Sky and Aja's Great Adventure

This is our new blog, started in China, to document our trip from Japan through mainland Asia. I hope that we can use this to keep in touch with all of our friends and family in far away places with our writing and pictures. To start with, this is mostly transcribed from journals we have been writing in most days. With this blog, we hope to improve our writing skills, and keep a memoir of our thoughts and experiences along the road through Asia. There is a lot we have already written and transcribing, editing and typing is a slow process, so it may be a little while before we are completely up to date. I hope you enjoy reading about our travels!
This blog is a bit of an experiment, and both of us are new to web pages. The layout is not exactly what we want, but maybe we can change that later. Hopefully, our web skills will improve quickly.
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August 3rd, 2006

We left Yamanashi from Isawa Onsen on the second train of the day after another night of smoke and alcohol at Kim's house. We listened to his new silly songs he is making into a record, and said goodbye to a few more of our Yamanashi friends.
In Fuji-Shi, we changed trains and rode each train until its final stop along the Tokaido line. We had a late lunch in Kobe, where we finally had our tickets checked. Near the station there was a big shrine with huge stone lanterns at its enterance. It enshrined one of Japan's great, benevolent, and locally loved warlords. Outside on the street the water meters were covered with the famous sights of Kobe drawn at off angles. It looked like it could only be a drawing of an earthquake.
Back on the platform, our bikes were still where we had left them in their bags to avoid hauling them through the station. This strategy works quite well, but maybe only in Japan. After fifteen hours of shifting through the trains, we finally made it to Hiroshima. It was late, my bike had a flat tire, and we settled for a hotel slightly out of our budget, the Hotel Intellegent.
The next day, we did some errands and visited the Peace Park. I saw the shell of the dome of the Industrial Promotion Building. It sits in a green lawn in a park full of trees. It has dark shadows and rough edges, red briks, grey cement, twisted metal, rubble left lying around it's edges. It is a ruin that has grown calm and peaceful over time. It is all that's left of the old Hiroshima.
A large American with a large camera, pink cheeks and round glasses wanted his picture taken in front of the dome. He made a serious face, but his camera malfunctioned. He told us it was ok for us to go on, and assured us he would be allright because he spoke some Japanese and could ask one of "them" to take his picture when he got it working again.

On Wednesday, we went to tthe Peace Memorial Museum. We dropped off the banner we made with AMC over a year ago with everyone's hands cut out and a message for peace written on each one. We made it intending to present it last year for the sixtieth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, but didn't get a chance to. The museum gave us a cold reception. We were asked if we had an appointment, we didn't. Then, the lady who greeted us took our banner and told us she would deliver it to "him", whoever he was. She didn't ask our names or what it was, she didn't even thank us.

The museum started out slow, displaying scattered facts about Hiroshima's history and some pieces of documents relating to the selection of Hiroshima as a target, emphasizing Hiroshima's military history and importance. Overall, I was not as shocked by the museum as I had expected to be. A significant section in the first room was dedicated to "why Hiroshima was bombed", but only examined the military documents and deliberations about which intact cities would make good targets and good testing grounds and the criteria they used. It did not question the logic behind using the atomic bomb, or look deeply at the political motives; intimidating the Soviet Union and keeping it out of the occupation. It simply talked about the other cities that were considered and why Hiroshima was chosen. It does not completely accept that it had to happen, but the notion that it might not have been necessary is so subtile. In a sense, it seems to make an effort to justify it by reiterating how important Hiroshima was for the military because the fifth division and Pacific command were stationed there.
In the second half of the museum the focus shifted to people's stories. Burnt clothes , a metal lunch box with charred food in it , melted glasses ... all things people were wearing or had with them, and their personal stories. I was surprised at how poor the clothes looked. most had been patched together numerous times before they got burned.
There was a section on the health effects of radiation, pictures of the spots that form on ou head when you start bleeding internally, the strange swelling that takes over your body, bleeding gums, Leukemia ...
Finally, there were video interviews of people who survived, interviewed in the last ten years telling their stories, how they survived, how they suffered, how people helped them, the people they knew who died, and how they searched for their families. They told about the thoughts they had and what they went through. One old man was an elementary school teacher whose schoolhouse collapsed . When he and all the kids came out, other people were gathering there because it was a designated place to gather in an emergency. He thought only his school had been bombed, and was confused when he began noticing that all the people gathering were burned and injured. It was only then that he noticed that the whole city was gone. Another woman spoke, almost casually, about how her two kids and her husband died. She described how the buttons on her baby son's shirt were all that was left of his shirt and were still in place on his dead, charred body.

Today, Hiroshima is a rich city. It has wide sidewalks, well dressed people and expensive shops. The shell of the Industrial Promotion Hall is dwarved by the tall shiny new skyscrapers and wide roads. The old pictures of the city showed the proud dome with all of its skin still on, standing tall above the old tile-roofed city.

In Hiroshima, we went to the bank with unbrushed hair and wrinkled clothes to buy travellers checks to ease our minds while travelling. We hadn't thouroughly discussed what to do with all our money, and we were working it out when we got called up. We fully surprised ourselves with our new wealth as we pulled stacks of cash out of torn and scrbbled on envelopes and put down over a million Yen for checks to send home for safe keeping to use to start our new lives in New Zealand. The other half was set aside to be blown on our trip through Asia.
It was an exciting feeling. We could finally afford to travel, we have more money than we could have saved in Albuquerque set aside, and lots of time. Living in Japan without a car and with constant frugality let us leave rich. Our year in Japan had definitely bought us a considerable amount of freedom. Now we can head out with no worries!

After our first night in Hiroshima, we went to Miyajima on a ferry and passed by the famous giant red torii that stands in the water at high tide. It's a tiny island overcrowded with deer, shrines and with plenty of Okonomiyaki restaurants. Walking at night, the town was crawling with what looked at first like huge rats, but were strange animals I'd never seen before. They were Tanukis, or racoon-dogs. Funny little creatures with long legs and tails that, I think, only live in Japan.
We set up our tent at the campsite there for only 300 yen a night, and planned to stay for three, but a sudden rainstorm convinced us to miss the last ferry our on the third night and to stay in an internet cafe instead. Luckily, the rain missed Miyajima and all our things were still dry. A deer had eaten a hole in our tent, though. We packed up and left for Fukuoka.

Our last night in Japan.

We were meeting our friend, Rebecca, in Fukuoka. She wanted to go clubbing. We didn't, we had big bags and an early ferry to catch. We got there too late for clubbing and went to a street vendor selling beer and maybe some snacks. There are no street vendors in Yamanashi, but Fukuoka was full of them. We stayed there drinking and talking until I could barely stay awake. The street vendor who we didn't patronize helped us find another internet cafe. This one had showers, so we went for it. It also had a place for Aja to paint her nails, and enough room to fully lay down.