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| One of the many memorials for the bomb victims. |
Most of the day was focused on highly depressing World War II A-bomb exhibitions. We went to a number of museums and peace memorials and talked with an A-bomb survivor who was just a little girl 2.4 kilometers away from the bomb when it went off. We also heard a talk from Dr. Robert Jacobs of the Hiroshima Peace Institute about the history and development of nuclear weapons.
I don't really want to spend too much time on this, because while Hiroshima is certainly a historic site and host to one of the most tragic losses of civilian life in modern history, I could only take so much of it. Walking from exhibit to exhibit displaying videos of dying Japanese children with radiation burns and maggots in their wounds and wax models of mothers and babies with their skin melting off of them was just emotionally draining. Everyone in the group was just shambling along with these glum looks on their faces. I guess I'm glad I had the opportunity to learn about this event right where it happened, but planning all of that for the same day within the span of just a few hours probably wasn't the best way to go about educating us.
Moving on.
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| Where are all the buildings? I forgot land could be green... |
Late in the day we headed to our final destination: the island of Miyajima. I have to say, the Miyajima visit has to be my favorite thing I've done since coming to Japan. I'll get more into it in a future post, as we spent all of our third day there. We took a train from our Hiroshima hotel and crossed the water on a ferryboat. When we finally arrived, we were met by a place completely different from anywhere we had gone before. The island was very rural and covered in lush greenery. The island is famous for its giant red tori gate sticking out of the water, and its enormous population of adorable sika deer. These deer were everywhere, and unlike the skittish deer from back in the States, these ones would come right up to you and let you pet them. They just walked the streets alongside the visitors. There were a lot of incredible things on this island, but for whatever reason, the deer stood out to me the most.
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| I still can't believe the view we had from our room. |
We checked into our traditional tatami-matted rooms in groups of five. It was indeed a lot of people to a room, but the rooms were actually rather spacious, so it wasn't a problem. Of course students were divvied up by gender, and there are only five guys in our program, so we were all in the same room. We dropped off our stuff and used the remaining time before dinner to walk the streets and check out the shops. They had those katana-hilted umbrellas for the equivalent of like $10. I really wanted to pick one up, but I never got around to it. Ah, well.
We headed back to the hotel after a while, changed into our (provided) yukata, and had a traditional fixed-menu Kaiseki-style Japanese dinner. There were too many dishes to count. There was some pretty weird stuff on my plates, but I made a point of trying everything. I remember there was tuna, squid, salmon, oysters, miso, rice, fruit, custard, a fish's face, lots of veggies I didn't recognize, tempura, aaand . . . other things I can't remember. I tried a fish eye, and yep, that was pretty weird.
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| The deer! They were everywhere! |
After dinner, pretty much everyone headed over to the hotel's public baths for a relaxing way to wind down after the long day. The public nudity thing is still a bit weird as a foreigner, but I'm getting used to it. Note that these were indeed divided by gender.
Everyone eventually headed up to their rooms and stayed up way too late before finally calling it a night.
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