Hiroshima, Osaka, and Kyoto

I'm having a bit of hard time with the Internet here. It's working fine for Nathan, and it SORT of works for me, but we'll see how it goes.

I've been riding quite a few bullet trains lately. The first hour or so I spent gawking out the window at the ridiculously spiffy landscape flyby, but lately I've taken to reading books. I got through some enjoyably brain-dead space opera, and now I'm now reading some enjoyably brain-dead Anne McCaffrey. Will they crack the conspiracy? Will our hero survive and get the girl? Will the girl forgive our hero for being a doofus? I'm mildly in suspense on the final point.

In a moment, I'm going to wander downstairs and find out if the hotel's sushi is any good, but before that I'll update you on our touring:

We went to the "peace memorial" in Hiroshima. It is very close to where ground zero was for the atomic bomb back in 1945 (August 6th, I believe? The date gets repeated over and over and over in the exhibits). About 140,000 people died, and there are a lot of people left in the area who are "genbakusha" -- that is, survivors of the atomic bomb. They tend to have unique medical issues.

There was one building that was almost directly beneath the blast, which meant that all the horizontal surfaces were blown out but vertical walls mostly survived. It's called the A-bomb dome, because the original building had a large central dome, of which only a metal skeleton survives. There's a large park with a cenotaph, fountains, trees, etc. near that, and at the south end of the park is the museum. The museum and park cover the tragedy from nearly every possible angle--there are newspaper articles about the bombing, both contemporary and recent. There are models of the city before and after. There were huge numbers of schoolchildren (mostly junior-high aged it seems) who were working on demolishing houses for firebreaks against bombings, so about 8,000 of these students died; there was various memorabilia of all the different students, some of whom lived for several days before dying.

As a whole, the exhibit is quite gloomy (but of course, given the topic, it's hard for it to be anything otherwise). There is a desperate, urgent feel to the place, that "this must never be repeated, anywhere." The people who went through it seemed very intent that some kind of meaning be made out of the tragedy, and the meaning they pull from it is to make Hiroshima a "world peace city." The mayor of Hiroshima sends a strongly worded protest to any government that performs a nuclear test, and the full text of all those telegrams is engraved in stone. It did occur to me that the present emphasis in Japan on world peace is probably drawn especially from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I've been told that a commitment to nonviolent resolution of problems is actually in their pledge of allegiance).

After Hiroshima, we went to Osaka. Osaka is (I believe) the second-largest city in Japan, and famous for its food. Unfortunately, we only spent a little less than a day there, so didn't have a chance to sample much of it. Osaka looks like it has enough things to do to occupy an entire vacation, so perhaps some other year. Osaka has an amazing aquarium--there were dozens of tanks with some mighty big fish in them. The walkway spirals downward weaving through the tanks, so you start by seeing penguins, otters, iguanas and monkeys on the surface, and then gradually descends into the brightly colored swarms of fish swimming below them. The aquarium is themed around the "ring of fire," with species from various places around the world according to the position on the outside, with the "Pacific ocean" tank in the center. The Pacific tank is the spectacular centerpiece of the whole thing. There's a whale shark of some kind swimming among the manta rays and schools of fish--perhaps twenty or thirty different kinds. The walls of the Pacific tank are made of nine-inch-thick acrylic glass (the whole aquarium uses some 350 odd tons of acrylic glass, which they mention is more acrylic glass than is usually produced worldwide in an entire year). As you exit, you're walked past tanks and tubes of creatively lit jellyfish, in all their tentacled glory.

The one place we did get to eat was an okonomiyakiya. That's a kind of cook-at-your-table omelet, with lots of cabbage, meat, and noodles, and the slightest hint of egg. You eat it with a bunch of sauces, and you're not allowed to cook it yourself (the staff does it for you, and exhorts you not to touch it!). It was definitely one of my favorite meals of the trip, and there have been quite a few great ones.

And now, we find out whether the connection will work well enough to let me post this.