Japan

Family and Friends,
My time in Japan went by faster than any other country. It was one of the countries I was most excited about visiting before my trip even started, so to see it come and go has been bittersweet. I bought a Japan Rail Pass before I got there so I was able to travel by train around the country. I must say I was amazed at the Japanese railway system. The Shinkansen high-speed trains travel at 180 miles per hour, but if you didn’t look out the window to see the countryside in a blur you would think that you were cruising along at 60. All of the trains are one time and there is a train to the other side of the country just about every thirty minutes. I couldn’t help but imagine how nice it would be to have a similar mode of transportation in the U.S. To be able to show up at the station 10 minutes before the train leaves and not have to worry about checking bags or anything like that.
The first morning my friend Mike and I took off for Hiroshima. We spent the afternoon at the Peace Memorial Museum and Park. The museum showed through pictures, artifacts, and personal accounts what happened when the bomb hit and the destruction that has ensued in the years after. It was another place that made me look back on the history that I had learned during my time as an American student and think completely differently about it. To see the pictures of a quaint city full of innocent civilians and the corresponding pictures of the destruction caused by the bomb was hard to understand. Obviously, the war was a backdrop for all of this to put it in to context, but much like the Vietnam War Museum that I visited I came out of the building shocked that we continue to find our way in to wars that destroy countries and families alike. The park around the museum is very pretty, and it is filled with various peace monuments. If any of you know the story of Sadako and her effort to make 1000 paper cranes, there is a monument dedicated to her and it is surrounded by glass cases full of paper cranes made by children from around the world. Another monument in the park is the A-Bomb Dome, which is the only structure in Hiroshima that withstood the bomb and has been left standing to this day. All that is left of what used to be the Industrial Promotion Hall is the steel frame and a few bricks, and it is a harsh juxtaposition to the beautiful city that has flourished around it, but it serves as an effective reminder of what happened to the city.
My only night in Hiroshima Mike and I decided we wanted to experience a Japanese baseball game, and luckily enough there was a game in town that night. We rooted on the hometown Hiroshima Carp against the Nagoya Dragons. I bought us two tickets the day of the game at the box office for thirty bucks apiece and when we got in to the stadium we realized that our seats were in the first row on the first base line directly behind the home team’s dugout. The team wasn’t great, they always finish below .500 and could be called the Kansas City Royal of the Far East, but the fans were wild and we even got on the jumbotron during the seventh inning because we were doing some serious cheering and crowd pumping.
The next morning I split off from Mike who was headed to Tokyo and I headed to Kyoto. When I got there in the afternoon I had no place to stay, which I thought wouldn’t be a problem, but getting a room in Kyoto on a Saturday night during cherry blossom season is a difficult task. I walked to a few hostels before realizing that nowhere had vacancy and I must have called ten different hotels and hostels before I decided to just take my bag and see what I wanted to see that day with or without a room for the night. I traveled across the city by subway and visited the Heian-Jingu Shrine, which can be seen in one of my favorite movies, Lost In Translation, which gave it a little extra personal significance. It was very pretty but also very crowded. I ended up finding the last available bed at a hostel that was decent and stayed there for the night.
On my third day I took a train to Nara, a small city near Kyoto that was Japan’s first capital and is full of famous temples and gardens. I had a guidebook with me and it suggested a walking tour that took me about 6 hours in total. My favorite part of the day was my visit to a Japanese garden that I discovered while wandering around. When I got inside I realized that I was the only person there, and it was a refreshing change from not only the Japanese tourist sights, but also all of the other cities that I had visited in the previous month. It was exactly the kind of natural Japanese beauty that I had been looking for. It was a relatively small enclosed area with a pond in the center lined with moss covered rocks and beautiful flowers. I ended up staying there for over an hour just listening to the fountains and streams, it was my own personal version of meditation. The rest of the day I spent walking around the city seeing many different shrines and temples and then I made my way back to Kyoto for the night.
On my final day in Kyoto I took the bus around to three different temples that I had wanted to see. The first temple I saw was the Kiyomizu-Dera temple, which is famous for having a waterfall which is split into three streams that are supposed to give you good luck or wisdom. Needless to say I drank from all three of the streams and I have since won the lottery (I spent it all in a Pachinko parlor, don’t ask) and been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. In the afternoon I visited Kinkaku-Ji, which is a golden temple that was originally built in the 14th century but was burned to the ground in 1950 by a monk and fully recreated in 1955. The outside of the building is completely covered in gold leafing and it sits across a pond against the hills of Kyoto. My last stop for the day was the Ryoan-Ji temple, which is famous for it’s giant Zen rock garden. It was created by an anonymous monk in 1450 and he gave no reasoning behind his design which includes 15 rocks spread throughout the bed of pebbles. After leaving the garden, I walked through the largest group of cherry blossom trees that I had seen. It was like stepping in to a different world. The ground and the sky were covered in pink petals and the petals were constantly falling like snowflakes in slow motion. I took a lot of pictures to try and capture what I was seeing, but it really didn’t do it justice. I ended up taking a short video, which I think shows it a little better, but it could have been one of those moments that can’t be reproduced.
After my train back to Kobe where the ship was docked I met up with George and Dani for a Kobe Beef Dinner. Let me say that regardless of the price, if you are ever in Japan you need to try it. The restaurant that I was at was set up like a Benihana, minus all of the showy tomfoolery, shenanigans and hullabaloo of the chef. I have eaten quite a few premium steaks in my life, but none of them were quite like this one. I wouldn’t have had to chew the meat if I didn’t want to because it immediately melted in my mouth. It was a fabulous finish to a great trip and I know that Japan is a place that I want to go back to see the places I didn’t get to see sometime in the future. It completely lived up to every expectation that I had, which is saying a lot.

Conor