One Long Night in Hiroshima

Contest Closed: The winner of the caption contest is my buddy Steve, whose offensive entry made me laugh so hard I could not relay it to Camille and Denise in a comprehensible manner. Good work Steve. Email me your address and you shall recieve a postcard in the next few weeks.

Hiroshima

Arriving in Hiroshima was no surprise; it was as necessary a stop for me as Tokyo would be for any tourist to enter Japan. It took us only a few hours from Kyoto to arrive, and it was at this point that Denise left us to our own devices, for better or for worse. She'd looked after us a great deal up to here. She made sure that I got some medicine for my stomach, which is not super helpful, but much better than a kick "squa' in the nuts."

On the whole, Japanese medicine is pretty unhelpful; it comes in doses that are more likely to make a cold laugh at you than run in terror. But according to Denise and Camille, they go to the hospital for everything, and so I guess you don't want to have your entire population too heavily medicated (unless you're the U.S. pharmaceutical industry). What I most appreciate about Japanese medicine, is that it tastes just god-awful. It is truly heinous. Denise says her students are super diligent about washing their hands for fear of the medicine. Finally a country that has it figured out. How many kids would play sick if Buckley's Mixture was the tastiest stuff in the medicine cabinet I wonder?

After proving indispensable once again, Denise, being the working girl, wanted, and rightly deserved, some relaxation to round out her time off of school. So seeing her off we set out ourselves to the Hiroshima peace park, the memorial to the roughly 200,000 who died in the A-Bomb attack.

We started off by going to the site of the hypo-center, above which "Little Boy" exploded in a massive way. The haunting skeleton of the Hiroshima Prefectuctural Industrial Promotion Hall, better known as the "A-Bomb Dome," one of the few buildings not flattened in the blast, stood in front of us as a reminder today of what happened on that day more than 60 years ago. As we beheld it, the rain began to fall first as a few lonely drops, then soon as a persistent fine drizzle.

Unfortunately we didn't have our jackets, but the somber mood it carried with it seemed appropriate. The park, for its part, is filled with various memorials, some to the Koreans taken as slave labourers who died there that day, to the children who suffered. Among my favorites is the Flame of Peace, an eternal flame that will only be extinguished once the last nuclear weapon is destroyed. It may be that we run out of petrochemicals to fuel it before we wake up to our stupidity, but who knows, right?

The museum itself is well done and practically free. I think it almost ridiculous to pay only 50c for the entrance fee. I couldn't even find a donation bin at the end of it. Oh well. The Japanese, who are not especially renowned for their transparency on what happened during the war, or in general (Whaling is a contemporary example. There's hope on the way though. This article is exciting owing to the confluence of several avenues of pressure on them), have done an excellent job here. There is admission of war crimes on their part in China, as well as a sincere and balanced view of the events leading up to the bombing. It is one of the best museums I have been to.

With our brains filled to capacity, we set about trying to kill the next 5 hours until we could go to Round 1, an all-night activity arcade. We managed to do so with relative ease at a coffee shop where we proceeded to solve most of the worlds problems. War, the ever elusive problem escaped our grasp, but only just barely. If only the world would listen to Camille and I. Okay, well at least if the Calgary urban planning committee would - we should probably start small.

Think globally, act locally

After finding an all night katsu place to fill our bellies we proceeded to Round 1, where we would play ping-pong, pool, basketball, arcade games, etc. all night. This proved to be a gripping struggle for supremacy over one another - like a battle between King Kong and Godzilla (I, given my hairy constitution am unfortunately a shoe-in for the former) - it could only end in tears, or so we thought. As it turns out it ended in an anti-climactic rest in a lay-z-boy massage chair wondering why we didn't have the stamina to make it until dawn like we used to. Oh yeah, we're old, as Denise would gleefully point out if she were here to witness us.

Resting in the massage chairs I took a moment to flip through a strange porno-comic wherein the author was clearly working out his peeping-tom fantasies as a cat - interesting, but not interesting enough to fight off my imminent collapse at 4:50 in a karaoke room where I slept for a little less than an hour.

When I awoke, I felt very ill. Not just tired - hungover: I threw up in the bathroom and the acidity felt like it was going to eat through the roof of my mouth and into my brain. Oh, I felt so hung over - only, I hadn't had a drop of alcohol to drink. Was it hyperacidity? Was it bad curry katsu at the all night diner? Whas it melon pop? Or was it the first first dry hangover on record? It's true Hiroshima is the center for malevolent firsts, but this will go down forever as an unsolved mystery.

Miyajima

Within an hour or so, after an important stop in the bus station bathroom hunched over a squat toilet, and a brief rest on a bus station bench (as one is wont to do when finding an empty bench in a bus station in my condition - I tell you I can sleep anywhere after this year), I felt a little better and we headed off to Miyajima, and island just offshore from Hiroshima in the Inland Sea, where the famous floating shrine and floating gate can be found. We were not in the best of spirits - stalling because of cold and hunger - but we were willing to persevere all the same. As it turned out our timing was perfect. You see, the gates are surrounded by water only at high tide; at low tide they would more appropriately be dubbed, the muddy gates. We arrived at high tide.

Feeling more chipper once on the island, we decided that we would carry through our plan to climb to the top om Mt. Misen. Too which a colleague of Denise's later exclaimed "Rieree?" Yes, we really did. It's not the most strenuous of hikes, but we were carrying our packs, and Camille's was considerably heavy and he is less of a hiker than me. So after a few closely connected breaks, I switched packs with him and we continued to the summit. (Now to say summit is a little misleading. Mountains in this part of Japan are more like precocious hills)

As we walked back down, I was starting to get really hungry, which seems to have become something of a theme here in Japan. To make matters worse we walked by the worlds largest rice paddle, which contributed to my condition; my imagination believing it would surely take a paddle this big to fill the gaping hole in my belly. Depressingly, it was carved out of a 300 year old tree. Good use of old growth forests if you ask me! Now, as Camille remarked, they're going to have to find a 500 year old tree to make the largest rice bowl in the world to go with it.

I had high hopes of getting back to food, er, shore. But we were quickly distracted by the fact that the tide was now out as we returned, and it would be a waste of a wandering opportunity. So we mucked about for a while, until we were finally able to go back to the ferry terminal. People were all over the place digging vigorously for clams and crabs (apparently) - but this latter bit we weren't sure if he was confused by the English word, or he was telling us that he had crabs and the digging was entirely besides the point. Another mystery.

The big dilemma of the day was whether to go to Iwakuni, an old Samurai quarter, or go "home" to Masuda. My sense of adventure told me to go to Iwakuni, but I was concerned about money, and frankly too tired and hungry to make a stallwart argument towards this destination. We called ahead to book the hostel and found the number out of service. That was enough to convince us that it was a useless endeavour adn we headed back to Hiroshima where I needed to be fed. What fed us was KFC - no not a kick from Chuck, though in retrospect that is what we should have had to knock some common sense into us, but it was nevertheless the Colonel and his dastardly secret recipe that would ensnare us in our weakest hour.

A Return to Masuda

We pretty much collapsed in sleep when we got on the bus. Camille didn't sleep much, worried about missing our stop and having to stay in Hamada or some other godforsaken place. But I, who had be asleep at ever possible opportunity (on the 9 minute ferry crossing, the 15 minute train ride, the KFC line up) made no bones about passing out. After this long on the road, you learn to be inventive. I learned some time ago that a jacket propped up by one's sandals makes actually a pretty fine pillow - try it out sometime. This method of pillow creation was employed here; it met with resounding success.

Denise was happy to see us, and we spent the next 48 hours sleeping. Okay, that's not true, but it took us two full days to recover. We really are getting much to old for this, but males in some regards never grow up, and boys, as they say, will be boys. Even if it takes a great long toll on body and mind.

---

---