Hiroshima Mon Amour

Thanks to China's Great Firewall, we were unable to post our blogs from the last few weeks so...lets do a little time warp.

Friday 27th March

One week ago (really, It feels like one month ago) we were back on the Shinkansen and 4 hours later we arrived in Hiroshima. We arrived quite late in the day which meant we were both hungry, luckily for us the local dish in Hiroshima is Okonomiyaki, the giant, thick, savoury pancakes we first tried in Nara. They are fast becoming one of our favourite dishes. We had heard rumours, that we suspected might be urban legend, of a 5-storey building housing 26 okonomiyaki restaurants. But it actually exists, so we enjoyed an evening of pancakes and conversation with the locals. 

It would be nice to say that savoury pancakes were the reason Hiroshima was so well known, but of course we live in an imperfect world and Hiroshima sadly has the label of the first city in history to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon and now more than 60 years later, the citizens are still dealing with the aftereffects of the A-bomb. I lose track of how many cities we have visited on this trip that have left me dejected as to what our own race has done and continues to do to each other, yet like Nagasaki and Phenom Phen Hiroshima is a tranquil town, just getting on and trying to be better, proving that there is still hope and good in the world.  

In the Peace Memorial Park the A-Bomb dome is a startling reminder of the atrocity that happened here on August 6^th 1945. We made our way over to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial museum, which was no less saddening or shocking after the Nagasaki museum, if anything it made it worse knowing that this was allowed to happen twice. 

The museum was informative and at the same time fairly objective, reminding us that Japan too was an aggressor in the Second World War. What is impressive about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is how they have become places of hope rather than despair. The city continues to advocate the abolition of all nuclear weapons. When you are here, seeing the effects of nuclear weapons I whole-heartedly believe that the 2020 vision campaign will become a reality, I cant understand why it is not already and like Japan I have faith that the right decisions will be made. 

After the despair of the museum we decided to go and find the good in the world so on our last day in Hiroshima we caught the ferry over to the island of Itsukushima to visit the Itsukushima Shrine. The shrine is often referred to as the floating shrine due to its location off the bay of the island so at high tide it appears to be floating on the water. The island itself is beautiful with the standard prancing deers and small shrines dotted here and there. We spent the day walking through the forest and browsing in the shops (also standard the Hello Kitty shop) and admiring the world's largest spatula! 

Kyoto

It is slightly hard to concentrate on writing a blog post when rumbling along at over 250 mph on a bullet train but I will try to stop looking out of the window and get a bit more up to date.

We are on the train from Osaka to Fukuoke having spent the last week in the Kansai area of central Japan, Kansai is kind of like the Midlands, it is in the middle and it is where all the good stuff is, the capital might be just down the road but the Midlands is where the action is. Kansai includes the areas around Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe and other historic areas such as Nara. We will catch up with these areas in another post but first we spent a few more days in Kyoto.

On March 1st we spent the day at Fushimi-Inari Taisha it is one of my favourite places on the planet not just in Japan, I came here in 2004 and have wanted to come back ever since. The temple complex is set across a hill with pathways lined with red tori, there are small shines dotted across the hill as well as a lot of stone foxes. The complex is dedicated to the Gods of rice and harvest and is now an important site for business people. There are always people at the shines pondering something to do with a business venture and this really adds to the atmosphere, but mostly it is very beautiful.

After the amazing weather we had it was time for a bit of cold and damp but we made the most of it and spent the day in the Gion area of Kyoto checking out the traditional style narrow streets, shops and temples. We also bumped into a few more Geisha.

The weather was nice again on our last day in Kyoto so we had a long walk to one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan, the gardens were beautiful and there was a wedding going on so there were a lot of smiling faces around.

Kyoto is a pretty special place (so much so that the Allies decided not to bomb it during WW2) it is a culture city like Paris or London, you can walk around it, the people are very friendly the food is good and there are so many gardens and parks that you can easily forget you are in a city. We couldn't stay forever so we packed up and got on a train to Osaka.