Butt Flaps and Spy Crabs

Saturday morning my alarm went off at 5:10 and up I got.  My bags were already packed, so I swiped some bread and yogurt from the kitchen before heading out the door to meet my 6:19 bus.  There were a considerable amount of people at the stop for it being so early, including a group of older-aged friends.

On the bus with me, I waited at/wandered around the station and got some bread and cocoa for travel food before buying my ticket and pestering Daniel and B to check their locations.  At 15 till the train left, I went to the platform, having not heard from Daniel.

On the train with us, standing room only, to Yodoyabashi where we transferred to the JR line subway.  Then we were at Shin-Osaka and 15 minutes from our scheduled Shinkansen.  Daniel missed it by just a few minutes and had to buy another ticket.  The ride itself was uneventful. It was a really smooth train with fold-down tables and cushy seats.  I played some Pokemon (there was someone else in the car playing that I chatted with), started a new crochet project (a hat for Daniel--he bought the yarn) and listened to music when the laugh of the girl sitting next to me became too obnoxious.

The countryside was beautiful.  I was surprised at how many cemeteries we could see from the train and was more than slightly annoyed at how many tunnels we went though and how high what I assume the sound barriers were.  Trying to look out the window was almost pointless.

Then we arrived!  The station was busy and full of shops.  B and I waited for Daniel and saw a group of elementary school kids go by in their yellow caps.  Then he arrived and we hopped on the streetcar to Peace Park.

We spent a good deal of time at the A-Bomb Dome, what was a school or a library or a government building back before August 6, 1945 at 8:15 a.m.  Despite being about 100 meters from the Hypocenter, the dome somehow survived, standing, and has been preserved since.

There were a number of other monuments on the way to the museum; for the children, for Sadako and her paper cranes, the eternal flame that will burn until there aren't any nukes left in the world and a whole bunch of others.  We arrived at the museum about 10 minutes before the survivor was set to speak.  We bought our tickets and headed downstairs for seats.

If you're squeamish, skip the next paragraph.  It contains details of immediately after the bomb was dropped.

Sugimoto-san spoke in Japanese and Dr. Scott translated.  She was 14 at the time; is 79 now.  She told how she was working about 200km from the hypocenter and dove under her work desk at the first sign of trouble.  The building collapsed around her and she could see her friend's leg in front of her.  Glass embedded itself in her arm, causing a wound that eventually festered and became infested with maggots.  She told how she tried to help others once she was freed from the building, how there was a burned boy carrying his own arm, a mother carried her dead, scorched baby, how skin peeled off and fluttered in the wind, how eyeballs popped out of sockets--sometimes hanging by the nerves, how hair stood on end, how people crawled for the contaminated river--dying of thirst and yet killing themselves faster by drinking, how horses experienced the same thing--burning and drowning.  She spoke of the black rain that burned what it touched and killed the fish in the rivers.  How she had 2/3 of her stomach removed because of the cancer from radiation.  How her father died three days after the blast from radiation, not because he was unfortunately close, but because he was searching for her and the rest of the family in the rubble.

We went into the museum afterward.  There was a special exhibit containing art of survivors depicting the desperation for water, how they wish they had given water or found corpses at wells and troughs.  Some of the drawings were startlingly realistic, giving a true sense of what the aftermath looked like.

Back upstairs, there was a military timeline starting in the 1800s and going up until the bomb in 1945.  The center looped videos of Hiroshima before and after as well as of the American pilots deployed for the mission.  There was a model of the city before and after Little Boy--absolutely nothing was left.

Upstairs had current nuclear warhead count per country (I'd heard that the US has the most, but the graph showed Russia had twice as many).  It also started the beginning of the artifacts.  Articles of clothing.  Lunchboxes.  Roof tiles that had melted and bubbled in the heat.  Chest of drawers and cement walls with glass embedded in them.  Steel and other metal structure warped and bent out of shape by the blast.  A chunk of stone stairs with the "shadow" of a person caught in the blast emblazoned upon them.  Scores and scores of every day items melted together in almost unrecognizable blobs.

There was even a section of items one could touch--mainly roof tiles that had bubbled--with signs reassuring visitors that the items are safe.

There was a reproduction of burned people with frizzled hair and fluttering skin.

There were clippings of nails that grew in black because of radiation.  There were mats of hair that came out with three strokes of a brush.

And Sadako's paper cranes.

Since stepping foot on the Peace Park grounds, I felt sick to my stomach; the land is bad.

We left the museum and stopped by a few more memorials: the mount made of deceased children's ashes, a tomb stone that survived the blast with only its top knocked off, the shrine for the mothers.  We checked into our hostel and waited for B's speaking partner Yuki (a Hiroshima native) to be in the area so we could go to dinner.  The room was alright; had a bathroom, sink and three futons.  We opened the window to air it out because it smelled terrible.

For dinner we wandered to a Vietnamese place at a local mall.  It was pretty tasty, if a bit over-priced.  I purchased my first alcoholic beverage, what they called a Pine and Mint Soda.  It had peach flavor in it and was rather tasty--and as "alcoholic beverages" tend to be in Japan, didn't seem to have any alcohol in it.

We got ice cream afterward and went to purikura with Yuki and her younger sister before they headed home.  Daniel, B and I sat by the "death stairs," as we call them, the stairs people would have gone down to access the river in their need for water, in front of the dome and just talked for probably an hour.  Then it was back to the hostel for more talking and sleep.

We checked out around 9 and had breakfast at a local cafe.  It was tasty and right across the street from the mother shrine.  From there, we walked to the hypocenter, which is down this tiny, random sidestreet and is only noted with a plaque.  It was rather lack-luster.

Then it was on to Hondori street, a major shopping area in Hiroshima.  We wandered down probably half way and there was a balloon sculptor.  He was really good--made Mickey Mouse and Ponyo and a bunch of other recognizable characters.  B paid for him to make a relakuma, which he did, and it was adorable.  I bought more new socks.  Daniel sunk 3000 yen in an arcade for a blanket and ended up really lucky in the end with two Hello Kitty plushies.

Then we were off and away to Hiroshima Castle.  There was a shrine on the grounds where I picked up an omamori (and was given a phone charm omamori for free by a local priestess).  There was a wedding going on in the shrine so we couldn't go in, but it looked rather impressive.  The castle itself was a reproduction and a museum.  The view from the top was less than spectacular because the city had grown up around it too much.  There was some sort of samurai event going on that we were going to watch, but it was getting too late, so we split.

We walked to Shukkeien garden and wandered around.  It was peaceful, relatively, but full of businessmen and other tourists.  There was a bamboo forest and a river full of crabs that scared the crap out of B.  They were kinda cute.

Back at Hiroshima station, we hopped on a train to Miyajima, the Itsukushima Shrine and the famous torii (shrine gates).  We arrived and (after the blip of B losing her ticket) got on a ferry to the island.  Unfortunately, the tide was out when we arrived, so the torii weren't underwater as they typically are in photographs.

And there were deer everywhere!  They were completely tame--didn't care that you were there, or touching them, or that they had to touch you to try and find food.  One of them was bold enough to stick its nose in Daniel's pocket.

We got our pictures of the torii and climbed the stairs to the other shrine at the top of the hill.  On the way there, we saw a mother deer with a nursing fawn as well as a tanuki (looks like a mix of a raccoon and a fox).  It was dark by then and we were all tired, so we headed back to the ferry, back to the train and back to Hiroshima station where we bought our return shinkansen tickets (9800 yen) and hopped on the train.

Misa and Maki picked me up from Hirakatashi-eki when I finally made it back, about 11 p.m., since the buses had stopped hours ago.  I showered and passed out in bed.

And slept until noon.  When I got up, there wasn't anyone home, so I had a small breakfast of raisin bread before they arrived and then I helped prepare food for the grilling party with Maki and Takeshi's friends.  By 5 p.m., I was so tired I went upstairs and laid down... and woke up around 8 to everyone leaving.  I did my homework and headed back to sleep.

A video of a shinkansen coming into the station.

A photograph of Hiroshima after Little Boy was dropped.

The coding between pictures seems to have changed--thanks, Blogger.  I don't know how to fix it, so we get to enjoy a whole bunch of wasted blog space.