Really long-ass post ahead.

Introduction
The Japanese school system is on a trimester system, with the school year ending in March then beginning in April. Having a merely two week break between the end and beginning of the school years doesn’t really give enough time off to let the batteries fully recharge and make the new school year feel like a new start, but it was enough time for Beth and I to take a six-day long trip to check out some other parts of the country.

Transportation
About six weeks prior to spring break, we figured that traveling via the Seishun 18 Kippu (youthful 18 ticket) would by far give us the most bang for our yen. It can be purchased for the price of ¥11,500 (about $120) and gives you five days of unlimited non-consecutive local train travel within the whole of the country. Our plan was to go from Fukushima to Tokyo to Kyoto to Hiroshima, then turn around and head back the same direction, stopping by Nara. In other words, we were simply following the main train lines that run northeast to southwest.

It’s practically impossible to do that trip for any cheaper via any other mode of transportation, sans hitchhiking or biking/walking. As a comparison, had we taken the shinkansen we would be looking at about five times that cost. Then again, it would have been about four times faster.

Had we simply gone straight from Fukushima to Hiroshima it would have taken about 22 hours of riding. Local trains usually run the full duration of their route for about one to two hours, thereafter they simply go back in the other direction, so we would have had to make around 18 or so transfers along the way. We really didn’t want to do that. Luckily, JR (Japan Rail) has a solution to that problem.

JR runs the Moonlight Nagara, a local overnight train from Tokyo to Ogaki, which is a small city about 1.5 hours away from Kyoto. Why it stops in Ogaki instead of Kyoto, I have no idea. You board the train at Tokyo Station at a bit past 11 pm and arrive in Ogaki at around 6 am. Continue onward to Kyoto, and you’re in the city ready to sightsee at a comfortable 8 am. The seats are also quite a bit nicer than regular local trains. They have a good amount of legroom and can recline, unlike regular trains.

Beth blurring in front of the Moonlight Nagara

So it sounds all well and good, right? Well, not quite. First off, these trains are extremely popular during Seishun 18 Kippu season (it’s a seasonal deal), so you must reserve tickets on the Moonlight Nagara well in advance. Our dates for this trip were decided mainly by what days the ticket agent could find that had two seats available.

Secondly, once we actually boarded the train and it took off, we were waiting for them to turn off/dim the lights. After all, it is an overnight train and of course everyone was going to be sleeping.

We waited. And waited. And waited.

They never even dimmed the lights, so the whole trip everyone was doing their best to cover up their eyes so they could get some damn sleep. On the way there I got a measly 30 minutes of sleep, and the remaining portion of the time was spent by starting a game of Pokemon Diamond.

All told for the whole six-day trip, we ended up spending about 43 hours on somewhere in the neighborhood of about 30 trains. It was tiring, but we had our DSes and each other to keep us company. I’m planning on doing it again in the summer.

Kyoto
We arrive in Kyoto somewhere around 8 in the morning and immediately set off to go find some breakfast. Unfortunately everything in the station was waaaay overpriced, so we eventually bit the bullet and grabbed some McDonald’s. While in the station it hit home pretty hard exactly what this place was: a tourist city.

Living in Fukushima, I see the occasional white person/obvious foreigner, but it’s only once every few days that I see one I don’t know (but most of them I at least recognize). When we stepped into Kyoto station it was a huge BAM: WHITE PEOPLE, most of which were dragging around a shit-ton of luggage. And it wasn’t just them, you can easily tell that a very large part of the people in the station were either foreign tourists or in-country tourists. Considering I was a pseudo-in-country-foreign-tourist, I’m not quite sure under which umbrella I personally fit.

This whole feeling and experience was a far cry from being in Fukushima, where a tourist would end up only if he got lost. Heck, it was far, far worse than being in Tokyo. This whole concept of the city being so hyper-touristy continue to come back over and over throughout our two-day stay there.

After eating breakfast we headed over to our hostel, where we dropped our backpacks off and rented two bikes from them for ¥500 each. We did so because that’s pretty cheap to rent a bike for a day, but it ended up coming back and biting us in the ass. More on that later.

Nijo-jo
Due to our hostel almost literally being right next to Nijo Castle, we biked there first. It was the first time I’ve ever paid to park my bike.

Now with most things in Kyoto, it was an impressive structure on impressive grounds with an impressive history. Unfortunately everyone else in the world thinks so too, so the really big tourist attractions in Kyoto tend to be, understandably, quite crowded. With fat Americans.

Obesity is so rare here that it was a shock to suddenly, once again, be surrounded by a bunch of obese people. I was surprised at how surprised I was.

Of course there’s plenty of Japanese and other nationalities there, but a good 40% of the people at the castle were white. That number tended to stay consistent for most of the rest of Kyoto’s attractions.

Once you get past the crowds, the castle itself is quite cool. One of the big features it’s known for is for its nightingale floors—floors that intentionally and squeak when you walk on them to alert about intruders. Unfortunately, the modern day version of the castle has had audio playback devices placed throughout, so while it would be nice to enjoy the sounds of the castle, instead visitors are subject to loud and annoying automatic audio explanations. Seriously, they really need to ditch those kiosks.

A very cool thing about the castle is simply the history that has taken place there. It was built by Tokugawa Ieyasu, shogun of Japan in the 1600s and remained the center of the Tokugawa government for the next 160 years or so. I appreciated its significance from the history I know of Japan, but I’m sure I’d have appreciated it even more had I been more intimate with the intricacies of the Tokugawa shogunate.

The grounds themselves were all impressive, with a large garden (apparently built in the 1960s) that had a plethora of a large variety flowering trees for every season. Within the time that we were in Kyoto, they were holding a special Nijo at night activity where they lit up the whole grounds and castle with artistic lighting. Beth and I didn’t realize this until we actually left the castle, and we ended up not returning due to the extra fee we would have had to pay to enter it again.

Renting a Bike
Following Nijo castle we biked back to the hostel so I could return my horrendously terrible rental bike. The lady at the counter asked what was broken, and I simply replied, “Everything.” They gave me a full refund.

We then returned to Kyoto station where we spent some time trying to find the bike rental place. This was the first time we blatantly experienced the citizens of Kyoto’s inhospitality.

That city’s locals seemed to be quite a jaded bunch, mostly likely sick and tired of all of the crap that the excessive tourism spews. You can tell that the city used to have it’s own flavor rich in history and tradition, but the present-day Kyoto is merely a shell of what it seems it once was. The vast majority of the city has been rebuilt into the bland and depressing Japanese style of throwing up concrete boxes with incessantly flashing lights, while the portions of the city that were spared have turned into over commercialized tourist traps. This attitude of theirs was far different than I’ve experienced in other parts of this country, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway, most all bikes here have luggage racks on the back. At least they’re meant to be luggage racks. Far more often they’re used as seats for a passenger on the bike. It’s extremely common, to the point where you’d think that was their real purpose.

Now to get to from the hostel (where I had returned my bike) to the station with two people and one bike, Beth and I used the common method of the man peddling and the woman riding on the luggage rack. At the station some random Japanese man decided to take the opportunity to chew both of us out about why the hell you shouldn’t have two people on one bike. I was all ready to pretend I didn’t understand the guy (a very useful excuse in many cases here), but Beth didn’t. Sigh. She got off the back, and we ended up walking the rest of the way to the rental station.

It may not seem like much, but that was a huge epiphany as to how people in Kyoto seem to operate versus, say Tokyo. In Tokyo everyone minds their own business. They don’t care about you and you don’t care about what they do. Hell, most of the time people will even go out of their way simply to ignore you. I like this method. I don’t like the Kyoto method of interferance.

Anyway, I spent ¥2,600 to rent an actual nice bike for two days. We ate lunch then went off to find Fushimi Inarai.

Fushimi Inari
Fushimi Inari is the famous place that has passageways of tens of thousands of torii—the red gates always placed in front of Shinto shrines.

Looking out of a pond

It’s a ways from the center of the city, and the late-afternoon bike ride was quite pleasant. Once we arrived we quickly noticed something amazing—there were barely any people there, much less any crowds.

Taking a break to examine some torii

The peaceful walk up the mountain through the tunnel of torii was surprisingly pleasant, and after some walking we came across a little clearing with perhaps a few hundred shrines, including a larger one next to a small lake. We left the established path to have a look at all of them and eventually found what seemed to be a barely-used path through the woods. Taking a stroll through the woods together in the waning light, it was quite a relief to get away from the crowded city attractions.

Old torii discarded next to the trail

We wanted to take the long trek up the mountain, but it was dusk by the time we hit the forest, and even though it’s open 24/7, we figured it would be best to head out and leave Fushimi Inari. By the time we found our way back to the entrance it was full-on night and we were famished.

As we rode back we kept an eye out for interesting local places to eat, but nothing really jumped out at us. Finally, nearing the station, we gave up and went to some chain.

While at the restaurant there was a table with some English-speaking women nearby. Unfortunately for them, the waitress spoke zero English and they spoke even less Japanese. When they were having trouble communicating on one hand I wanted to go over and see if I could help, but on the other hand it was vastly more easy (and, to an extent, entertaining) to simply watch the event at it transpired.

I couldn’t hear everything, but it seemed that their main problem had something to do with numbers. To no surprise, the ladies had no idea how to say numbers in Japanese, but to my semi-great surprise, the waitress also had no idea how to say numbers in English. Considering that the waitress was relatively young and that English education has been mandatory here for quite some time, I’d pretty much assume that most Japanese people of the younger generation at least know that much simple English. To my dismay, I was wrong.

Anyway, they finally got whatever they wanted, and we ate and went back to the hostel, where we had a very, very good sleep.

Traveling Through the City
To begin the day, Beth also decided to screw the hostel’s rental bike. Even though hers was much better than my initial one, hers still was crap.

We packed up our stuff from the hostel and left, heading to the closest bus stop, where the second main example of strangers interfering transpired. While waiting for the bus I rested one of my feet on the bench. Some lady walking by decided to take it upon herself to get angry at me for having the gall to put my foot on the outside bench. I’m obviously a terrible person.

After that little incident the bus came and picked Beth up, while I sped away on my bike. It was a race.

Even though the city center of Kyoto tends to have nice wide sidewalks, due to the amount of pedestrians and my desire to make good use of a bike with gears (my bike here is single gear), I started riding in the road. It was city traffic, so it was easy to keep up with. Apparently a specific taxi driver didn’t agree, so for the duration of my time on the road, he continued honking at me.

And honking. And honking. And honking.

Fucking hell, dude. Seriously. C’mon.

If I’m keeping up with traffic just fine, there’s absolutely no reason for you to be such a dick.

There was a lot of traffic on the road, so when the line got stopped for a red light about thirty cars ahead I felt damn good speeding past all the stopped cars and leaving that dick of a taxi far behind.

I ended up getting to the station ten minutes before Beth and her bus. Psht, buses.

Kiyomizu-dera
Beth rented her bike, and we were off to Kiyomizu-dera, which is a large temple with plenty of scenic surrounding buildings within the grounds. It’s quite well known for much of the main structure being built on a cliff and supported with a tangle of wooden beams.

It was a nice ride to the area surrounding the temple, but once we got there it was an absolute headache trying to find a place to park our bikes. Usually you can just park your bikes wherever, but because this was such a crowded touristy area, if you parked your bike along the street the police would quite likely take them away. Luckily for us, the bike rental place warned us about this and gave us a map of where we could park at Kiomizu-dera.

But it was a slightly confusing map. We found where we thought the map said to go, which was a nearby parking area within which we saw many bikes parked. When we stopped on the sidewalk to give the signs a closer read an employee of the parking area started yelling at us that we couldn’t park there.

All we were doing was reading the sign while still on the sidewalk next to road, and this guy decided the best course of action was to yell at us angrily that we can’t park there. Well screw you, sir.

In the end we did what soon became the norm on this trip—find an apartment complex and just park our bikes there. Luckily Japan doesn’t really seem to have any semblance of zoning, so there was an apartment complex quiet close by.

This particular street was a narrow yet very crowded street, both with vehicles and people. They all seemed to be going up the hill, which we presumed was the direction of the temple grounds. Weary of trudging through crowds, we took an alternate route through a different shrine under renovation construction. It was still open to the public, though as we were right about to look around the area we realized that the crowd of people and flowers near the shrine was actually a funeral. We figured it would be best to not crash a funeral, so we continued on up the road.

It was soon quite obvious what the purpose of that large shrine was and why there was a funeral there, as we had apparently opted to take the path through a cemetery. A cemetery with a nice view of Kyoto, might I add.

Aside from being quite large, there was nothing really notable about it. I much prefer walking through the cemetery on Mt. Shinobu in Fukushima.

After exiting the cemetery we found ourselves at the entrance to Kiyomizu-dera, where we looked around and acted like the tourists we were.

Thousands of people were oohing and aawing about the temple on the mountain and the pagodas and the everything else that looked old yet fresh and orange at the same time. It was while walking along the path leading around the side of the mountain that I noticed another pagoda off away from everything else. I much preferred the idea of going over and seeing the neglected one versus the brightly colored buildings that everyone else seemed to prefer.

A short walk later, we examined it closely, and though I don’t remember why it was built, that particular pagoda served a different purpose than the other brightly colored and maintained buildings elsewhere on the grounds. It had, if I remember, intentionally not been maintained. The other buildings are rebuilt periodically and get quite a bit of maintenance. This lone rotting pagoda was an excellent example of what the other buildings would look like had they not been given all of the attention they receive.

I liked this rotting one largely for the purpose that this is what all of these old buildings are really like. They don’t remain splendid for the duration of time; all we’re doing is looking at a new iteration of a slightly older iteration of a slightly older iteration, and so on. The rotting one just seemed so much more historical.

Finally we left Kiyomizu-dera to go to our final tourist destination in Kyoto: Monkey Park.

Monkey Park
I really had never heard of Monkey Park before looking at a map of attractions in the city, but the name itself was enough for me to want to visit it. As with seemingly most things in the city, it was far away from everything else, so we got on it and rode our bikes down there. I’m pretty convinced that we rode our bikes further than most other people who rent them.

On the way we luckily remembered to stop by a Kojima-denki (an electronics store) and grab some batteries to replace the ones that had all but died the previous day.

A break on the way to Monkey Park, in Kyoto

Monkey park was next to some bridge and another tourist trap that I don’t really remember even knowing what it was, but we eventually found our way to the entrance of the park and paid the nominal entrance fee.

The actual monkeys in the park mainly reside at the top of the mountain, so we began the trek upwards. Along the way there are little interactive quizzes all about monkeys, that fortunately were made for kids, thus being in simple enough Japanese that they were easy to understand for both of us. Beth got more questions right, though.

Remember that at this point, we still didn’t really quite know the purpose of the park, so we started to get slightly apprehensive when intermittently along the trail there were signs giving instructions on what to do if there was a monkey in the path and you wanted to get by. The mean thing we got is that you never, ever, ever look the monkeys directly in the eyes. Don’t do it. Ever. Never.

Once we finally got to the top we completely understood why those signs were there. There were monkeys. Everywhere.

There was an observation area at the top of the mountain, and we happened to arrive right as the employees grabbed the monkey food buckets and started throwing it everywhere. Monkeys immediately flowed from the trees to grab the food, around sixty or so. It was madness I tell you, madness.

Beth right before she was eaten by monkeys

After most of the food was taken care of by the little beasts, we wandered away a bit higher up to more peaceful grounds where I found some monkeys playing/fighting with each other. I, of course, wanted a cool picture, so I sat on the ground and started snapping. They slowly worked their way towards me then disappeared under the bench that was in front of me.

Right as I let my guard down two monkeys jumped up from behind the bench, screaming their monkey hearts out at me. Holy. Shit. It freaked me the hell out, and I learned a valuable life lesson: never trust a monkey, even if he used to be your best friend and promised to pay you back.

Monkeys ominously looming over Kyoto

It was at this time that an experiment of mine came to fruition. You see, for the time period that we were away school was out, but I was still supposed to show up to our completely useless and there-simply-to-maintain-appearances office days. At office days us JHS Fukushima JETs arrive late to the office (separate from any of our schools and the board of education), take a really long lunch, then leave early. There is nothing in between except playing DS and computer games with each other and browsing the internet. It’s purely for appearances.

I decided to try and not show up for two of these days and hope that the actual workers there wouldn’t notice. After all, us JETs have a room all to ourselves and much of the time the other workers wouldn’t even realize if we were there or not. Now I could have just as easily taken these days off, but I wanted to test it.

So then, as we were about to leave monkey park my phone starts ringing, I look at the number, and damn, it’s my supervisor. He said the people at the office said I didn’t show up, I said oops and apologized, then he said to let him know when I leave the country and asked me how Canada was.

!!!

He thought I was in Canada. I’ve never been to Canada and don’t plan on doing so anytime soon. I assured him that I was quite sure that I was still in Japan (though I didn’t say where) and that I would surely contact him if I went to Canada. I then asked he could retroactively use my vacation days. He agreed, and I went on my merry way.

After that fuss, as always tends to happen, it soon became late in the day. We departed on our bikes, riding along a nice river trail to go look for someplace to eat followed by someplace to sleep.

Finding a Kyoto Love Hotel
Why did we have to find someplace to sleep? It was because we only reserved one night in our hostel. Beyond the fact that all other hostels were full for the second night we would be there, Beth and I wanted to try out some of the famed Kansai love hotels. I had previously found a promising Kyoto love hotel district from a Japanese site that conveniently ranks love hotels. The love hotel district seemed to be a bit out of the way, to the point that it wasn’t even on the map we had acquired, but I trusted my interneting skills.

Once we got off the subway at Takeda Station, our designated stop, we were immediately concerned that maybe my directions were a bit off. The love hotel districts in Shibuya and Shinjuku were in the middle of places obviously catering to sexual entertainment and night life in general. Whereas in Kyoto we happened to get off at a dark semi-industrial rundown part of the city with the only company being the cars speeding speeding above us on the highway, a far cry from the bustling streets and bright lights of Shinjuku. Had this been in the US, this was the part of town you don’t go to at night lest you get mugged.

By this point in time it was well into the night, and we had no place to stay. All of our bets were on finding this district. And after ten or so minutes of walking west, we suddenly saw an oasis of flashing lights and bright colors and large gaudy buildings in the middle of this gray depressing wasteland.

The oasis of love hotels in the desert of Kyoto

Yatta!

We quickly made our way up to the hotels and had a look around at the 30 or so hotels crammed into about a two block square area. For love hotels, you can either pay by the time used (minimum of 30 minutes) or you can wait until later at night and pay for a stay. Times that stays open up seem to vary between about 8 pm to midnight, depending on the hotel. The good thing about this, though, is that many hotels will let you stay all the way until 2 pm or so the next day, far later than most regular hotels.

Anyway, it wasn’t quite yet late enough for us to check in for a stay, so we went about trying to find a place to eat dinner. Yeah, that didn’t work too well. Usually it’s pretty easy to find an eatery nearby, even if it’s just a ramen shop, but in this area we were only able to find a conbini or an extremely overpriced Italian restaurant. We chose the conbini. By this time it was late enough and we were hungry enough that we didn’t care.

After our ‘dinner’ we headed back to look for a cheap room that was open for stays already. Sadly, it seemed that all of the cool themed hotels/rooms—the cat one, the S&M one, the train one, etc.–were all either taken or didn’t open up for stays until later in the night. Damn. We just wanted to find a place to lie down and rest, so we simply found a vacant room at a hotel already open for stays and took it.

Now within this wandering around we realized that these hotels are set up differently than the Tokyo ones. The Shinjuku and Shibuya love hotel districts are set in largely pedestrian areas, so most of the visitors walk around when they pick their hotels and walk inside the lobby to look at the room offerings. The streets and hotels are built accordingly.

In Kyoto, the district was obviously in an area that people commute to specifically for the love hotels. I really see no other reason for going to such a shitty part of town. This means that instead of you walking into a lobby and making your selection, you drive your car into the parking area (always located on the first floor of the building). Each room has it’s own parking spot and each parking spot has a photo of the room it accompanies, so you drive around the garage looking for the photo of the room you want, then simply pull in. Each spot has a motion sensor, so once you pull in it deactivates the photo (turns off the light). You then simply must walk up to your room where the door is already automatically unlocked.

Each room has an automatic payment center in it. It automatically keeps track of how long you’ve been in the room and any purchases you may have made (from the fridge full of alcohol or the machine full of vibrators). When you want to go you stick your cash or credit into the machine, then off you go, never speaking or seeing another person other than your partner.

There are no keys, because once you’re in your room you’re there until you leave, and there are no people because everything is automatic.

This is vastly different from the Shinjuku and Shibuya hotels where you select your room in the lobby, talk to the clerk, pay in advance, and get a key. I must say that I like that style better, as when I pay in advance I know exactly how much it’ll cost me. In our Kyoto love hotel both of us kept on being concerned that it was racking up a bunch of charges, which was compounded by us not really fully understanding how the system there worked until after we had left.

We ended up staying at a hotel called Opus, simply because they had a cheap room and were open for stays at the time. By cheap I mean it was about ¥8,000 (about $80) for the night, but the room itself was far nicer than any other hotel you would get for that price. As is common for love hotels, it had a huge (over 50”) flat-panel TV with a built-in PS2 with game, karaoke, four channels of porn, and movies hooked up to a room-wide surround sound system. The bathroom had toiletries of all kind, including a variety of bubble bath mixes, the room came with some condoms, a vibrating cock ring, and the aforementioned dispenser of various sex toys.

The bed was nice, the robes were fluffy, and we had a very good sleep. Which it better had been, because we had to wake up before five the next day.

This was our last morning in Kyoto, and we wanted to get out of there on the very first train so we could arrive in Hiroshima with enough time to spend in the atomic bomb museum before it closed. We figured that if we took the first train from Kyoto and didn’t miss any transfers, we would arrive in Hiroshima a bit past noon. That didn’t quite happen as planned, and it all began at the Takeda station, our very first station of the day.

We arrived at the station and got on the first train the pulled up that was heading to Kyoto. Because it was the first train of the day, it was open and waiting on the track a decent amount of time before its departure.

When another train pulled up on a different track, we realized that the subway train we were on actually had a later departure time than the newly arriving above-ground train, so we rushed out of the train, across the platform, and into the other train, hopping inside just as the doors closed. We were happy that we got on the earlier train. That happiness soon turned sour.

A Lost Cell Phone
It didn’t take long for me to realize that the pocket I usually keep my cell phone in was ominously empty. This was Not a Good Thing. In college I shied away from buying a cell phone so I wouldn’t get reliant on one, but the inevitable happened and once I got a cell phone, especially one here, I have become dependent on it. Not being able to make calls or emails anymore wasn’t really the bad part (Beth still had her phone). The bad part was that I had our itinerary on my phone. Without it we’d be out of directions, trains, phone numbers, etc. It would suck.

We got off the train at Kyoto and quickly looked for an information or police booth. The information booth was closed, so after explaining our plight to a ticket window attendant he made a call, then gave us a phone number instructing us to call them again in about 45 minutes, when the train had finished making its loop.

In the meantime, instead of just waiting around, we took a train back to Takeda and talked to the attendant there. This was about when we decided that it was too difficult to explain that we actually changed from a subway to an above-ground train going to the same station. We had trouble explaining that well enough for anyone we talked to to grasp that concept.

Many phone calls and explanations later, the attendant said that the original train we were on, based on the time we boarded it, would be finishing its loop and returning to the station. Beth and I rushed down to the newly arriving train and quickly searched all of its 15 or so cars. No dice.

Arrrgggghh.

The train pulled away, and we were on the verge of just heading out.

Then we saw him: a conductor carrying a cell phone. My cell phone. Woot. This is his cell phone.

After filling out some paperwork and making a call to prove it was mine, I happily received my phone an hour after first reporting it lost. Good going Kyoto and Japan, with this final gesture you made up for many of the rude people we came across in your city.

Hiroshima
We finally left Kyoto a bit over two hours later than planned and began on the six hour train ride to Hiroshima. Or so we thought.

While most trains in Japan have an excellent record of being on time, sometimes shit happens. Shit happened.

On our two-hour train that was supposed to take us to Hiroshima, the conductor gave an announcement over the PA. Beth and I didn’t quite understand all of it, but we did get that something was wrong. Thanks to the help of a fellow traveler on the train we ended up finding out that something had happened to the tracks ahead and the train would be stopping well before its final destination.

Well shit, how to get to Hiroshima? We were in the countryside that was too far away for local buses and too small for highway buses to stop at. If the tracks were down we couldn’t take the local train, and taking a taxi or going back and taking the shinkansen would be prohibitively expensive, especially on a low-budget trip such as this. We thought. We threw out suggestions. We admitted that we really didn’t know the best course of action, so we figured hey, why not just follow everyone else who’s obviously going to the same place and can actually understand the language? So we did, and it paid off.

Our train did stop well before it was supposed to, and everyone did get out. But then everyone waited at the platform, so we waited to. After a surprisingly short amount of time we were on another train bound for Hiroshima. All that worry and all that tenseness from people there cumulated in an extremely anti-climactic conclusion.

The arrival in Hiroshima was many hours later than what we had planned, and as the museum closes at five, we decided to put it off for the next day and instead continue on the same train line to Miyajima about 30 minutes away.

Miyajima
Miyajima was our second UNESCO World Heritage Site (the first being Kyoto itself) and is largely known for its huge four-legged torii sitting in the sea. From the station it was a short ferry ride out to the island, where we realized that it probably would have been better to visit the island at a different time of day. We quickly found out that the evening was when the sea was at low tide, so instead of this big structure appearing to float in the sea, we saw a big structure sitting in and, the bottom 10 feet covered with, mud.

My big head in front of a big torii covered in mud

Beyond the torii, the shrine was also quite interesting. At high tide it’s also standing above the water, and the grounds have many a pagoda, shrines, a temple, and a noh stage. While that historical stuff was all well and good there were three things we didn’t know about the island—the large amount of wild deer that intermingle with all the people, momiji, and the world’s largest rice paddle.

Beth wants to use the paddle

Hell yes, the world’s largest rice paddle.

We found that momiji is a (very) locally made treat that the island and surrounding area is known for. There were many momiji shops in the area that had the big machine that made and packaged the momiji there within the shop. You can watch the doughy mixture be made, the chocolate/cream/cheese inside be injected, the whole thing being cooked, the cooked treat being packaged, then buy the freshly made product. Oh they were fresh and they were good.

We hadn’t had lunch yet and had to force ourselves to stop buying and eating more (you could buy them individually or in boxes). I should have purchased a box to take home.

The light was waning, the boat took us away, the train brought us back to Hiroshima, and we did something for the first time in my life—we took a trolley.

Well before World War II Hiroshima had an extensive trolley system, and between then and now not much has changed. It’s one of the few remaining cities in the world that still utilizes an extensive public transportation system of trolleys. Riding them was a weird feeling. You’re on a train, but it’s a much lighter and slow moving train that’s in the middle of the road and follows traffic signals.

We slept well at the hostel that night, allowing us to sleep in a bit. That morning we headed outside to be greeted with the quite depressing weather of continuous light cold rain. Our only real plan for the day was to explore Peace Park.

Peace Park
Peace Park is the area directly over where the atomic bomb exploded. It’s a large area that’s home to numerous monuments—seemingly one for every kind of person that happened to be caught in the bomb. Of course, the biggest and most well-known is the Atomic Bomb Dome, the closest building to the bomb’s hypocenter that remained standing following the blast.

The Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima

It really isn’t much to look at, just a destroyed old building. But knowing of the history, and there’s plenty of information around the park, that building creates an amazingly somber feeling. From the T-shaped Aioi bridge, watching the sea of umbrellas in front of the half-destroyed building, the cold rain painted quiet a depressing picture. And that was before we went to the museum.

The atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima Peace Park is probably one of the better museums about an actual event. It gives a history of pre-atomic bomb Hiroshima, showing that it had a long history of being an ideal staging ground for many Japanese wars. It had a very detailed account of many facets of the city’s war-entrenched history and explanations for everything that happened to the city before, during, and after the war. It gave a detailed analysis of why America decided to drop the bomb and specifically why on Hiroshima. In addition, it supplied the aftereffects of the bomb and radiation in general and moves on to finish up with the modern day problem of nuclear armament.

Overall, it was an excellent museum and did a very good job and giving factual reasonings for both sides of the story. If anything, I felt that the museum put much of the blame on the extreme imperialistic policies of the Japanese government at the time for the suffering ordinary people went through before, during, and a result of World War II.

They had been fighting needless wars constantly for over 50 years, and it took their defeat in World War II to finally jolt the leadership back to its senses. Now they by no means whatsoever condone the dropping of the bomb, but throughout the museum I remained quite impressed at the handling of simple factual explanations of why who did what.

Of course, the most somber moment of the museum is when you arrive at the section where it shows artifacts of a certain person’s life (or more often, death) and gives a brief explanation of what happened to them during the bomb. At the entrance, Beth and I both paid the ¥300 to rent an audio tour device, and it was in this specific section of the museum that we were glad we had them.

The written explanations for the artifacts gave only a brief telling, while the audio tour gave a very in-depth story of the parents who could only recognize their son by his voice or the man who’s fingers were flash-burnt off of his hands, which then grew back weird fingernails with blood vessels for the rest of his life. Or the boy who’s mom packed him a lunch his tin lunch box, later finding the only trace of her son to be the lunch box with the food inside cooked to ash by the time.

The personal artifacts ranged from the touching—a tin lunch box still full of the food’s ashes—to the macabre—pieces of burnt skin and whole fingernails. There are burnt locks of hair, numerous tattered uniforms that middle school students on demolition crews were wearing and died in, the tricycle a young boy was riding when the bomb struck and vaporized him, and helmets and glasses and pieces of glass removed from victims. It was quite successful at putting a human face of the victims of the bomb and its aftermath.

After spending many hours in the museum, we ate lunch then went out to decide what to do next. Outside of Miyajima and Peace Park we really had no other plans for Hiroshima, so we went out to find some.

Hiroshima Lodging
The plan for lodging this particular night was the same as in Kyoto—I had a looked up information on love hotels in the city and picked the area most likely to have what we needed. We figured that there might be something interesting or at least going on in that area, so we headed there. To our disappointment, we were wrong. We found the specific district and two love hotels, but we had a good six hours to kill before stays opened up. There was nothing in the area to really do. We wandered into an arcade, but after one game of Initial D we went back outside.

This area did have plenty of capsule hotels with saunas, but having a girl along immediately nullified that option. All of them only allowed men to stay there. After a very short deliberation, we said screw it and went to a nearby Toyoko Inn, a somewhat cheap (¥8,000ish) Western-style hotel where we could check in far, far before our love hotel would have let us. I was happy we made that decision, as we were finally able to just take off our backpacks and rest outside of the rain.

But then what about dinner? We were happy in our warmth and didn’t want to leave the hotel, so after an even shorter deliberation than before we decided to splurge and buy some Pizza Hut. Yes, pizza is considered splurging when it costs an epic $30 for a 12” pizza, the standard cost here. I was nominated to call and place the order, which I’ve done before here with little fanfare. This was different, though.

The lady on the phone was an idiot. A complete and utter idiot. Even if my Japanese is a far cry from perfect, I at least know I can order a pizza, but this lady didn’t have that sort of confidence in me.

The huge part was that she asked me my name, and I replied “ドッジ” (Dojji, a much easier word for Japanese people to spell/understand than “Dodge”). She asked for my name again, and I said it again but this time spelling it. She didn’t get and asked a third time and gave it to her a third time. Then she, and this is where it starts getting worse, said, “私の名前は … です。” This is literally saying, “My name is …,” and she said it really slowly.

I responded with, “私の名前はドッジです。” also really slowly (literally: My name is Dodge.). She apparently still didn’t get it and, after a pause, responded with, “My name is ….” Now I have to give her props for trying in English, so I now responded with, “My name is Dojji.” To absolutely no one’s surprise it still didn’t register with her.

She asked in English again, and finally fed up I switched back to Japanese and said that my name was Dojji, like the “dojji-” in “dodgeball” (pronounced “dojjiboru”). And she finally understood! I was just about to start saying “My name is Dodge,” in about every language I know how to say it in, but luckily I didn’t have to resort to that.

Finally, the most difficult pizza order of my life was over, and we sat back, relaxed, eventually received the pizza, and enjoyed the evening.

Time for the 1.5 day trip back!

Osaka
We left Hiroshima bright and early and hopped on a train heading back in the direction of Kyoto. Our original plan was to hit up four UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Kyoto, Miyajima, Hiroshima, and Nara). Nara was going to be about a five hour detour while on the way back from Hiroshima. We changed our minds.

After seeing so many temples and shrines and everything, the idea of taking a detour just to see more of what looks like the same thing just felt a bit much, so instead we simply hopped off the train at Osaka, the 12th largest city in the world.

Beth had already been to Osaka four or so years ago and apparently didn’t really take a hankering to it, but I wanted to try the city out for an afternoon, if anything just to say that I’ve been there. This was also a complete spur-of-the-moment side trip, so neither of us knew anything at all about the city except that Beth remembered some cool pedestrian shopping center but had no idea at all how to get there.

Once we got off the train at the station ready to be amazed by this large famous city we were quickly disappointed. Now I’m sure that there’s lots of really really cool stuff to do in Osaka, but when we hopped out of Osaka station all we found was a very drab and dirty city and a bigass Yodobashi Camera (a huge electronics store). Too bad for Osaka, but Beth lives close to Akihabara, and their Yodobashi Camera (and Akihabara itself) is about as good as one is going to get for electronics. I think I would have been more impressed if I got off at Fukushima Station for the first time, and Fukushima is a podunk Tohoku city.

After picking a random direction to walk in and walking that way for about 15 minutes we found out that we must have walked in the wrong direction. The wrong direction from what? Well, anything at all of interest. The city just kept getting more drabby and more dirty. I was beginning to see what Beth was talking about, that is if you feel justified in judging a city just by walking around in it for 15 minutes.

So we walked back to the station and picked another direction to walk in. It didn’t take long for something to come from this endeavor, as we soon came across what else but a giant ferris wheel on the top of a huge shopping center. It was an impressive building with lots of stores, but it was largely full of clothes stores (with some exceptions) thus completely uninteresting for either of us.

Slightly less disappointed, but still waiting for the “Wow!” factor to jump in, we left the ferris wheel building and found ourselves in a lively pedestrian shopping center, with arcades and pachinko parlors flowing around every corner and many a stores shoved in between them. Beth soon came to the realization that this was the exact sole “interesting” area of the city she had been to on her prior visit, so of course we had to explore.

And really, when I explore an area of a city that really means going into all of the arcades, seeing what they have, and playing a few games. We did so, and I believe that within less than an hour’s time I had blown ¥600 on a UFO catcher game trying to get a Death Note and played on something like four Pop’n Music 16 machines.

After taking a break from the arcades, I happened to notice a store that had an official Pop’n Music ASC controller on display in the window, among many other interesting artifacts. Being the first time I had seen an official Pop’n Music ASC in person, my curiosity concerning the store was officially piqued, and we quickly entered what ended up entering the store called Mandarake… a huge treasure trove of wonder.

If you are a fan of old and obscure manga and anime, or even new and popular manga or anime, gundams, figurines, or video games, then Mandarake is an amazing store. It’s largely a used anime/manga/game/figurines store that’s full to the brim with amazing items. They range from Godzilla figurines from around the 50s to cells from many anime to posters to manga from the 40s to video games to… everything. They even have a karaoke stage so people can perform over the store’s sound system. It was an amazing store, and I don’t even really care too much about anime and stuff. If you’re a huge and knowledgeable fan of the old/obscure then you’d probably shit your pants in there.

Beth and I later found out that Mandarake is an actual chain with something like eight stores around Japan, and the biggest one is actually in Tokyo. Considering how awesome the Osaka store is, Beth and I definitely have the Tokyo branch on our to-do list.

Home
Afterwards it was back to the train station to head back to Ogaki, hop on our overnight Moonlight Nagara, arrive in Tokyo at a bit past 5 am the next morning, hop on six trains to Fukushima, bicycle back to my apartment, and then off to sleep.

Trip over.

See, this is what happens when I bring my laptop to school. I’ve spent a good eight hours over a two day period typing this all up. Yesterday I had three classes spread out throughout the day, which is nice, but today I had merely two classes for the first two periods in the morning. After that lunch takes up 20 minutes and cleaning takes up 15, which means that I had over five hours of absolutely nothing to do at school. I usually use that time by interspersing playing DS games with Japanese study, but with my computer here, the computer takes precedence.

If I ever have another 16-page entry, it’s probably because I brought my laptop to school and had very few classes.

Tomorrow I have one class and Friday I have two. We’ll see how this works out.

If you got to this sentence and actually read everything preceding it, congratulations. You have surpassed all of my expectations.

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