Miyajima

August 19^th, 2016

After launching myself on a solo expedition on slow trains from Kyoto to Hiroshima and spending a day exploring that city, visiting Hiroshima Castle, the Genbaku Dome, the Peace Memorial and Okonomiyaki Village, I decided to make a day of going to the island of Miyajima to see the famous torii at Itsukushima Shirne.

The island of Miyajima is also known as Itsukushima, which is also the name of the large shinto shrine located there, famous for its giant vermillion torii gate that sits out in the bay and seems to float magically upon the water at high tide.

From my hostel in Hatsukaichi, located conveniently halfway between Hiroshima and Miyajima, I took a short ride on the dentetsu (electric railway) to a ferry terminal where I would catch a ferry boat to the island. It was a beautiful day and the the usual tourist crowd was out and the signs were easy to follow.

From the ferry, I got my first glimpse of the torii in the distance as we approached the island, and cameras start popping out all over the place, as usual. When I made landfall I arrived at a huge terminal full of tourist information, and full of tourists, and from there you simply follow the crowds.

It was a blazing hot day. I mean, really, it was 40 degrees C (104F) out, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky to provide any respite from the sun’s glare. I walked down the broad avenue along the beach toward the shrine, already sweating and using a handheld fan to shield my face from the burning sun. The avenue was lined with little shops catering to tourists, full of souvenirs, snacks and, thankfully, kakigōri (shaved ice)! I bought myself a big kakigōri and continued on my way. Also, the island, much like the buddhist temple town of Nara, is inhabited by deer, who today lazed about in the shade of trees trying to keep out of the heat.

Instead of going directly to the shrine to see the torii, I did what I usually do, which is to wander around, taking any path that looks interesting, and I ended up exploring the little town a bit. I walked up some stairs, went up and over a small mountain and thought I had discovered a whole town on the other side of the mountain, but it turned out to just be the same town and just around the corner a little bit, haha. The town was densely built and the little back streets seemed entirely deserted, save for a couple small shōtengai (shopping arcades) covered overhead to keep out the sun. Probably, everyone who could stay inside on such a hot day was doing exactly that.

(Remember to click on an image to get a closer look!)

First, a view of the marina near my hostel.

And this hilarious little… grandma hat for cats???

The ferry terminal for Miyajima bound ferries.

First glimpses of the torii

This looks interesting. I wonder where this leads to…

I thought I had found a town secluded from all the tourist stuff!

Empty backstreets.

Shoutengai shaded from the sun.

Back to the shrine.

 

お鳥居 The Great Torii

After not finding much else of interest in the little abandoned streets of the town, I decided to get back to the business of seeing the famous torii gate. When I got there it was low tide, and the torii stood out on basically a wide expanse of mud flat, teeming with little hermit crabs other tiny sand-burrowing mollusks. Itsukushima Shrine was built such that it surrounded this little bay like a harbor. Dozens of tourists were out walking around in the sand, and children poked around in the mud finding little sea creatures. It was like a day at the beach.

It was so incredibly hot!

Hot deer.

The great torii!

 

弥山 Mount Misen

Satisfied with the time spent around the torii, I headed back into the town to wander some more. Somehow, I can’t remember how, I found out there was a “ropeway,” a gondola that would take you up a mountain. Which mountain? I didn’t know. I remember waiting outside of a nice little hotel for a van that came and picked us up and drove some way up into the hills.

From there I bought a ticket for the ropeway, and up I went, to where, I still had no idea. I may not have known where I was going, but the view along the way was stunning. In the gondola we soared through the mountains high above the forest as views of the sea stretched out all around us.

Ropeway, eh? Where to, I wonder?

Random pretty

More random pretty

Whoa! What!?!

The Seto Inland Sea becomes visible all around!

It’s like a Hiroshige woodblock card up there!

Having reached the end of the ropeway, I discovered that there was still further that you could go, and I found myself hiking a trail through the forest and up the mountain ever higher, and despite the fact the the higher I went, the hotter the unforgiving sun seemed to become, I pushed on, driven by the excitement of the unknown.

At last I reached the summit where there was a clearing and a little building where you could go onto the roof for a 360 degree view of the Seto Inland Sea. Up there, I truly felt I was on top of the world. Islands in the distance seemed to float in the air as the blue sea faded seamlessly into the sky. It was magnificent! It was glorious! … And I was about to die of heatstroke and starvation, but I still had do the whole trek in reverse, hiking back down to the ropeway, and descending down to the seaside.

The summit!

 

夕方 Evening

Having survived the trip down the mountain I treated myself to a beer and relaxed a while. And somehow, despite my exhaustion, my insatiable wanderlust propelled me yet again(!) up into some hills where I found another temple to explore, but I finally came back around to see the great torii as the sun set. The tide had started to come in, but you could still wade underneath the gate. It was great to soak my aching feet in the sea water after all that hiking around.

Relaxing with a beer.

Deer love beer, too!?!

Gee, I wonder if I can find my way to that.

Yep.

Tourists get ready for the sunset photo op at the torii.

This poor little guy was trying to eke out a dinner amoung scraps on a plastic polluted beach 😦

Sleepy deer

Good night, Miyajima.

 

Amazingly, after all that, I went all the way back into Hiroshima that night for dinner! I was craving ramen, as I tend to do, and there wasn’t much going on in the area around my hostel. So, I hopped the train back to Hiroshima and found a ramen shop near Hiroshima Station where the patrons were almost all business men, something fairly typical for ramen shops, and bought myself a bowl. On the way back, I ran into a crowd as a Hiroshima Carp baseball game had just let out. Fans lined up for the train decked out in their cardinal red Carp gear.

Back to Hiroshima for ramen!

Carp fans crowd the station after the game.

I just thought this station near my hostle looked cool.

See?

This concludes part two of my excursion to Hiroshima, Miyajima, and Kobe. Check out part three here (coming soon!) where I spend about 24 hours in Kobe and eat beef, visit the Weathercock House, Chinatown, and the harbor, and generally just wander around like I always do!

And while you’re at it, check out my translation website, Davetranslates.wordpress.com, where I translate Japanese news articles into English for fun and practice!

Hiroshima

August 17^th, 2016

It was the hottest, sweatiest part of summer. Classes had finished a few weeks ago, but I was still living in the dorm with a few more weeks to go. The summer had been packed with plenty of fun and social activity. There were a lot of farewell parties for fellow exchange students heading home which at times lasted well into the next morning, the effects lasting well into the next evening (二日酔い). But there was a lot of boredom to contend with, too. Without classes and with friends gone away there were extra days to fill, long, hot, slow summer days that never seemed to end. And on one of those days, after a few days of rowdy farewell parties, I got the idea fill my time with a spontaneous solo trip and decided to visit the city of Hiroshima which I had yet to explore.

I decided to make it interesting, though. Rather than just take a bullet train and get there quickly, I thought it might be interesting to take a string of local trains and get there slowly; slowly enough to fill up a long summer day (and cheaper, too!). At something like 400km (250mi), the trip would have taken maybe 2 or 3 hours on fast trains, but it took a full 8 or 9 hours on five local trains for me.

On the way, I gazed out the windows, never growing tired of the passing scenery of rural Japan. Small hamlets of buildings in disrepair surrounded by neatly plotted rice fields and flanked by green mountains bulging out of the landscape with patches of bamboo forest nestled among the trees. I stopped first at a tiny station out past Himeji, though I can’t remember the name of the town. Then I transferred again at Okayama, then Mihara, and from there went all the way to Hatsukaichi Station on the far side of Hiroshima.

When I finally arrived it was about 9 o’clock at night and I may have been just about the only person in the station. I tried to exit the wicket, swiped my ICOCA (transit fare) card and the wicket locked and stopped me, indicating that I needed to go see a station attendant. I went over to the window and handed him my card and he checked it. The guy was dumbfounded when my card told him I had come from Kyoto. He said, “Kyōto? Shinkansen?” I said, “no, futsū (local trains),” and he was like “whaaaaaaaaa??” He actually went and made a phone call or something; he stepped into the back for a minute before he finally came out with a calculator to add up the fee. For a cool $64 I commuted from Kyoto to Hiroshima, at least half of what it would have cost me to take the fast trains.

My hostel (Omotenashi Hostel) was on the outskirts of Hiroshima, situated on a little marina about halfway between the city and Miyajima, where the famous torii of Itsukushima Shrine is located. I went directly there, took a shower and went right to bed. It was VERY nice; I highly recommend it if you are going to Miyajima, and sitting outside on the seawall in the peace of night, gazing at the full moon and its reflection on the still, black water of the harbor was a priceless moment for me.

(remember to click on the images to get a better look)

Starting my day at Kyoto Station.

A small station outside of Himeji. It may have been Aioi. I can’t remember, but it started with an “A”.

View from the station in Mihara.

Omotenashi Hostel Miyajima, Hatsukaichi

The harbor view right outside the hostel.

A nice temple across the highway.

 

広島駅 Hiroshima Eki

I woke up to a beautiful day and made my way back to the station where I took the Dentetsu (electric railway) into Hiroshima. I found Hiroshima Station to be impressively large and, with the renovations taking place at the time, terribly confusing. I basically got lost for at least an hour trying to find my way out, and ended up walking through it more than once, as well as around it several times, trying to find the front so I could get my bearings and go somewhere. It was exhausting, but at least I got a look at some interesting backstreets nearby, and backstreets are what I’m all about anyway, so…

Every town in Japan has its own unique and expressive manhole covers. Hiroshima’s reflects the local pro baseball team, the Hiroshima Carp.

The front of Hiroshima Station, but how do I get to there???

Literally, where am I???

What???

Okay, this I can handle.

Hiroshima Eki backstreets.

 

広島城 Hiroshima-jō

Having finally found my way out of the labyrinthine station and its environs, I made my way over to Hiroshima Castle. I can’t remember if I planned any of this or just figured it out on the fly. I think it was the latter, haha! The castle was very beautiful, the wooden exterior being unpainted, and featured a really cool museum inside. There were also nice views of the city from inside.

Hiroshima Castle

 

原爆ドームと広島平和記念碑 Genbaku Dome and Peace Memorial Park

Planning my next move, I realized I was walking distance to the Genbaku Dome—the standing remains of the exhibition building left after the bomb—and the Peace Memorial. On the way I stopped at a Family Mart for lunch and ate hiyashi chūka, a chilled meat, veg, and noodle salad, perfect for a hot summer day. The Genbaku Dome was an arresting sight as I approached it from the north. It’s situated next to a river with walkways along both sides. It was a sober and relaxing area where I spent a lot of time taking photos and resting. At one time I was a approached by a small girl who offered me a gift of a tiny origami paper crane. The paper crane has some significance in this context, as a young girl who survived the bombing but died later of her wounds, Sasaki Sadako, famously folded 1,000 paper cranes before her death. The paper crane is thus meant to remind us of the innocent victims of the atomic bomb and symbolizes a wish for peace. So, I think they have children handing these out to tourists in the area, and it was really a touching and moving gesture.

Hiyashi Chuuka (lit. “chilled Chinese”). A perfect summer dish.

Genbaku Dome

Origami paper crane, symbolizing the hope for peace.

The rest of the park was world-class in its beauty. A sprawling and well-maintained park-like campus meanders from the Genbaku Dome over to the Peace Memorial Museum. I entered the museum and, while it is a very important thing for all people to experience, the exhibits felt to me a little bit like disaster p*rn. You spend the entire time gawking at the horror and destructive power of the atom bomb, almost glorified in these displays. It was difficult and gave me mixed feelings. I don’t mean to offend, I’m just saying that this is how I felt about it. But I guess that’s the whole point, right? To shock anyone who sees it into becoming firmly resolved in their opposition to something so terrible as nuclear weapons, or war in general.

The Bell of Peace.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

 

お好み村 Okonomi-mura

As the afternoon faded into dusk, I walked toward what looked like the nearest commercial district on Google Maps (you can tell because the area is color-coded in… orange-ish pink?). It may have been called Horikawa-chō, but within it I discovered an area called Okonomi-mura, a hub for okonomiyaki dining. Okonomiyaki is, of course, the delicious, savory egg batter pancake, of which Hiroshima has its own famous version with noodles. There must have been 100 okonomiyaki-ya in the area, including one ten-story building packed entirely with okonomiyaki stalls. I chose the giant, well-lit one at street level. I ordered a beer and a pancake (Austin Powers, anyone?), but the heat and the first beer must have dampened my appetite and I could barely stuff down half of the huge, dense and filling okonomiyaki. I tried to eat as much as I could because I didn’t want to be the only foreigner in the room (I was) and be the guy who “didn’t like” his Japanese food. I stumbled out of there, about to burst and sat around in the square, people-watching, and then continued to wander around. In my wandering I think I happened upon Hiroshima’s “naughty” district. I wasn’t feeling THAT adventurous that night, and besides, I was an okonomiyaki bomb waiting to go off, so I turned around and made my way home.

Okonomi-mura, the Mecca of Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki!

The plaza at Okonomi-mura. Pretty chill spot, actually.

I ate at this okonomiyaki-ya. I loved the mom-and-pop shop atmosphere of this bustling local favorite.

Hiroshima’s entertainment district.

I wasn’t feeling up for it this night. Looks neat, though.

Omotenashi Hostel at night. I really liked this place a lot. Maybe the nicest hostel I stayed at.

Featuring some family samurai armor that straight-up looks like Darth Vader up in this B.

Moonlight over the harbor.

 

This concludes the first part of my Hiroshima and Kōbe adventure. Check out the second part here, where I travel to Miyajima to see the famous torii at Itsukushima Shrine and inadvertently ascend to the top of Mount Misen!

And while you’re at it, go check out my translation website, Davetranslates.wordpress.com, where I translate Japanese news articles into English for fun and practice, and see what I’m capable of in J – E translation.