was to be in one of only two cities destroyed by a nuclear weapon. The abstract lessons of the Cold War, the clinically detached nature of physics, the mechanical precision of the engineering seemed to stand in stark contrast to what I had seen, and to the reality of being here. I bought dinner, walked underground and emerged into the night on Aioi-dori again. The sun sets fast here; I had gone underground with the sun low on the horizon, and twenty minutes later it was gone. I thought about how this spot, 500 meters from the hypocenter, would not have been a good place to be (although perhaps being underground might have offered some measure of protection — then again, maybe not). And I thought about how everything around me was very, very new.

And then it hit me: Everything around me was new. Atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, if you didn’t know you were standing in Hiroshima you’d never be able to tell. Sixty years is not all that long; it’s well within living memory, and the re-emergence of Hiroshima into a modern Japanese city, with all the bright lights and enthusiasm that implies, is not something that happened recently — it’s been in progress for a while. This city was flattened by a terrible, terrible thing.. and it has been reborn into something bigger, better, brighter. The people who live here do not seem to dwell on what happened, because the past is the past and it cannot be changed anymore. Life for them moved on long ago; Hiroshima residents worry about the future and the mayor complains at lengths every time a new nuclear test is conducted because the memory will exist forever.. but while the past seems to inform their approach to the present, and their outlook for the future, it does not define either.

Things change, it’s true. But we change too. We adapt, we learn, and we cope; life goes on, inexorably, unavoidably. We feel pain, but that pain fades; we suffer wounds, but the wounds heal, and we are able to talk about them, examine the circumstances that lead to them, work to prevent them in the future. The bombing was considered to be a knockout punch: It was said, in 1945, that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for 75 years. Some thought the city itself would never recover.

The 1.1 million people who live here would beg to differ on the latter.
And as to the former.. the hypocenter — this city’s Ground Zero — is surrounded by some of the lushest urban greenery I’ve ever seen anywhere.

They said the world changed forever in New York on 11 September, 2001. But the world changed forever here in Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945, too. I have a hard time believing the world that emerged from that event is worse than what had come before.

Lena and Natalia were right: This is a damn scary time to be alive. But we’re going to get through it. We’ve been through worse.

We’ll be OK.

You know what this is, of course. It’s impossible to be alive in 2004 and not know what happened 160 meters from the Industrial Promotion Hall of Hiroshima Prefecture on 6 August, 1945. This is, arguably, the seminal image of the first half of the 20th century; the starkness of what it represents meant that we spent the second half of that century trying to prevent it from happening again somewhere else. I walked down to the river tonight, sat in the park around the A-Bomb Dome, took pictures, and drank my Coke. I thought about what had happened here, and how strange it seems — how distant it is. Hiroshima is a modern, bustling Japanese city — neon, cars, sleek hotels with hardwood floors, funky fashions and hundreds of restaurants. 59 years ago standing in this spot might not have been such a good idea. Yet here we are. That light standard just off from the middle of the picture? It’s left field at Hiroshima Municipal Stadium.

I walked around thinking about tragedy and its effect on a city, on a nation, on a culture. I thought about 9/11, arguably one of the defining moments of my generation. (I would not be one of the people who would argue it, but work with me here.) There are those who would suggest we cannot forget what happened that day, but I think what they really mean is that they want us to dwell on it, pick at the scab, refuse to let it heal. They have motives behind these arguments, agendas that require pain to advance without complaint. For those who lost loved ones in the catastrophe life will never be the same, of course, but we move on, as Tennyson said, as the world darkens around us. What we choose to do, and how we choose to honor the dead, is entirely up to us.

Hiroshima might not be a bad place to find inspiration. You’d think that with all this tragedy — a couple orders of magnitude more dead than 9/11 — Hiroshima might be a sad place to visit. (There will undoubtedly be someone who thinks I’m trivializing one incident or the other by tying them together. The point isn’t what happened, the point is how we deal with grief. Loss is loss, no matter how it occurred.) I’d be lying if I said the Dome and Peace Memorial Park weren’t moving in the dark, thought-provoking in their own ways. But here’s something I’m willing to bet $10 you didn’t know: On a Friday night in early fall, in 2004, these two places are the make-out spots for Hiroshima teenagers.

Little cats roam the park. (J., one of them looked like a small version of Hilti, and about as affectionate.) Couples spoke softly in the dark alcoves, away from the light standards, in the shadow of this most iconographic of buildings. From the Heiwa-Ohashi Bridge came folk music, guitars and taiko drums and harmonicas (you’d think this combination wouldn’t work, but amazingly it does). I heard kids laughing and racing around, I saw men and women walking together, enjoying maybe the finest evening since I got to Japan. And I realized I was watching the re-born Hiroshima — mindful of the past, aware of the past, but beyond it at the same time. So far as I could tell, I was the only person whose purpose in visiting the Park and the Dome was.. visiting the Park and the Dome. Everyone else — I mean everyone else — was either crossing through the park on their way somewhere else, or walking with someone and laughing, or engaged in the intricate exploration of another person’s tonsils, or doing the things that have brought joy to humankind from the beginning of our understanding of joy.

I wondered if I’d see couples flocking to Freedom Park (or whatever they’re going to name it) to make out within my lifetime.

Hikari 367 left Himeji this afternoon at 15:30, on the nose, as you would expect. I started the day up on Mt. Shosha, home to Engyoji, a collection of Buddhist temples and sub-temples up in the hills of Hyogo-ken northwest of Himeji. It was a nice way to start the day, albeit somewhat inauspiciously — my bus managed to hit a small car on the way out of town. There was little damage, and no injuries (and I felt perfectly happy staying where I was — out of the way), and it only delayed our arrival at the Mt. Shosha ropeway by about 20 minutes. Searching the depths of my memory I’m reasonably sure there was some kind of Buddhist rite I could have performed that would have canceled out the effects of the minor MVA this morning — it would have saved me some considerable pain later in the day.

I know I said I was going to try taking it easy for a couple of days but the trip up to Engyoji made that kind of impossible: While a bus is provided for wusses, I declined to wait and started walking. Up the steep 800 meter path up the side of the mountain to the main offices of the temple. It turns out this was (a) stupid and (b) the wrong way to go, though it was very scenic. My leg started bothering me almost immediately. Many breaks were necessary. Also, I need to get in shape before climbing mountains. Ugh.

Maniden was the focal point of my visit to Engyoji. There are a number of other world historical sites within the temple complex but by the time I made it up the east path I was too spent to consider hiking anywhere else. Like Kiyomizu in Kyoto, it was built without nails; unlike Kiyomizu, it dates from the last century since the thing burned down in the early 1900s. The cablecar attendant told me that Tom Cruise had come to Engyoji to film part of The Last Samurai though I’ll be damned if I can figure out where he did it, or what part was filmed there. There were some truly neat moments, such as the arrival of a dozen pilgrims, faces flushed with the exertion of climbing up the mountain, who then climbed up to Maniden and soon thereafter began chanting so loudly you could almost hear it echo across the valley.

Worth a visit, but don’t bring your broken body.

Koko-en, the gardens I wanted to visit yesterday while the light was good: I’m really torqued that they closed when they did, because it would have been so good then. In the middle of the day they were still beautiful, but would have been a thousand times better with the liquid gold pouring down. There isn’t too much to say about the gardens itself, except that Koko-en is unique in that the nursery is included on the walking tour and is housed in the former samurai quarters of Himeji-jo.

I got to Hiroshima in the late afternoon after about an hour on the train. While waiting for my train in Himeji, a northbound 500 series Nozomi saw fit to rocket through the station, creating its own weather patterns in its wake. You have no idea. Not only are these things fast, they’re loud, too; the sneak up on Himeji station and then blast through at full speed — if you’re looking in the wrong direction, as I was, you miss their approach. Suddenly there’s this thunderclap, and a silver arrow goes flying across your field of vision, and is gone even before you realize it. My one sorrow about the Japan Rail Pass is that it isn’t valid on Nozomi services, so I don’t get to experience this from the inside out. Those 500 series trains look sweet.

My hotel is housed in a bare concrete building on the banks of the Kyobashi-gawa river, where it meets up with the Enko-gawa. I have a very nice view of both from my window. The hotel’s Web site describes it as having high-speed Internet in all rooms, which had me fired up. Upon arrival I searched high and low for an RJ45 jack and couldn’t find one. I was ready to be pissed, until hallie poked me and said, “Hey, I’ve found a wireless network: FLEX-4F. Do you want to connect?” Behold! The hotel has configured floor-by-floor WiFi.

Sweeeeet.

Things That Bug Me About Japan:

1. Garbage. You would not believe how much packaging you get with everything here. I bought some gyoza at Isetan the other day. The plastic tray was wrapped in paper, as you would wrap a Christmas present. The box was then put into a paper bag, which was sealed. The paper bag was then put into a plastic bag. I’m shocked the clerk didn’t put my hashi into their own little envelope (I guess the fact that they’re hermetically sealed kind of precludes that).
2. Everything talks to you. Everything. The escalator. The elevator. The ATM. The subway. The bus. The shinkansen. The truck backing up in the street. In theory, this is great. In practice, not so much. Why? Because you tune it out. Granted I’d never understand what it was saying anyway (though I’ve gotten to the point where I can pick out the important gist of an announcement; anything that sounds like, “suniwa blah blah blah” is warning you of an upcoming stop and if you want to get off, get ready), but the fact that it’s incessant and everywhere means I don’t notice anything. Frankly I wouldn’t be surprised to discover a talking toiler by the time I leave. (“Thank you for using me as a waste receptacle,” maybe.) At the same time, I wish I could speak Japanese so I could figure what the hell the escalator is telling me — it’s warning me about something, but what I don’t know. (“Abunai desu kara” == it’s dangerous. Great! Thanks! What’s dangerous?!)
3. If you smoke, Japan is the country for you. Since I don’t, it drives me bananas. My hotel in Tokyo was awful for this — the hallways, poorly ventilated, reeked of cigarette smoke. They were too warm, too, which really didn’t help matters at all.
4. Vertical space. It’s no surprise that contemporary Japan designs for small spaces, horizontally speaking, but what baffles me is the need to compress vertically, too. I’ve lost count of the number of doors I have nearly hit my head on; this morning, in the shower in my hotel in Himeji, I discovered I barely had room to work the shampoo through my hair. WTF?

Things I Will Miss About Japan

1. Neon and concrete. We really don’t have enough of this back home.
2. Austere aestheticism. My hotel in Hiroshima is sleek in that bare concrete and strong primary colors way that looks so good on film. Though small, my room has — get this — hardwood floors. You get this all over the place, just with varying degrees of modernity.
3. Ridiculously convenient public transport. Okay, maybe just in Tokyo.
4. Edible food at the Kwik-E-Mart. I’m not joking: I had a perfectly servicable donburi at the FamilyMart this evening (this is what happens when you stay out past the closing time of most restaurants). Try that at 7-11.

There’s probably more I will think up as time goes on, for both lists, but it’s like midnight and I want to go to bed.

Part I: First Impressions

You first see it from the train as you’re coming in from Nishi-Akashi. It sort of pops out of nowhere, on the right side, peeking from behind the hills. It disappears behind the buildings as the 300-series Shinkansen slides into Himeji station; you don’t see it again until you’re about halfway up Otemae street. On especially fine days, it stands out in sharp relief against a blue sky, the white walls brilliant with reflected light, the black tile roof cutting an edge in the air. Himeji-jo is probably the one castle you need to see if you go to Japan — it is the “canonical” castle, the one that everyone points to as an example of Japanese castle construction. And it a damned impressive example it is.

There have been fortifications in Himeji since 1333. Norimura Akamatsu built the first fort; his son, Sadanori built up the surrounding area. The original castle was built sometime in the middle of the 16th century (no one is precisely sure when), and the first of the three moat systems was dug in 1601. (The outer moat, for those who are interested, would have been about where the train station is today. It’s roughly a 1,200m walk from the train station to the castle. You figure it out.) The castle, as it stands today, was completed in 1618 and survived fire, earthquakes, World War II bombings, and UN oversight.

As you walk through the buildings and the courtyards you see the defensive systems of the castle stone-throwing holes and weapons racks everywhere, hidden rooms from which soldiers could launch ambushes on unsuspecting invaders, sluiceways for boiling water and oil), you’re struck by a powerful sense of connection with the past. Even before you reach the castle itself, you’re reminded of it — the massive earthworks that formed some of the outer walls sit next to shops, penned in by sidewalks and bounded by streets. You don’t really think of it until the sign you’re standing next to draws your attention to it: Lots of cities use rock formations as decorations on street corners. And then you realize you’re staring at what was a wall.

I spent a good chunk of the afternoon thinking about how humanity communicates with itself through time. The castle is a good example — some of the basic fortifications that Akamastu built in 1333 are still here, albeit in highly modified forms. I wonder what he would have thought, had he known that nearly 700 years later people would look back on his accomplishments in awe. My guess is that he probably wouldn’t have thought anything — because it wouldn’t have even been a consideration. Humans have a habit of building things because they serve some useful purpose other than telling a story; that they survive well into the future, and tell a story along the way, is beside the point. Call it a side effect. I’m a little fuzzy on the specifics right now but ours might be the first era where we build monuments for the sake of building monuments — for purely secular reasons, if you will. Every other major civilization built monuments for some other purpose.

This has been something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the past two years or so. We build monuments that last hundreds of years but with a few notable exceptions they are not designed to communicate a specific message; we don’t worry about telling future generations stories through the things that we build. Instead we hope that any message we have is passed down through oral traditions and mythology (like religion). I thought about the Waste Isolation Pilot Project marker problem — humanity’s first conscious effort to communicate with itself, for ten thousand years into the future, my generation’s enduring monument to itself.

Himeji-jo, maybe more than the shrines and temples, harkens back to something that doesn’t really exist anymore. You can practice Shinto or Buddhism today, and so the shrines and temples have a reason to exist today. But you can’t be a feudal lord in Japan anymore. 1868 changed all that, when the whole Shogunate system went up in smoke with the Meiji restoration. All that’s left now are places like Himeji-jo — that generation’s enduring monument to itself, for the future. An accidental monument.

Part II: Not Just A Burget Joint In New Jersey

I decided that with my banged-up body I needed to take it easy today. No more long hikes through the city, no whirlwind attempts to make it to every site I wanted to see. Instead, I woke up in my own time, checked out of my hotel, and wandered around the Kyoto station area for about an hour while I waited for my train, Hikari 307 (incidentally, the very same train I came to Kyoto on).

We arrived in Himeji under threatening skies. There were dark clouds on the western horizon and I thought, “Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if I lost another day on this trip because of crappy weather?” By the time I walked the 450 linear meters from the shinkansen platform to the front of the station it was pouring rain. Thank god my hotel was within rock-throwing distance and a good portion of the walk was covered; I checked in, dropped my bags, and contemplated my next move. The idea of spending the afternoon in the hotel was not hugely appealing, though I have to confess I was OK with it if that’s what was going to happen. It seemed strange to me to think that when I left Kyoto it had been warm, a little windy, and sunny, and now, after an hour’s train ride, it looked like it wanted to hurl lightning bolts — but then I realized that an hour’s train ride on a shinkansen gets you about 270 kilometers away from where you started. Did I mention that those suckers are fast? They’re fast.

I kept poking my head out the window every 10 minutes to see what the weather was doing. By 14:45 the rain had stopped and the clouds had parted, giving rise to what turned out to be.. well, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

It was the weather that I had packed for. Cool enough that the fleece jacket I packed didn’t seem like such a stupid idea; warm enough that when it came time to do some serious hiking it was OK to take the jacket off. If you could find a sunny spot out of the wind, it was very warm. Just right for the middle of October, if you ask me. Scattered clouds remained after the departure of the rainstorm, and I decided that I’d walk up towards the castle. The good bits closed at 16:30, and it takes about 90 minutes to do the whole thing, so I figured I’d try my luck.

And how.

A word about Himeji: My guidebooks describe this as a drab town of about 480,000. I can’t really disagree. Himeji lacks the punch even of towns I’ve seen from the train. Pulling in I thought, “I planned to stay here overnight why, again?” But then I went and walked around, and the place has a definite charm to it. For starters, it’s not maddeningly big, and we’ve already established I don’t like maddeningly big. It exists on a scale that is immediately understandable — what you see is essentially what you get. Weirdly enough, my thought, walking up Otemae, was that it reminded me of Lethbridge. Not in terms of size, of course, but in terms of feel — the wide, spacious sidewalks, the low-rise buildings, the small shops with the faded signage. It’s not Japan’s classiest place, but it is a functional one, and it may well be more representative of average life in this country than Tokyo. (Did somebody call for a sweeping generalization?)

I like it here, even if I can’t quite put my finger on why.

I have a theory, though. At 16:15, while I was wandering around Himeji castle, something magical happened. I had come damn close to praying for this, since it had been fricking hard to come by during this trip. I’ve had haze, I’ve had overcast skies, I’ve had pouring rain. Until this happened, I was beginning to give up hope.

What happened was this: I poked my head out of a window in the main tower of Himeji-jo and my breath caught in my throat. It was the light — the absolute best kind of light for a photographer that doesn’t involve getting up at sunrise or breaking out the tripod. I have come to know this light well. It is the fall light of Victoria, the kind we get maybe two or three times a month from September through to early December, a golden, pure, radiant light that makes everything glow. Light, so muted for me on this trip, so uncooperative and harsh, had decided to cooperate for one beautiful hour. I couldn’t have been happier. I would have been happier had Koko-en, the park next to the castle, been open; the fact that it closed its gates at 16:30, just as the light was getting good, kinda honked me off. But that was OK. I got the pictures I wanted of the castle, in the light that I had been craving. It was awesome. Thinking about it now, I’m smiling. For the first time on this trip I could include as much of the sky as I wanted in a frame without worrying about it being washed or wrecking my metering. For the first time I wasn’t afraid to go super-wide, minimizing close features in order to put the castle in perspective, show it in its entire grandeur, punch it up to the level it deserves. Himeji-jo loomed large in my mind, and I wanted to show it as best I could. Today, I got exactly the light I needed to do that, and I couldn’t be happier.

(I’m really reluctant to say this, because I’m worried I’ll jinx something, but: If I can have one more day with light like today’s, I will call this trip a smashing success. If that day happens to be Sunday, while I’m on Miyajima, I think I’ll be so overjoyed I might break down and cry.)

Part III: It Worked So Well Yesterday

There’s a scene in Lost in Translation where Bob, sitting in a sauna, is initially pleased to see two white people arrive. Hooray! Someone to talk to! His reaction shifts almost immediately when the newcomers begin conversing in German.

This is more or less how it feels here. There are a lot of white people in Kyoto — maybe not numerically more than in Tokyo, but the city is smaller and so you are more likely to run into them. And every time I try to talk to them — every single time — they turn out to be Germans, Norwegians, Finnish, Spanish, or French. Which is OK — I know a few words in each of those languages, and a number of words in two of them — but it’s still very strange. To come halfway around the world and run into a couple from Toulouse who seem overjoyed that someone speaks French (albeit with a wacky faded Quebecois accent).

Now, when other people approach me, they’re pretty sure that I speak English. But not always. I’ve had white people come up to me and ask me something in Japanglish. A pair of Norwegians got in the middle of my shot today in Nara and apologized to me — in Japanese.

You know how you’ve arrived in Japan? When you start orienting and providing advice to other foreigners. In Isetan last night a woman, who was fresh off a flight into KIX, was trying to buy an orange. Isetan (like other department stores with a food floor) has a supermarket section but if you haven’t done a lot of walking around down there it might not be obvious. The orange-stand woman couldn’t figure out what was happening, so I pushed myself into the conversation. “It’s like a supermarket,” I said. “You pick up your food and pay for it over there.” The woman thanked me and asked me how long I’d been here. “About a week,” I said. “On second thought, it’s not like a supermarket. It is a supermarket.”

Speaking of food.. I have discovered the most wonderful form of Japanese cuisine: Kushikatsu. If you can put it on a stick, you can eat it after it has been battered and deep-fried. Oh, wow, is it ever bad for you! I felt my arteries constrict just staring at the menu. Of course, I had to try some. I don’t have a clue what I ate, though I’m pretty sure there was an onion in there somewhere, but it was good.

Went to a fancy tempura restaurant tonight. You think you’ve had tempura in North America — no, you haven’t. This place was a lot more like.. well, it’s like a sushi bar, but for tempura instead of sushi. The stuff was so light, so fluffy, so fresh it just about knocked my socks off. Great fun to sit at the bar and watch the chefs with the big wok full of oil chat it up with Japanese businessmen who are either drunk or getting that way very quickly. My dinner came with a very interesting miso — ako miso, not the usual shiro stuff we’re used to back home. At the bottom of the bowl, a surprise: Tiny clams! Mmm, mmm, good.

The rice is.. different. I don’t know what’s different about it — maybe it’s not as moist as it is at home — but I like it.