Japan (days 6 – 7): Hiroshima and Miyajima

Shinkansen! That’s what the Japanese call their fast trains. They also have special names denoting how fast they go. The fastest”bullet train” is called nazomi but we took a slower one for our trip to Hiroshima. From Toyota it took about 2.5 hours because the slower train’s max speed was “only” around 240 km/hr and made several stops in the smaller cities. I was pretty happy about this down time as I was finally able to update this blog for you! After arriving we went on a hunt for the city’s specialty–Okonomiyaki. It took a while to find it though because I asked three different people at the hotel where to find Okonomiyoki. Note to self (and future tourists): one vowel wrong and you have made yourself completely incomprehensible! Finally someone realized what I was trying to say and we got a map and were on our way. That was not the end of our hunt though. It was dificult to figure out just which building this restaurant was in and since the name was not written in English characters I had to match up the Kanji to make sure we were walking in the right restaurant.

 

Okonomiyaki for those of you who don’t know is the Japanese version of pizza. It is made of rice tortillas with a variety of  topings along with noodles if you like and then topped with a Japanese sauce. They are cooked in the kitchen but then served on a stove top in the middle of the table which is at 120 degrees during the entire meal. Might I also add that the middle of the table starts about 4 inches from the end. No elbows in this table while eating!!! Luckily the menu at Goemon was in English but the servers had difficulty understanding us to say the least. We ordered two Okonomiyaki and a beer each to start for four of us. They were so delicious that we attempted to order two more but ended up receiving four. We tried our best to finish them and felt terrible wasting what we couldn’t finish since that is clearly against their culture to do so, but we just couldn’t quite eat the last one! Oh well!

 

The next day we set out for a tour of Hiroshima including the Museum which details the Atomic bombing that devistated this city at the end of World War II. It was an emotional tour very much reminding me of the tours I had done in the past at concentration camps. We even got to here the story of a “Hibakusa” (survivor) of the A-bombing which was pretty amazing and miraculous. 140,000 people died within 6 months of the bombing. I know it’s history at this point but I was less than proud to be an American on this day. So many innocent people died and so many more were permanently damaged by the radiation. The suffering they must have experienced due to the hate waves is unimaginable to me. I hope that no country ever drops one of these bombs again. I believe humans are capable of less destructive solutions to their conflicts. Let’s hope I’m right!

To pull us out of our Hiroshima History depression we got a boxed lunch on the box and promptly headed to a happy place –the island of Miyajima. Miyajima was absolutely beautiful. There is a gate there that actually lies in the ocean water. The island also is very picturesque with many temples and shrines scattered throughout nature. We were also able to find a shot glass and a Sake set with Miyajima written in Japanese. There was also had the biggest, freshest and most delicious grilled oysters I’ve ever had in my life and the dark Karin beer we had along side the oysters was pretty darn good too. We also got to try maple shaped Japanese cakes filled with many different flavors of paste.

That night we were craving Udon noodles and went to a place recommended by our guide although she was uncertain they had any menus in English. Fortunately the did have English menus and we each got the Udon soup of our liking. Delicious. Afterwards we explored the city a bit to see the castle (Japanese temple style of course) that was lit up. Our cameras didn’t do this view justice but we took some pictures anyways and then headed back to the hotel for a drink. We first tried to go to the top of our hotel (the 33rd floor) but never made it past the menu which displayed alcohols ranging from about $50 a bottle to around $4000. We ended up in the 1st floor restaurant sipping some sweet and more reasonably priced Sake to end the night. What a great day it was!

Our last time in Hiroshima was spent in the Calbee factory where the make Japan’s most popular snacks – shrimp crackers. We were told that “Cal” stands for calcium and “bee” stands for vitamin B1, but most of us weren’t convinced that the snacks were really healthy. Although the do back the crackers and then spray the fat on rather than deep frying them so we will give them SOME credit. This was definitely an interesting tour as I had never seen a food production facility in person. Many of the conveyor belt systems were, however, familiar to me from my family’s business. The best part of this tour was tasting the fresh snacks right as they came off the line. Once bagged I was less impressed by them though. The company’s success was remarkable. They started from nothing a few years after the bombing and now they are very successful just recently having entered the public stock exchange.