| Submitted by: Mark Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 09 February 2005 |
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They had to have continuous fire watches over the city and even then they had some real disasters.
Most of the lanterns have been replaced by electric lights, but there are still some lanterns around. Each building had two stories and was topped by a tile roof. Most have wood grating or a fence in front. Very common is a vertical grillwork in front. There will be narrow strips of garden maybe a foot wide in front with trees or a bush. Incongruous touches are air conditioners, TV antennae, wires, that sort of thing. Also there are modern colorful posters for kabuki. As we walk through we can almost feel it is the 1600s. Then a dog we passed starts barking at bicycle brakes that squeal too loudly. Also there is the sound of traditional wooden sandals clopping through the street.
We saw one geisha and two maiko coming to work. The difference is rank. Maiko are still just learning the trade. The maiko were posing for some passersby photos in four inch thick wooden platform shoes. The geisha sat in a fancy car. She was being driven around like a piece of firewood, and that was pretty much the attitude she presented. Her drivers got out of the car to make some arrangements, got back in, and drove off. In all that time, ten or fifteen minutes, the geisha did not appear to move a muscle. She stared straight ahead fixedly, even when sitting alone in the back seat of the car, her snow white painted face vacant of any expression.
There is still a lot of confusion about what a geisha actually does. That is mostly because it will almost never be done for non-Japanese. But it is nothing that the Legion of Decency would not approve of. She is sort of a cultured mistress of ceremonies at a party. She sings, she plays traditional musical instruments like the biwa. Her main stock and trade is high-class Japanese charm. It is sort of like if you could hire Audrey Hepburn to host and run your dinner party. If they are suspect for anything it is for making a living just renting youthful charm to rich businessmen. Yes, there are prostitutes who call themselves geisha just like there are prostitutes who call themselves masseuses in our country. But that is not what a real masseuse does.
Well it had gotten dark and we had to find our way back to the room. We got a little lost, but eventually found our way. The radio gave us a lot more choice than Tokyo did, maybe four stations to choose from. One seemed to have a classical recital of singing. Back home I would not have listened, but here I was a little more desperate. Japanese falls somewhere between Italian and German for being a good language for singing. What do I mean by that? Well, German and Hebrew are really guttural languages. They have a lot of really hard sounds. That doesn't mean an opera like MEISTERSINGER can't have nice music, but it the singing just never quite sounds musical to my ear. Italian and Spanish, languages heavily based on Latin, sound better sung. English and Japanese fall in between.
Later the music turned to more popular styles. There was one station that had a male disk jockey who spoke English and a female who spoke Japanese. She would rattle off a string of Japanese and then the guy would say 'You know, that's really true...' and then he would talk for a while. Japanese radio stations have been criticized for being too much talk and not enough music. That is probably accurate.
I wrote in my log till after Evelyn went to sleep, then I went to sleep also. The room does not get very dark.
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10/17/96 Hiroshima and Miya-jima: War and Peace
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The room was fairly cold over night. I woke up at 5-ish and wrote in my log. Once Evelyn woke up I went to take a shower. There was not a lot of hot water, but I take a short shower. I realized after the fact that I broke a house rule. There are no showers before 7 AM. I didn't have a lot of choice today since we had to catch an early train to Hiroshima. We left the Takase before 7 AM and hoped to pass a grocery or restaurant on the way. Kyoto was just waking up. We crossed the little bridge. The guards were in a van. There is some sort of tension in this neighborhood I do not understand. I don't know if it has something to do with my perception that this is or is near a Burakumin neighborhood. Even in the early morning the streets were fairly noisy with trucks. Tokyo never seemed this noisy. It could be a difference in restrictions on noise mufflers or just because we were not in the areas that get this sort of traffic, but the trucks are real thunderers.
You find some pretty strange things in vending machines here. I have yet to see a candy vending machine but I have seen machines that sold bags of rice, as I have said. We passed a bookstore that had a pornographic magazine vending machine. In this way the magazines are available 24 hours a day and also a certain anonymity is offered to the purchaser.
We did not pass any restaurants or groceries on the way to the train station. We will wait in eat in Hiroshima. We were too late at the station to get reservations for the 9:42 to Hiroshima. The next train with reservations was 10:40-something. We decided to go unreserved. We ended in a smoking car and for the first stretch could not even sit together. But at least we got seats. It seems strange to see people standing in the aisles of a super-modern train.
The trip is just exactly two hours. As we get to Western Honshu we are among hills. We are not in mountains the way we seemed to be in Nikko, but there is a nice hilly look to the area. There are small homes in little valleys. Unfortunately the train is mostly in tunnels. It must have been an incredible engineering feat to dig all these tunnels for the Shinkansen.
We got to the city. It is bigger and more metropolitan than I was expecting. By the map it was only about a mile to the Peace Memorial, but of course that assumes we can find our way. We did a little wandering with compass and map. We stopped in a noodle shop and had a bowl of noodles each and some gyoza.
One very popular snack in Japan is roasted chestnuts. You frequently see chestnuts for sale on street. You even see people roasting chestnuts on the street. You rarely see it in the U.S.
On we went to the Peace Memorial. Entering it there were a few little shrines but the first really notable site is the Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall. This a building that was very close to the hypocenter of the blast, yet amazingly it was left partially standing. It is most notable for its dome whose metal framework was left reasonably intact. It has become a sort of symbol of the blast. The word 'hypocenter' is one rarely-used. We here epicenter, but not hypocenter. Epicenter is the point directly above the center. The Hiroshima bomb was detonated in air so one talks about the hypocenter. Actually technically the building is not in the Peace Park, but it is made to look like it is part of the park, and that is good enough for me.
At another memorial. A sort of upside-down pagoda, a local engaged us in conversation for about ten minutes. What did we think of Japan? I asked him if he had traveled and what did he want to know about the US. Apparently he had heard that Americans had real problems with crime and with lawyers. Both I said were concerns, but were not as bad as they appeared from the outside. Most people's lives are rarely touched by crime or by lawyers.
Our next stop was the memorial to Sadako, the little girl who had come to symbolize the bomb victims. She had been a bomb survivor at age two, but at age 12 she developed leukemia. In an attempt to preserve her life she attempted to fold 1000 origami cranes. How many she did fold is a subject of some controversy. Some say she folded more than 1000, some say it was only 644 and friends folded the rest. But she died and now school children from all over the country fold cranes and they are piled at the memorial in long chains of tutti-fruiti strands.
At one end of the park is the A-bomb Museum. It is really in two pieces and there is a lot of redundancy in its message so Evelyn thinks it might have been two similar museums combined into one. It begins with the history of city culminating with Hiroshima going to war. This one sees going around the outer rim. Then in the center there is a section telling what happened in blast. Then going around the rim there is a piece on the immediate effects, then a section on long-term effects, and finally an exhibit on the need for peace and the banning nuclear weapons. There were some muted references to Japan having been warlike itself. And there was a quote from Truman announcing the atomic bomb that referred to Japan as the nation who had brought war to Asia. However, their description of the United States coming into the war just said that a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor pulled Japan into war with the US. It was like the attack was a chance event.
Many of the displays had TV's next to them. You could press any of about 14 button to choose a language for an explanation. However since the explanations were only about three paragraphs, it seemed like a waste of technology. They could have just written the message in the 14 languages and plastered it on the wall.
Between the two buildings there is a bridge and a section where you can choose to see short films about the subject. We watched a short animated film about a little girl who comes to the peace memorial by herself, is frightened by the exhibits, and how by folding a crane she met the spirit of Sadako.
The second half of the museum concentrated on the immediate and long-term effects of the blast. This was some really nightmarish stuff. There was a diorama of victims walking with their skin falling off, there were exhibits of the clothing of those killed. There were bottles melted by the heat and shadows etched into stone. Parts recreated the ruins of city. A 3-D map of city showed the hypo-center and how high the bomb was when it exploded. There were watches stopped at time of bomb. A piece of concrete had glass shards buried in it. Then there were exhibits about the diseases caused by the radiation and finally a section of eyewitness accounts.
When we first entered the building there were not many people present, but there were a huge number of schoolchildren around in groups that had come on field trips from school. Just as we were getting to the interesting part of the museum the dam broke and the museum filled up with noisy schoolchildren. Many took the subject seriously, but many more were just running around, not taking anything seriously.
Next came a visit to Hiroshima Castle. Actually it is Ri Castle, or a reconstruction thereof after it had been in large part dismantled in the Meiji restoration and then totally destroyed in the atomic blast. It was rebuilt in 1958. For a while it had a display inside and a 300 yen admission. Both went away. Now you can walk around inside and see what it looked like, but only the look is authentic. And it has a sort of plywood feel. It is only one story in any case. It is wide but not high. We explored, but there was not much to see but a nice look on the outside. We decided to head out for Miya-jima Island. Crossing busy streets in strange towns I often follow what I tell Evelyn is the Jason method. When Jason had to get the Argo through the clashing rocks he noticed that the birds who fly through the rocks have the timing down just about right. They fly through the rocks with no problems. So he just released a bird and followed it. I figure a local knows the timing of the streets and from where to OK for traffic, so I just follow a local.
Walking we passed a computer store and saw a large number of books on UNIX in Japanese. I suppose it looked a bit strange to us, but I am not sure why that would be. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark Leeper" |
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