Hiroshima and Miyajima, cont.

(Incidentally, today is Tanabata, the star festival. In Yokohama, I can report there is one star visible in the clear night sky.)

Day 2 - Miyajima

Day 2 started with another huge feast at the ryokan. I checked out and walked around Miyajima for a while. The rain had stopped, and as the morning progressed, the sun peeked out more and more.

If I'd been going hoping to see all the tourist draws, I'd have been disappointed. The aquarium and the ropeway were both closed. Fortunately I wasn't planning to see either of them. I went instead to Daisho-in temple.

Usually when I visit a shrine or temple in Japan, I don't have any strong feeling that it is a religious place. There are families there, giggling girls buying good-luck charms, tourists snapping pictures.

This temple was different. Its setting was quiet, and prettily green; it reminded me of Kyoto or Kamakura. And it was full of interesting religious objects. There was a mandala made of coloured sand, contributed by visiting monks from Tibet. There was a cave containing 88 icons representing the temples of Shikoku, with soil from each; it was said that if you go through this cave, you needn't visit the temples of Shikoku.

(There are 88 famous temples in Shikoku; one can visit all of them on a pilgrimage, in which case one is following in the footsteps of the founder of Shingon Buddhism. This temple in Miyajima is a Shingon Buddhist temple. One of my students, with her husband, took this pilgrimage when she lived in Shikoku. She showed me a picture of the two of them, many years ago, both clad in pilgrim's clothes.)

There are many collections of statues; there was one walk lined with 500 men, each with its own facial expression. There are also sutra wheels you can spin; spinning a sutra wheel once will will be equivalent to reading their text in full. A monk was beating a drum, which sound reverberated across the temple grounds. There was free tea for visitors.

One thing that did interest me was the 'cute' statues everywhere. Some of the statues were imposing; some were stately; some were dignified. But there were an awful lot of them that looked rather like cute, 'chibi' anime characters.

I usually don't really care for temples, but I liked this one. I also went to Itsukushima Shrine. This shrine is almost like a red network of piers, 'floating' on the water. When I went here in mid-morning, it was lapped by water. When I walked by a couple of hours later, half of it was dry. The tide was going out.

The famous red torii gate in the ocean can be approached when the tide is low; however I only saw it at high tide, 'floating'.

The little streets of Miyajima have a real old-style Japanese feel to them (most of the stores are souvenir shops). At night they're lit with lanterns. And there really are a lot of deer. Visitors are not supposed to feed them, but sometimes they will take matters into their own hands (an American woman, who took my picture, had a map with a big chunk bitten out of it...).

I walked around quite a bit. There were a lot more foreigners on Miyajima than I've seen anywhere in Japan for a long time. I always feel kind of excited when I hear an Australian accent. There were a few on Miyajima.

I bought the obligatory Miyajima omiyage of 'momiji manjuu'. Momiji is a Japanese maple - I believe Mum and Dad have one in their garden? and kind of a symbol of Miyajima. Manju is a kind of Japanese sweet, it's like a little cakey thing with bean paste inside. Some of the manju have different fillings.

In Miyajima there were a number of shops with big, manju-making machines, filling maple-leaf-shaped impressions with the manju mix, and cooking them. I bought a box for my school (they have gotten quite a bit of omiyage from me this year, with all my travels ^_^) and she threw in an extra, chocolate one, for makeweight. ^_^ I ate it on the train home.

(I still can't say I'm a fan of Japanese confectionary, though...)

The other specialties of Miyajima seemed to be iwagaki, fish cakes, and anago (conger eel). I'd tried conger eel at my ryokan - it was delicious - and fish cakes too. But nothing would tempt me to try iwagaki. I don't care if it's barbecued, broiled, stir-fried, whatever - no matter how you prepare them, oysters are *still* like eating a big wad of mucus. And I'm sorry if that's a disgusting mental image, but that's how they make me feel!!

After I was done in Miyajima - and it really was a nice place, especially as the weather cleared up - I took the ferry back. I couldn't believe that on such a nice day, I was the only person on that ferry who was sitting outside. Every Japanese person was sitting inside in the air conditioning, watching the TV screen or reading comic books, etc. So I enjoyed the fresh sea air in peace and solitude. ^_^

I took a streetcar back to Hiroshima city.

Hiroshima atomic bomb memorials

In Hiroshima I went straight to Genbaku Dome (Genbaku means 'Atomic Bomb'). This shell of a building was located very near the epicenter of the bomb blast and was one of the only buildings in the whole area to survive, albeit in a ruined state. As time went on, and other A-bomb-damaged buildings were restored, the people of Hiroshima decided to preserve this domed building in the same condition it was after the bombing.

Around this building is the peace park. By this time the weather was warm and sunny, and very nice for walking around the park. I had lunch at a little outdoor Italian restaurant by the river.

The peace park is full of various monuments and statues. One of them is the children's peace statue; its erection was motivated by the story of Sadako and was supported by her classmates. (Sadako is the girl who died of leukemia a few years after the bombing; she was famous for trying to fold a thousand paper cranes to make her wish of living come true.)

This statue is surrounded by masses of paper cranes, many of them arranged in shapes and pictures. When I came to the statue, a group of schoolchildren was gathered around its base, holding posters for peace. They sang a song together, and all bowed toward the statue.

There's also a peace bell, which you can ring. I had nothing to leave, but I rang the bell. There's an eternal flame, burning near the peace memorial museum. There's incense burning. Somehow I didn't like the idea of burning anything to commemorate the bombing. It seemed like there was quite enough burning already. I preferred the bottles of water placed at the front of the Genbaku Dome. They say that after the bombing, countless people, burned all over their bodies, cried out for water, but there was no water to be had. So now, 63 years later, people leave water in memoriam.

I went to the peace park museum. It has a lot of exhibits and information - about the science of atomic bombs, how Hiroshima looked before and after the blast, the events leading up to it, etc. The obvious, overwhelming thrust of the museum and its displays is the human cost of a nuclear attack - most of the victims of the Hiroshima A-bomb were innocent civilians, and most of the human mementoes and relics in the museum were of children. Burned clothing, bags, toys, a blackened shoe; sometimes they were all parents had to identify that their children had died. One mother had even saved part of their young son's skin and fingernail to show the boy's father when he returned from war.

These sad remainders were on display at the museum, accompanied by short footnotes, frequently, stories of love - so-and-so struggled to reach her family, and, despite her family's ministrations, finally died in her mother's arms.

Sadako's story was again told here, in more detail than at the children's monument. On hearing she had less than a year to live, her parents bought her a pretty kimono, which she was delighted to receive. At the museum they had some of the cranes she had made. Actually, they were really tiny. Some of them were about the size of a macadamia nut; she had folded the creases with a needle.

At the time of the blast, a lot of students and civilians had been mobilised into the streets for demolition work (to create fire breaks in the event of air raids). As so many people were outside at the time, that many more were killed or injured. 8:15 was the time of the attack; there were also pocket watches on display, blackened and mangled, which had stopped at that exact moment.

The museum also, obviously, strongly promotes nuclear disarmament. There were masses of copies of letters of protest by the mayor of Hiroshima to the heads and ambassadors of different countries with nuclear weapons (including his latest one, written to North Korea).

After I left the museum, I was sitting in the park, enjoying the afternoon sunshine, and an old man came up and sat beside me. He was 67 years old, he said, and he was 3 years old when the war finished. His father was working in Hiroshima at the time of the A-bomb attack, and was killed in the blast. His mother, thereafter, had to get a job to support the family; and so they were were poor.

He was a nice man. He said he was studying English conversation, and wanted to go to Cairns some day.

Soon after that I had to get going back to Hiroshima station to take my shinkansen home.