Okay, so today I’ll bring you from Japan to Osaka, and we’ll be nearly halfway done with my Japan trip.
Monday wasn’t as nice as the previous two days – it was a bit chilly and drizzly all day. I woke up early, as usual, and headed out for the train station. It was my last walk through the peace park and through Hiroshima’s streets – I was surprised at how much I would miss the city. It’s a really peaceful, quiet city for how large it is. A little house on the outskirts, maybe up on one of the mountains overlooking the bay, would be an incredibly pleasant place to live.
Anyway, I walked past the castle one last time and through the busy streets near the train station, for the first time entering through the front doors instead of the underground shopping mall. Again, the train station was crowded with hundreds of people, lights and noise from trains everywhere, but at this point I was getting pretty good at navigating. I found the same train to Kure I took the day before, and I was on my way back to the city.
I went straight to the JMSDF museum and was one of the first people through the doors. The museum itself was neatly put together, but a little limited, I felt. Most of it was about the JMSDF’s history of minesweeping, which was a really important task following WWII – the Allies had dropped hundreds of thousands of sea mines around Japan in the final months of the war, and it took decades to get them all cleared up. You’d still hear about a fishing boat blundering into a mine and getting its entire crew blown up late into the ’50s, for example. There were lots of artifacts and examples of mines and mine-disposal equipment, but the real draw of the museum is the submarine.
Once the JMSDF expanded beyond minesweeping, it bought a bunch of old subs from the US in order to protect Japan’s sea lanes from the Ruskies and Chinese. You can board and explore a few of the crew and command areas in one of these subs, which I did. It was extremely tight quarters – my elbows were frequently brushing the walls, and I had my backpack with all my luggage with me since I wasn’t returning to the hotel, so I was really having to squeeze. There was an old Japanese sailor serving as a tour guide on the bridge, and he was explaining all the instruments and control surfaces to a couple there before me, but he kindly showed me how to work the periscope. I was able to look out at the bay and over at the Yamato museum across the street.
After an hour or two at the museum, it was time to hit the road. My ultimate destination was Osaka, about halfway between Hiroshima and Tokyo, but along the way I wanted to stop in Himeji and see Himeji Castle, one of the most famous and elaborate castles in all Japan. I walked back to the department store in the light rain and bought some donuts, and munched on them back at the train station. From there, it was back to Hiroshima, and then back into the shinkansen area to catch the bullet train. I felt a pang as I left the city for the last time – I didn’t expect to love Hiroshima as much as I did, and I knew I’d miss the city. I took one last photo as my train departed to remember it by.
The ride is pretty uneventful. The train is smooth, and most of the time the view is either of the ocean to the south, or of tunnel walls as you dive into one of the hundreds of Japanese mountains. By the time I reached Himeji, it was raining steadily, and the air was pretty chilled. I had packed an umbrella, naturally, so I was fine. From the platform, I could glimpse the castle looming about a mile away in the distance. If you remember the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, at one point Bond visits a “ninja school” – that was shot at Himeji.
The walk there was cold and wet, and main road ran straight from the station to the castle. The castle grounds are enormous, sprawling over many acres, and the castle itself is fiendishly intricate, with dozens of walls, courtyards, towers, and buildings all making a labyrinth around the main keep. The idea is that any attackers would get confused and lost and give the defenders more time to murder them with arrows from above.
There were hundreds of other tourists there, but the castle is large enough that everyone spreads out and I felt like I had the place to myself a lot of the time. I made my way from gate to gate, courtyard to courtyard, winding around through the outer areas, through a massive western addition, through the “Long Gallery” – in Japanese castles the walls are hollow and people lived in them. The Long Gallery is the entire southern and western wall of the compound, and was the living quarters for the castle’s ladies-in-waiting. The inside is all polished wood and the typical sliding walls. You had to remove your shoes and carry them with you in a plastic bag (as would be true of the main keep).
Eventually I reached the keep itself, and started climbing it. Inside the castle, most floors are very open, with lots of supporting pillars being the only thing to break it up. Historically, the floors would have been divided by sliding paper walls and have had lots of furniture, but today everything is bare. Each floor is smaller than the one below it, so as you climb the stairs get narrower and steeper, and the available space gets smaller, until the top floor is only the size of a typical bedroom. Again, great views of the surrounding city.
I made my way down and back out through the grounds. It had taken more than three hours to explore the castle and I took about 500 pictures. Next door were the castle gardens, and I had naturally bought a joint ticket because it was so cheap (everything in Japan was really affordable! My hotels were between $20 – $40 a night, the rail pass was $200, meals $5-$10 twice a day, and most museums less than $10 – the majority were free! All told, I spent less than $1000 for everything, with the vast majority of it being the ship, train, and plane tickets). The rain was intermittent now, so I walked through the gardens with only a handful of other people. The gardens are divided into a series of courtyards by walls, and each courtyard had a theme. Most of them have running water and lots of sculpted hills and trees. Honestly, Japan has some of the best gardens I’ve ever explored – every one of them was serene and tranquil, the sort of place you can easily imagine an ancient lord kicking back and relaxing.
Soon enough, I had exhausted the gardens, and by this point I was pretty tired from a long day – it was getting on to 5 in the afternoon and I’d really only eaten those donuts that morning. Should have had lunch at some point. Oh, well. I paused in front of the castle to try to take a selfie that didn’t look awful, which failed – I have no idea how to smile for photos and always look insane. Then it was back, a brief wait for the next shinkansen, and on to Osaka.
Osaka was big, flashy, and busy, much more lively than Hiroshima had been. Right outside the station traffic was crazy, but there were elevated walkways and plenty of traffic signals. Japan is a very orderly, well-organized place and it’s really easy to be a pedestrian…although sometimes I would get frustrated at waiting for the walk signal at a 10-foot wide road with no traffic in sight. I headed for my hotel about a mile away, again, walking, to get a feel for the city. I walked past dozens of big, flashy hotels, through a random city park underneath a highway overpass, and finally into some narrow back alleyways. Finally, I came to a little coffeeshop in a traditional neighborhood – all one or two story buildings, winding, twisty alleyways, no major roads. It looked wrong, but my map said it was the place, so I went in.
Inside was lots of heavy wood architecture, dim lighting, and a wonderful smell of curry (I still hadn’t eaten dinner). A young Japanese man at one of the tables smiled at me and hurried over, asking if I was there for the hostel (spotting the backpack, no doubt). It turned out the hotel was on the second floor of the restaurant, so he led me upstairs, past a lounge where an Australian guy was hitting on an American girl, and into the dorm. I was tired and wet from the journey and the rain, but the curry smelled so good that I ventured back downstairs and had a great curry dinner – a late one at about 8:00, but that just made it better. I wasn’t about to go out and explore Osaka feeling as I did, so instead I bought a coffee, sat in the warm restaurant, and just watched hte people come in.
Next day’s plan was to head to the ancient capital of Japan, Kyoto, a short train ride away.
Gwangju Dreaming 