Japan

April 10, 2009
From Reggie and Georgia

Japanese drummers greeting the ship

We arrived in Kobe, Japan,( home of Kobe beef-we did not eat any) on April 6th and departed from Yokohama, Japan on the 10th. I purchased Japan Rail Passes for Reggie, Jackson and myself in Hong Kong, so that we could travel about Japan during our brief stay. As soon as the ship was cleared by the immigration authorities, the three of us found our way to the train station and caught the shenkansen (high speed bullet train) to Hiroshima. We visited Peace Memorial Park which commemorates the first atomic bomb used by humankind on August 6, 1945. The bomb exploded at an altitude of 1,980 feet and we stood directly under that spot, an area known as the hypocenter. Over 100,000 people lost their lives on that day and the Memorial is dedicated to them and to the survivors. There is an epitaph at the eternal flame written in Japanese which is translated as “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.”

The visit to the museum was quite sobering. Hiroshima is now a vibrant and beautiful city and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, a stark contrast to this horrifying moment in history. We met some volunteer guides, citizens of Hiroshima, who donate their time to the many visitors, by providing guided tours around the immediate area located below the hypocenter. We even met a survivor….he is classified as such because his mother was 4 months pregnant with him at the time of the blast. Both of his parents, in spite of the enormous doses of radiation, managed to survive into their 90’s. We asked him why the Japanese are not bitter and why there is not hatred for the Americans. His explanation, “We are Buddhists, We are sorry, Thankyou, We love you.” I have found this to be one of the more remarkable aspects of the human character that has shown up in different countries along the way, such as South Africa, Vietnam, Cambodia and China. Many people have endured great suffering because of the actions of various western countries and yet they forgive and they move on.













This is a model of Hiroshima showing how it looked before the bomb and immediately after the bomb. The T shaped bridge was the target. The actual hypocenter was the street to the left of the green dome building the remains of which are standing today. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is centered in the arch of the Peace Memorial above.


We had dinner in Hiroshima at an okonomiyaki restaurant. Okonomiyaki is a sort of Japanese crepe filled with cabbage, meat of your choice, and topped with an egg. You sit down at a counter in an okonomiyaki stall, which has a flat iron surface (griddle) for cooking along its entire length. The cook pours out some batter to form a crepe, while cooking a big fistful of finely shredded cabbage, bean sprouts, bacon, and your choice of an additional meat or seafood. When the crepe is cooked, the cabbage is placed on top of it and it is flipped over. When the meat is done, the crepe is flipped again, the meat is placed on top and an egg is broken over the entire stack. Once the heat of the stack has cooked the egg, the whole thing is shoveled over to you on a large spatula, and you eat with your choice of several hoisin- or Worchestershire-type sauces. It’s quite tasty and cheap. There is a building just off a long shopping/walking street in Hiroshima with about 6-8 of these okonomiyaki stalls on the second floor. We picked one at random and had a beer as we watched our dinner being prepared. After dinner, we took the shinkansen back to Kobe to spend the night aboard the MV Explorer.

On Tuesday, April 7, we packed our bags and set out by shinkansen for a two-night stay in Kyoto. Kyoto is one of the most historic and lovely cities in Japan. For more than one thousand years, it served as Japan’s capital and home to its emperors. Much of it was spared from bombing in World War II, so many ancient temples and buildings remain. It has an excellent subway system, making it very easy to get around. On our arrival, we had a petit dejeuner in a French-style restaurant and then took the subway north to find our lodgings, the ryokan Kohro, near the intersection of Rokkokuku dori (dori = street) and Sakaimachi dori. Ryokans are traditional Japanese hotels, with tatami mats on the floor, sliding wooden panels covered with rice paper as room dividers, and low, coffee table-style tables that require you to sit on the floor. When you are ready to go to bed, management sends the ladies to lay out futons on the floor. Georgia, Jackson, and I shared the room, with Jackson having some complaints about the snoring.

We settled our luggage and headed off to see the city. Late March to early April is peak cherry blossom time in Kyoto, and indeed, Kyoto is the place where the Japanese flock to see the cherry blossoms, with a passion that gives their journey a pilgrimage quality. We first went to see the Nijo Castle. It was about a 20-minute walk from our hotel. The castle was built in the early 1600’s by one of the shoguns who ruled then. The largest building in the castle, called Ninomaru Palace served as the official palace of the shogun and as the building where he received visiting samurai coming to show their respects. It consists of a series of rooms within a large wooden structure. The wooden floors were purposefully built to be very squeaky, so no one could sneak up on the shogun or his bodyguards. They call them the nightingale floors. The gardens around the palace were in full spring glory, with the cherry and weeping cherry trees in leading roles – truly exquisite, especially when used as principal decorative elements in carefully crafted gardens with ponds and brooks of flowing water. After our tour, we took the subway over to the Gion district, east of the Kamo-gawa River. It is an old area, with little streets and a pedestrian way along a small tributary of the river. Cherry trees in bloom were abundant here as well. We had lunch in a small restaurant and then walked back to our hotel, crossing the bridge over the Kamo-gawa at Shijo dori and turning immediately north on Pontocho dori, which in the old days was the scene of nightlife and debauchery, but now is lined with boutique restaurants offering every conceivable cuisine. At the end of Pontocho, we turned left and made our way back to the hotel, with a short detour to see the arcade-covered Nishiki food market.

At the hotel, I convinced Jackson that he needed to try the Japanese hot bath. The hot bath is located in the basement of our ryokan. What you do is take off your clothes and put on a light kimono and slippers. You then go down the elevator and through the lobby to the stairs and down them to the basement. Men and women have separate hot baths. However, they are common baths and any number of persons can be in them at the same time. You enter the bath outer room, hang up your kimono, store your towel in a locker, and then enter the bath room. In it are 12 bathing stations, each with a wooden stool, a wooden pail, a shower head, soap, shampoo, and conditioner. The protocol is to sit down on your little wooden stool and rinse yourself thoroughly with hot water. Then you get up and get in the hot tub, which is about 6 feet wide and 10 feet long. After immersing yourself in the hot water for a while, you climb out, resume your position on the wooden stool, suds yourself up, shampoo your head, rinse yourself off, and climb back in the hot tub/pool for another pleasant soak in the quite hot water. Fortunately, Jackson and I were the only two people using the bath at that time. Otherwise, he might have thought better of the idea! It was very relaxing. We went back up stairs, got dressed, and when Georgia returned and dressed, we went out for dinner at a small, family-style restaurant. Noodles are always part of dinner in Japan, more so than rice. There are two kinds: udon (made from white wheat) and soba (made from buckwheat). You eat them with chopsticks; try that sometime – the rascals are slippery and elusive and maybe 3 feet long, much longer than noodles have any right to be. We then had an ice cream dessert. Back at the ryokan, our futons were laid out, so we lay down and watched a Japanese baseball game on TV. The Japanese are really enthusiastic about their baseball, with cheerleaders and noisemakers and much glee. The game we watched was won in the bottom of the ninth by the home team Tigers, coming from 7 runs down, and ending with a double to right field that scored the tying and go-ahead runs. It was the best baseball game I have seen in years, no doubt fueled by the energy of the fans. Jackson and I talked about it for 30 minutes before going off to sleep.

Wednesday, April 8, we arose to greet the arrival of the futon removers, who came in and stowed our futons in our closet and then along came our breakfast, delivered by a Japanese lady in a kimono. We had ordered two western breakfasts and one Asian breakfast; the western one was eggs, croissants, and coffee. I ate the Asian one, which consisted of miso soup, some seaweed, a heated water pot with chunks of tofu floating in the hot water, fish (salmon), and rice, plus hot tea. I traded the pot of tea to Jackson for his cup of coffee. After breakfast, we went down the street and around the corner to another hotel where we rented bicycles for the day for about $10 (1,000 yen) each. We rode our bicycles first to a Starbucks-type coffee shop, where we savored a fine double espresso. We spent the morning riding upstream along the Kamo-gawa river and then following the Takano-gawa branch north from where it joins the Kamo-gawa. It was a splendid, sunshiny day, warm and spring-like. Groups of pre-school age children crowded the path along the river; others played along the river banks, which were festooned with cherry trees in full flower. Before noon, we turned around and headed down to where Kamo-ohashi dori crosses the river. We rode along this street, which is where the University of Kyoto is located, to reach the head of the Philosopher’s Pathway. This walkway follows a small canal/tributary of the Kamo-gawa and its length is lined with cherry trees whose branches form an arcade of white blossoms over the canal. It was full of people; it is the major tourist attraction in Kyoto when the cherry blossoms are at their peak. A light breeze was blowing, and cherry petals floated gently like snowflakes down onto the path and into the canal where they formed a white fleet drifting with a slow majesty on the current. We could not ride our bikes because of the throng, but had to dismount and walk with them.

Our next tourist stop was to see the formal Japanese garden at the Heian temple. But first, lunch at a little Japanese restaurant where we had noodle dishes and beer; mine was topped with pork cutlet, which is one of the culinary surprises of Japan. I visited the Heian Shrine with my sister, Elizabeth, many years ago around the same time. The garden is quite amazing and layed out beautifully around reflecting pools. There are hundreds of weeping cherry trees at the entrance. The garden was set up for night time viewing with floodlights and power cables and so detracted from the daytime visit which we had.




We saw many Japanese women in traditional kimonas and learned that during this season, they get into the shrines for free if they dress this way. It was an added benefit for us.

After leaving there we rode over to the park which is the site of the Imperial Palace where we rested before returning the bikes. That evening we had another traditional Japanese meal of udon noodles sitting cross legged at a low table. It was quite difficult bending our western bodies into the shape necessary for occupying such small spaces, while juggling soup and noodles with chopsticks. Slurping noodles is not considered rude in Japan and is actually about the most successful technique for consuming such fare. Of course the beautiful day could not end without another round of Japanese style bathing at our ryokan before bedding down on the futons so neatly laid out on the tatami mats. This round of bathing was more dismaying for Jackson, since the bath was also being used by some Japanese people – a man and his 3-year old son and an older man. Fortunately, they didn’t linger and we soon had it to ourselves.

The next day we departed from Kyoto and took an early morning train to nearby Nara, a popular tourist destination for the Japanese, and the site of the first permanent capital of Japan. There are many famous temples there which are located in a large park surrounded by a fence. Deer roam freely within the park and are considered “divine messengers”. They will eat deer cookies right out of your hand. We visited Todaiji Temple which is an enormous wooden structure that houses the Daibutsu, a huge, 50-feet high bronze statue of Buddha, consisting of 437 tons of bronze and 286 pounds of pure gold. Its head has been replaced twice due to an earthquake and another calamity.

We returned to the train station after a leisurely stroll around the park and lunch in a small downtown “mom and pop” type of restaurant. Japan has taken public transportation seriously. It is so convenient to travel this way, that it is a wonder that they also lead the world in sensible automobile production. To my inexperienced eye, it appears that you can take a train to almost anywhere and then find it easy to ride local transportation in the form of buses, trolleys or subways with frequent stops. An added convenience is that all of the train stations have lockers where you can stow luggage or backpacks while visiting the city. We liberated our luggage and boarded the next shinkansen to Yokohama. These trains work better than clocks. They are frequent and always arrive at the very second scheduled. On the platform there are signs designating where to stand for which car and the train always stops at precisely that point. The passengers have exactly 60 seconds to get off or get on. People do not bustle or elbow each other and are particularly deferential to the elderly who seem to be just as adept at finding their way around these massive hubs of transportation. I developed an extreme case of train and subway envy. We had a smooth ride to Yokohama and were treated to a rare sight. Mt. Fuji, which is often shrouded in clouds or fog, was completely visible from our train window. We stared at the mountain for as long as we could until the bullet train swept into the next long tunnel.

Arriving in Yokohama exactly on time and for the first time, we had to figure out what subway line to take to find the ship which had relocated from Kobe to Yokohama during our absence. By this point Jackson had become quite adept at figuring out the amount of fare to purchase and then working the coin operated machines that spit out the tickets. We found the ship, our home, deposited our luggage and then hustled out to Yokohama’s version of Chinatown for dinner. After a good night’s sleep we were back in the subway station to transfer to the train station to use our rail passes one last time. We spent several hours in Tokyo long enough to be impressed by the crowds and to pine for Kyoto. We had lunch….more noodles and made our way back to the ship.

Our Asian whirlwind tour was over and we sailed out of Yokohama Harbor at 9PM with 8 glorious days at sea ahead before arriving in Honolulu.

More scenes from the Philosopher's Walk