Close Encounters

After a long day of travel (a train from Seoul to Busan, the Beetle jetfoil ferry back to Japan, and another train from Fukuoka), we found ourselves stepping into an exceptionally nice hostel in Hiroshima. It was around 9pm, and once again starving after a jaunt across the East China Sea, we implored the hostel staff to help us find a restaurant that would actually be open at that time of night. Japan, in this matter, is Spain’s polar opposite – one is hard-pressed to find a food service establishment open after about 8pm. We had learned this the hard way at the beginning of our trip. The staff’s friendliness and helpfulness thankfully matched their impeccably well-kept establishment, and we were soon headed 5 minutes down the street to a restaurant serving a regional treat, okonomayaki. We could barely pronounce it as it we entered the restaurant, but we had been promised that it would more than take the edge off of our hunger.

We sat on the floor around a table, the center of which comprised a miniature version of the stovetop we’re all used to seeing at Japanese steakhouses in the United States. We ordered this okonomayaki concoction that had been suggested and waited to see what would happen. The results were personal pizza-sized heaps of sizzling deliciousness laid out in front of us. Mine contained pork, rice cakes, cheese, and noodles, although it seems that almost anything can make an okonomayaki. The stovetop kept the food warm as we each dug into our individual pies (although we were so famished, and the food so good, that most of it was demolished before it thought about getting cold). Hiroshima-style okonomayaki (distinguished from Osaka-style by the presence of noodles) quickly rose to the top of my list of perfect foods. We spent the rest of the evening playing cards in the hostel (or rather, Marlayna and Jose attempted to teach me how to play Texas Hold ‘Em, once and for all) and trying to avoid a group of rather sketchy American counterparts.

We had planned on visiting the atomic bomb sites the next day, but the weather forecast suggested we go ahead and make the trek out to the island of Miyajima and hold off a day on the A-bomb sites. However, prior to embarking on this excursion, Jose and I desperately needed to change our now useless wads of Won back into Yen. This seemingly simple task would of course prove much more complicated, as we first had to find a bank operating a foreign exchange counter and then spent a good 45 minutes waiting for what must have been Japanese CIA clearance for the transaction. To begin with, the young man behind the desk was exceedingly pleasant, but clearly on his first week on the job, as he took direction for all the minutiae of the process from several three-ring binders laid out in front of him. Jose and I had to fill out forms for our exchanges, hand them and our passports to the newbie, wait for his approval, and then take dictation from him as to the amount of Yen we would be getting in exchange for our Won. The form was then passed on to another shade of red tape while the newbie thoroughly inspected EVERY single bill. Twenty minutes later, yet another bank employee (or maybe the CEO himself?) would return with our Yen and a receipt. We endured this process once for each of us, and then after I’d been handed 2 bills equivalent to Japanese Benjamins, I was implored to fill out yet another form and wait another 15 minutes…simply to get smaller change. More than an hour after we’d left the hostel to quickly change our money, we finally emerged from the bank.

We took a train about half an hour out to Miyajimaguchi and then the short 10 minute ferry ride out to Miyajima Island. The Torii gate guarding Miyajima’s shrine is billed as one of the three best views in Japan, according to the Japanese (they seem to be quite the fans of superlatives). It sits out in the middle of the water at high tide and can be reached on foot at low tide. The shrine behind it sits on piers in the water as well and boasts wide vermilion decks and a bevy of photogenic lanterns. The island is regarded as sacred by the Japanese, so much so that human life is unworthy of beginning or ending on it. Hence, there are no hospitals or nursing homes on the island. No one is “allowed” to be born or die there. With all due respect, I found this rule mildly entertaining. What, exactly, would the Miyajima authorities DO to me if I accidentally died while on the island?

In any case, we walked through the shrine and headed down along a quaint stream and towards the ropeway leading to Miyajima’s zenith. Though obviously tourist-laden, the island was quite the departure from all of the city life we had been leading. We were disappointed to find the ropeway to be rather costly, and so Jose, Marlayna, and I decided to take a rest while Marina and Katherine hiked up to the top of the mountain. It was during these few hours that we became rather intimately acquainted with Miyajima’s natives.

Along with its shrine and policy on life and death, Miyajima is famous for its population of tame-ish wild deer. They are also considered sacred, somewhat akin to cows in India, and therefore

cannot be harmed. They clearly know this, as they strut around the island stealing ice cream cones from human hands, staring down people they deem unworthy, and generally running the place. We had several conversations with a group of these deer while waiting for Marina and Katherine to complete their hike, and in sum, found them either shy or rather rude. Eventually bored with them and/or tired of receiving sardonic looks from them, we decided to take a cue from several of the deer and lay down for an afternoon snooze. I was soon awakened by Marlayna’s ginger suggestion that I consider relocating. Cautiously opening my eyes, I fully expected to find myself at the mercy of some horrendous form of spider or Japanese beetle. Instead, upon regaining sight, I realized I was staring up into the eyes of one of our furry ungulate friends. I excused myself for my clear infraction of the deer’s territory and removed myself to a more acceptable resting place.

We spent that evening taking part in one of our newfound favorite slices of Japanese culture – the all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink beer garden. It began to rain about an hour into our bacchanalia, at which point we gained even more respect for our Japanese hosts. Instead of bolting from the thunderstorm, the clientele calmly moved to covered areas. Before we knew it, the beer garden was handing out boxes of free umbrellas to everyone. The Japanese are, if nothing else, prepared. They also do not forfeit time that can be spent with beer and food. No wonder they got along so well with Germany…

In another one of our many incongruent transitions, we spent the next morning taking in Hiroshima’s atomic bomb memorial sites. Overcast skies and occasional rain drops that day provided an apt background. We first visited the A-Bomb dome, a former exhibition hall that lay just a few hundred yards from the epicenter of the explosion. Due to such close proximity to the bomb, the building survived the blast relatively intact – relatively, in this case, meaning that it was still recognizable as the building it had once been. Only about 3 buildings in the entire city could claim this honor by the afternoon of August 6, 1945. The building was particularly striking because it was still so well-preserved – it sort of has the effect of a pristine set of dinosaur bones – except that the emotional effect is compounded by black atomic scars. In addition, as had been the case at the Nagasaki Peace Park, a baseball stadium had been built in close proximity to the

A-Bomb dome. A game was on as we stood staring at the A-Bomb dome, the cheers of the crowd wafting on the breeze and into our ears. I’m still not entirely sure why, but the image of baseball in the shadow of atomic bomb memorials…or rather, atomic bomb memorials in the shadow of baseball, hit a nerve with me yet again. I think it has something to do with the eerie audio provided by happily screaming fans.

We crossed over a scenic canal (Canals play a predominant role in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki) into Hiroshima’s peace park, which showcased a children’s peace monument dedicated to Sadako Sasaki (of 1000 paper cranes fame) and a haunting peace bell, among other memorials. By far the most stirring part of the park, in my opinion, was the cenotaph erected at its center, bisecting the land between the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the A-Bomb Dome. An eternal flame burns in the reflecting pool extending away from the museum, as the semicircular concrete structure perfectly frames the flame and A-Bomb Dome in the distance. The names of the atomic bomb victims rest in peace, entombed in the center.

Jose, Marina and I took a tour of the museum, but soon realized we’d had our gut-wrenching fill of atomic bomb remains in Nagasaki. The Hiroshima museum seemed to me surprisingly inferior to the Nagasaki museum. It did, however, include dioramic displays of the city before and after the bomb, showcasing in stark relief the 3 buildings that remained partially standing after the explosion. I found myself feeling slightly sick to my stomach in the display room, surrounded once again by the ravaged personal effects of people who had been as alive as you or me at 8:14 am on that August 6^th. The feeling threw me off a little, as I rarely respond so emotionally to history. I’d managed to keep it together on the pockmarked shores at Omaha Beach and in the eerie silence now presiding over Dachau, but I found myself having to leave this museum.

Our final A-Bomb stop was the Hiroshima hypocenter, once again a stark contrast to the Nagasaki version. Whereas the Nagasaki hypocenter is marked by an imposing black obelisk in the center of a park-sized field, Hiroshima’s hypocenter consists of a simple brown plaque of about chest height, squeezed onto the sidewalk beside a hospital. It was quite underwhelming after Nagasaki – blink, and you miss it. Practically speaking, the contrast makes sense. Nagasaki was actually hit in a suburb, and thus could afford a park-sized memorial to its hypocenter. In contrast, Hiroshima's detonation occurred immediately over the city's center. A park here would have meant the fundamental restructuring of the city, certainly a show of weakness on the part of an already violated nation. So instead, the small monument partially blocks the edge of the sidewalk, and the pace of life rolls on…once again, as if nothing had ever been wrong.

We toured the less-than-impressive Hiroshima Castle before heading to the station to catch our train to Osaka and back to the ordered chaos of the big city.