Category: Silently in Japan

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.

The Fukuoka Prefecture Art Museum advertised itself as a place where local artists could show their stuff. From the exhibition on the first level, it seemed like a place where community art classes could exhibit their progress. Couldn’t resist taking a photo of this photo. How cute is this feathered creature? Moving to a room…

Ohori Park has large pond that once was part of the moat system of Fukuoka Castle. It has gardens, and playing fields, and landscaped groves of peach, plum, and cherry trees.  The peach and cherry trees were still in bloom. The ruins of Fukuoka Castle still retain some of the slanted stone ramparts. And a towering…

some signs we encountered today in Fukuoka

Dazaifu. Japan’s most famous Starbucks

Today we decided to take another trip out of Fukuoka and see the Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine.  It was a thirty minute train ride to Dazaifu where the shrine takes up enough mountainside acreage to include an amusement park and a mall-size modern museum.  The street from the train station to the shrine gate was lined with shops…

I lost my sunglasses a few days ago (cheap ones) and have been trying to find sunglasses to buy ever since. In the US, seems every corner Walgreens and CVS has a rack of them. Not here. In Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu, in Japan. Sunglasses = yakuza (the evil Japanese crime syndicate so…