Pictures (part six): Miyajima and Hiroshima

Well, this is going to be a shorter post today. Relatively shorter, anyway.

This post corresponds to this post for Miyajima, this post for Hiroshima, and this post for pictures.

If you don't know what this is by now, I haven't been fangirling enough.

Even the deer wanted to eat momiji manjuu.

You have no idea how much I wish I could be on that boat. Because SERIOUSLY. SO COOL.

This was right by the shrine which the huge sea torii belonged to. I have no idea what it was, except that it was sacred for some reason.

It's kind of creepy, in my opinion.

This's the back of the shrine. Notice that the water's already receded.

Also, there were tiny crabs all over the place.

Aaaaand that's all the pictures you get of awesome views, 'cause my camera is pretty terrible.

That enshrined piece of driftwood. SO COOL. (I actually took a bunch of pictures of this, but I figured that most people wouldn't want to look at more than one.)

Because I cannot post enough pictures of this torii.

Here's a pagoda that was on top of a hill that I climbed and nearly fell down. (The nearly falling down was my fault, for the record. Mostly.)

That tanuki is smoking.

Also, robots.

I don't think this needs any further explanation.

So as we were walking around as the sun was setting, we came across these deer, who apparently thought that the sign at this shop was tasty.

Then a little foreigner kid showed up to scold them loudly in English.

Kid: No! Bad deer! Don't eat paper!

Deer: [IGNORE]

Then they started fighting over who got to eat the paper.

This is a guardian lion wearing someone's glasses. No further explanation necessary.

Tiny shrine! (You can't see particularly well from this picture, but it was in a little pond, so you had to cross over a stone bridge to get to it.)

And here are some close-ups.

And here's the back of it. (You can see a little bit of the pond in this picture.)

Futons! We slept on futons. I really like futons. So much easier to make than normal beds. Also, they're pretty ridiculously comfortable.

Yes, that is a jellyfish. At my feet. Because the tide went out which allowed me to...

...walk down to the giant torii. Have I mentioned how much I love this torii? I love this torii so much. I would undoubtedly marry this torii, if I didn't think that Itsukushima Shrine would probably object.

As I mentioned before, people stuck coins in between the barnacles for luck.

When they couldn't find spots in the barnacles, they just stuck the coins in breaks in the wood of the torii.

A stepping stone path which you can only use when the tide's out.

Itsukushima Shrine, when the tide's out.

And here's the Atomic Dome again, 'cause that's the only picture I have from Hiroshima.

Today's the 65th anniversary of the atom bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, if you weren't aware. This was the first year that the U.S. sent a representative to the annual memorial ceremony in Hiroshima. Small steps, I suppose.

In any case, I don't have many photos left, so my guess is that I'll only have one post left, maybe two. They'll go up...at some point. Yeah. See how good I am with schedules when I don't have to keep notifying my parents that I haven't died in a ditch somewhere?

Please don't blame me for things that happened before I was born

Okay, well, once again I doubt this will be terribly long. I'll try to write more detailed blog posts (with pictures) about this week when, you know, I'm not two steps away from collapsing from exhaustion.

So today we woke up bright and early at the ryokan, and went down to eat breakfast, which was yummy. I really like Japanese breakfasts. American breakfasts are generally just too sweet for my tastes.

Anyway, after that, a couple of us went down to the giant torii (shrine gate) in the ocean (which is basically what Miyajima is most famous for). The tide was almost all the way out, so we walked down to the torii and were awed. I heard that the base of the gate has been there for 800 years (although I don't know if that's actually true or not). In any case, it was encrusted in barnacles, and people had stuck a bunch of coins in between the barnacles/in splits in the wood for luck. Pretty cool. I have lots of pictures.

Then I went and did some omiyage (closest English I can think of is "souvenir") shopping and bought momiji manju (little cakes shaped like maple leaves with various fillings) for my host family.

Then we all hopped on the ferry and a train and went back to Hiroshima. There we all got in taxis and rode to the Hiroshima Peace Museum. And the taxi ride was...interesting. The taxi driver started lecturing us about how horrible America was for dropping the bomb on Japan and how the war was entirely America's fault and how Americans weren't the least bit sorry for it and needed to be taught better and weren't we feeling grateful that he was teaching us how we had attacked the poor, defenseless Japanese people without provocation? (Apparently Pearl Harbor was America's fault. 'cause FDR knew about the attack and didn't do anything so he could declare war on Japan without warning. I just...what. Hello. History. Do you know it? At all?)

Needless to say, it was horribly awkward. Because what do you say? "I'm sorry that my country bombed your country 65 years ago, but really I had absolutely nothing to do with that decision, 'cause my PARENTS weren't even born yet, so can you stop being angry at me please"? Or do you just start chanting, "Rape of Nanking" over and over and over?

In any case, our responses were something like, "Oh, I see. That's a very interesting opinion you have."

So then we went to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, which was really good, even if it made me hate humanity a little bit. The nice thing about it was that they DID talk about the bad stuff Japan did during the war, including all the forced labor (although they didn't talk about comfort women, but that didn't really have any connection at all to Hiroshima, unlike the forced laborers, who died in the bombing). And the slant was less "ooh, America is so evil" and more "the atomic bomb is horrible; let's not do it again." (Not that I needed convincing. English 1A pretty much pounded that into my head.)

In any case, I already knew pretty much all the information in the museum (because I read A LOT), although I did get to see some lovely pictures of burn victims and people with their flesh melting off and cancerous tongues and the like. There were a couple of rooms that I had to go through relatively quickly because I started feeling sick to my stomach.

I actually thought the most interesting bits were about the (non-medical) aftermath: all the rebuilding and also the American attempts to censor information about what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Anyway, after that lovely, happy experience, everyone was exhausted and didn't want to go anywhere else, so we hopped on the train and rode back home.

My host parents went out to dinner this evening, so my little host brother and I had dinner by ourselves, and then played possibly every game in the house (and then some). And I learned how to play Othello, which is actually a lot of fun. My not-so-little host brother showed up at some point, ate half his dinner, and then curled up on the floor and fell asleep. ('course, he was playing soccer in the ridiculous heat, which is enough to make anyone exhausted.)

Tomorrow morning I'm hoping on a train and riding to Yokohama for more crazy adventures. WHOO. Dunno if I'll have internet, but I probably will. If I don't, don't freak out, please.

Anyway, g'night.