I had long been interested to visit Hiroshima to see what physical evidence of the 6 Aug 1945 bombing was still in existence. One thing I was surprised by was to feel such a connection to the events of that day when I finally saw the remains of thisbuilding in person. I arrived into Hiroshima on the afternoon of 25 Sep 2014 and immediately came to visit the dome. I took pictures at that time with just my digital camera. I came back the next morning, a clearer weather day, to take pictures with my tablet as a backup in case those pictures came out better. What I am posting is a mixture of the two. On 6 Aug 1945, this building was known as The Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. It is now known as ... read more

There is some interest around this topic, so I have decided to make a blog post just for it. Of my 14 nights in hotels, I opted to stay in Capsule/Pod hotels for eleven of those. I think most people would agree that that was too long an experiment, but looking back on it, it worked out fine. I stayed in two Capsule hotels, one in Tokyo and one in Kyoto. In each of those hotels, there were eight capsules to a room. My capsule room in Tokyo at the Hotel Nihonbashi Villa cost me just 18,100 Yen or roughly USD $165 for a seven night stay. My capsule room in Kyoto at the Capsule Ryokan Hotel cost me just 14,000 Yen or roughly USD $126 for a four night stay. The capsule room at the ... read more

I decided to check out the aquarium in Osaka since I learned that they had a Whale Shark in their biggest tank. While that was very cool to see one of them slowly swimming about, I was quite surprised to learn of the existence of Giant Spider Crabs. I have both a video and some still shots of them. Near the exit of the aquarium is a fairly good sized Petting Pond where you can reach down into the 8 to 12" deep pond and touch Rays, Zebra Sharks , and Leopard Sharks as they swim by. The Leopard sharks seemed the most anti social though as they had congregated in an area of the pond which cannot be reached by the hands of the aquarium guests. The Rays were pretty funny in that they often ... read more

Ryoan-ji was another World Cultural Heritage Site that I was able to visit during my time in Japan, and was just a short walk from the Golden Pavilion. If you are going to visit either of them, you might as well visit both, and there are other points of interest very close to them both as well. The focal point of Ryoanji is its rock garden and the moments of Zen that it provides to its tenders and visitors, but the entire grounds are very calming and nurturing as well. I once worked with a woman that kept a very small (7" x 9" or so) rock garden by her desk, and people (including me) often took to rake the sand within it when stopping by to talk with her. I figured seeing one of the ... read more

I seem to remember that some park in Japan had been somewhat overtaken by Macaque monkeys and thought thismight be the place, so had to go check it out. While it turns out that I was wrong about that, it was really quite an interesting experience and I was very glad I went to check it out. Once you get to the area, there is a bit of a hike to reach the 160m above sea level area where the feeding house is stationed. The hike would likely be too much for your average senior citizen, but most everyone else can easily make the climb. Once you get to where the feeding house is located, you can go inside within which you can purchase drinks for yourself, or fruit or nuts that you can feed to ... read more