New Stuff

All is not old in Japan; in fact much of what we saw is quite new. This is near Asakusa, where Alan and I stayed at the very beginning and end of our trip together. The second building is supposed to look like a glass of beer at night... the white stuff on top is the foam. Don't know what the gold tadpole is supposed to represent. You can see some of the bicycles lined up along the street. People in Tokyo, or anywhere else we traveled, didn't lock their bicycles up! Imazing!!! You didn't need to!!





Alan and I spent some time at the Kyoto train station. It's a train station shopping mall - a combination that seems pretty common. Much is underground, but then there was a fabulous building above ground at Kyoto, with a high end department store and hotel. Needless to say, we spent money in neither, but did take lots of photos. The architect for the building was Hara Hiroshi. You can see picture of other of his buildings here.
I'm the person waiting patiently with her suitcase in this photo. Alan went up to the top where there was a rooftop garden. Still, garden, rooftop, or no, it was amazingly hot and... well, you know.

Alan of course spent a lot of time in Tokyo, but our travels together were mostly elsewhere. We did spend a couple of evenings out on the town. One night we went to Ikekuburo, which was fun. We ate in a shopping mall with 2 floors of restaurants, where I had to point to the plastic model of food in front of the restaurant to order, since there were no pictures on the menu. I had quickly gotten used to those glossy photos! Ikebukuro is known for having a "tacky entertainment district" but it looked like a lot of fun. Perhaps a little over stimulating. This is a picture of the multitude of people crossing a street-wide crosswalk (I really like those, and think that they would be an enormous asset to Chicago).West of this area is Sunshine City, which is a complex of shops, offices, hotel, etc., including the Sunshine 60 (as in 60 stories), which at 240 meters is Japan's second tallest building. This is a view from one of the windows, looking west (I think). If you squint hard enough, you might see the ferris wheel of Tokyo Disneyland way way out in the distance.Next to Sunshine 60 is a car showroom building. I don't know if there are cars on all the floors -- could be, this is Tokyo afterall. But I liked the lighting on the building.
On our last night in Tokyo, and Japan, we met Linnea for dinner. Linnea was also living at the Arai's. She had taken the same program as Alan a couple of years ago, and lived with the Arai's. She returned this year to attend an even more intensive program, and returned to the Arai's. She's Swedish, but naturally had just graduated from Columbia University in NYC and therefore was one of those ultra-accomplished, multi-lingual Europeans that we always envy but don't do anything to emulate. And, goes without saying, very nice and polite. We ate at a sushi restaurant where the little plates of sushi, etc., travel around on a conveyer belt on a loop. If you spy a dish you desire, you scoop it up as it trundles by.
After the antiquities of Kyoto, Alan and I took the train down to Hiroshima, which, because of certain events during WWII, doesn't have a lot of antiquities. We headed directly to the Peace Memorial Park, which is just south of the Aioi-bashi bridge, which was the intended target of the atomic bomb the US forces dropped. Very close to the bridge, and close to where the bomb actually detonated (not over the bridge) is a building that has been left pretty much the way it was after the bomb. It was one of the few buildings left standing, so to speak. It was a municipal building, now called the A-bomb Dome.
The park houses several memorials, and several museums. A very pretty part of the park is the Children's Peace Monument. At this monument are boxes filled with origami cranes, and other creations, all of paper, all made by school children all over the world.
The Peace Memorial Museum is very good. It tells the history of Hiroshima, particularly beginning in the 19th Century. Because of its location, Hiroshima was always a military town. This is one of the reasons it was selected as a target for the bomb. Also because it was believed, falsely, that there were no POWs there -- did you know there were both American and Korean POWs at Hiroshima? The museum documents in great detail the life in Hiroshima before and after the bomb. One of the reasons there are so much eye-witness accounts of the bomb by children is because older kids were pulled out of school to work in building or dismantling structures to be used by the military. The museum documents the continued worldwide construction of nuclear weapons. A great focus of the museum, and indeed of the whole park, is towards the goal of peace, and the destruction of all nuclear weapons. There is the Flame of Peace that will be kept burning until the last weapon is gone... Here I am ringing the Peace Bell.

Other than the Peace Memorial Park, and the baseball stadium where the very popular Carp play, there isn't a whole lot to Hiroshima, although I welcome corrections on this. For example, here's the view from our hotel window. This was the only truly Western style hotel we stayed in. Pretty non-descript hotel, and view.There was a large shopping district in the middle of town. We ate in an 'Italian' restaurant, where there were plastic models of the food, like pasta, in the window, just like all the other restaurants. This is another one of those really wide sidewalks. I love those!
This is my favorite picture from our whole trip. Alan took this from the Aioi-bashi bridge, looking at the A-bomb Dome and the twilight sky of Hiroshima.