Category: Silently in Japan

Visiting Hiroshima, like Rotterdam, while I’m looking at the contemporary skyline there’s a black-and-white photo in my mind of a city reduced to rubble from an aerial bombardment.  There’s not much beauty to the functional look of a modern city unless you realize it has risen from almost total destruction.  What would be mundane is now magnificent, the…

Shika deer, considered messengers of the gods, roam unafraid among humans on Miyajima. They eat anything so beware of whatever you are holding in your hands.  I did a separate post with deer pics. We saw them in the streets and alleyways and our trek up the mountain. A forested mountain lush with deer food. There…

In guidebooks and tourist brochures, this haven of natural beauty is labeled Miyajima. On maps, it’s more commonly named Itsukushima which means “island dedicated to the gods”.  Whichever name you settle on, this island was considered a god and 800 years ago, the large Itsukushima shrine was erected on wooden poles over the water. It…

We took a ferry from Hiroshima to the island of Miyajima (also called Itsukushima) known for its temples and shrines and a large torii gate that appears to float just off shore. The island is also known for its oysters.

This morning we took 45-minute boat ride from Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park to Miyajima Island.  Known for its sacred mountain, the island has a large vermilion shrine built on the water with a “floating gate”.  (I’ll leave it to Ella to describe how the O-torii Gate floats and sinks with the tides.)  Miyajima is also known for…

On the island of Miyajima, the deer are part of the crowd.

For today, I had booked a walking tour / cooking class with Kozo, a native of Hiroshima. He’d spent some time in the U.S. so his English was fluent. Google translate was not necessary. We were the only two people on the tour. We started at the Peace Memorial, moved on to Hiroshima castle and…

Rainy day here in Hiroshima, but at least it wasn’t black rain.  We took a walking tour with Kozo, a retired businessman who was raised here.  He took us to places we missed when we concentrated on the Peace Memorial Park yesterday, and then we went back to his apartment and he showed us how to prepare…

Imagine being in a land of frequent earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and hearing air raid sirens.  The first time I heard them in Osaka, might felt a few heart palpitations. Then we heard them in Kagoshima and thought maybe Mt Sakurajima was going to finally belch lava instead of grey clouds of gas. Now in…

Not like back home. 7/11s in Japan offer all kinds of cheap, prepared food of pretty good quality. Originally owned by the same company as the US brand, 7/11 here is now fully Japanese owned.

Meant to post these earlier. We have left the island of Kyushu and are now back on the “mainland”.

We spent the afternoon wandering the Peace Memorial Park and Museum in Hiroshima.  Full of somber people. The place had that feel.  The unimaginable had happened here. I was asked to sign a petition against nuclear weapons. Perfect place to gather signatures. Though who they are petitioning is unclear. The museum was claustrophobically crowded and dimly lit…

We both somehow got our timing off this morning and checked out of our Fukuoka apartment an hour earlier than planned. What to do? Oh look…as we rolled our luggage by a big Starbucks next to the station. Let’s set a spell, have some free WiFi with coffee. I branched out and ordered a matcha…

“Knock, knock.”  “Who’s there?”  “Adam.”  “Adam who?”  “Atom Bomb.”  I remember I was around four or five when my mother told me this joke.  Later, when I was growing up in Los Alamos, my friends used to kid around about living in a city of bomb makers.  But Oppenheimer and the scientists who built the atomic bomb left a weird legacy of…

We’ve moved on to Hiroshima. Here are some last photos of Fukuoka.