NationStates Jolt Archive

My friend, Reuben, and his wife, Tina, are currently teaching English in Korea. He's been there for awhile, and has also done the same in Japan. Recently he sent me (and several friends) a long, four part, e-mail detailing his short vacation to Japan. I'm posting it here because it makes for an interesting discussion on culture shock (even for a foreigner who's been there awhile). The third part deals with his visit to Hiroshima, which is very, very moving, and offers some interesting perspective. I'll warn ahead of time that this is very long. The e-mails themselves ranged from 18-25kb, which is pretty big for text. However, despite the length, I think it's worthy of reading, and I hope people take the time to read it, and maybe give a little thought about what he has to say. I'll post the four parts as individual posts (largely because I don't think it'd fit in one post).

So, without further exposition on my part, here's Part 1:


It's weird. After so much time in the hazy, soft-focus ambiance of
South Korea, the sharp focus and keen sunlight of Japan seems both
intrusive and bizarre. Everything stands out in sharp contrast, and
the sky is a wholly unnerving depth of blue. Korea's mountains, from a
distance, look like an old watercolor painting, with the distant ridges
dissolving into washes of indistinct grey. Only in the immediate
foreground are they recognizable as the forested ranges that make up
the country's interior.

That's the thing, really. In Korea, the air is hung with a soft haze
that takes the edges off of things. And with the omnipresent dust
storms that emanate from somewhere in China, the buildings and streets
are dulled by a layer of dust that removes the glare and ages
everything to an unknown era removed from the present. Nothing seems
new. And only in specifically upscale areas is there any neon to give
color and presence to the night sky. Korea tends to adorn itself with
an undefinable sense of dust and age, no matter where you travel.

This makes the contrast to Japan all the more stark and unreal. Lying
only about 70~80 miles away, there's a world of difference between the
two countries. Admittedly, Busan, the southernmost port city in Korea,
is a cleaner, sunnier place than you'll find in the interior regions of
South Korea, but it still has its weirdly defining aspects that fix it
solidly with the rest of the country.

So, when you step off the ferry that has carried you across the three
hours that divide the two countries, you can immediately tell.

When we came to Japan in the summer of 2001, the difference was a
wholly physical one, at the outset. Sure, there were the immediate
signs of being somewhere unrepentantly foreign to the American sense,
but it was the heat that was first into our perceptions. After 14
hours on a plane across the Pacific, stepping out into the July sun was
like taking a physical blow that was directed at the upper chest.
Michigan tends to be a fairly temperate area, so the 90+ degree heat
and the 90%+ humidity were the first things to assail us when we
emerged from the airport.

This time, our perceptions were drawn to the utter and alarming clarity
of vision that the skies of Hakata, Japan, threw down upon us. Details
stood in sharp focus, in terms of bridges and buildings, and the sun
drew sharp, black shadows across the streets and sidewalks. A storm of
mating cicadas droned on in the background as an ominous soundtrack as
we walked from the International Ferry Terminal towards the downtown
area.

I've got an odd ability with language. This is something that I've
come to understand over the last few years. I've always had interest
in codes and ciphers, starting as a kid but never developing further,
as the real world applications of codebreaking tend to be in pretty low
demand. It's what allowed me to do well in math classes and test
situations, but other than that, it wasn't a lot of use...

When we were in Japan, it was this tendency to look for codes and
general sequences in things that led me to learning one of the Japanese
writing systems while we were there. It took me a little over a month
and a half to puzzle out the Japanese script of Katakana, which is used
primarily to write out foreign words.

As a note: Japan has what amounts to being four separate forms of
writing, one of which (Romanji) is our alphabet. The other three are
Katakana (mainly for approximating foreign words), Kanji (the complex
pictographic language that is taken from the original Chinese writing
system), and Hiregana (the simpler alphabet which is used to teach
children how to read and write, as well as serving as a sort of
punctuation and linkage to Kanji). Tina remembers most of her
Hiregana, but almost none of her Kanji. And well, it takes the average
Japanese person the better part of 10 years just to learn how to read
well enough to understand the average newspaper... Not an easy
system...

Anyway, I learned Katakana while we were there in 2001, but a lack of
practice has made it rusty. And since we've been in Korea, I've
learned the Korean form of writing, Hangeul. All of this is
self-taught, mainly practicing on reading menus at fast-food places and
the like. (When you sit and eat, you have the time to puzzle out
things like the local way to spell things like "cola" and "chicken."
Trust me, this is the easiest way to learn...)

The thing that I hadn't realized was how much easier it is to deal with
a language (like Korean) that only uses one system of writing, as
opposed to one that pulls from three separate and distinct systems.
(I'm leaving out the Romanji writing from both Korean and Japanese, as
it's mostly there just for foreigners... and to jazz things up for
advertising as well. I won't get into the fact that their Romanji
versions of things would be pretty unlikely to be pronounced in a way
that we'd be able to recognize...)

If I could look at a map in Korea, I'd be able to tell the cab driver
where to go, since I could simply read off the destination. But when
something's written in Kanji, it's completely unrecognizable to the
average foreigner and accordingly unpronounceable. And this reverses
itself when dealing with computers: We might know where we want to go,
but linking that up with the specific Kanji that our destination uses
is next to impossible.

We'd prepared ourselves for this, to a certain extent, with the simple
expedient of index cards. We'd figure out where we wanted to go from a
handy map (if nothing else, Japan's all about the useful wall maps in
the train stations), write it down on one of the index cards, and
that's what we'd show the cab driver. Remember this, if you ever have
to go to some entirely foreign place... Note cards are your friends.

And well, when it came to getting things like train tickets, we were
able to deal with a helpful (non-English speaking, however) ticket
attendant one time, and we found a ticket machine with English
instructions when we had to return. This was really the only time that
we got tripped up by the language gap, despite a wealth of doubts and
fears to that direction.

Anyway, that's the basics of culture and travel obstacles. This is the
foundation that formed our vacation. Now, onto the interesting parts.

When we'd come to Japan in the past (this marked our fourth trip, all
told), we'd had a number of destinations in mind. We'd wanted to go to
Kyoto, the historical capital of the country, before government was
moved to Edo in present-day Tokyo. I'd wanted to go to Chiba City, as
it was the basic setting for one of my favorite novels, Neuromancer, by
William Gibson. Then there was Hiroshima (for obvious reasons), Osaka
(being one of the well-known ports and tourist areas), and Okinawa
(where the States still maintains a military base, and the locals are
fairly tolerant), in greater or lesser degrees.

We'd been to Chiba and Tokyo on our first trip, which are pretty neat
in their urban wasteland aspects, even though they pretty much
specifically hate you. (I'm of the opinion that the airport at Narita
should have that as a sign, upon disembarkation: Welcome to Japan. We
hate you, specifically.) There's a veritable plethora of electronics,
media and games to be sampled, depending on time and interest, mainly.
In its own weird way, it's a mecca for the lover of gizmos and
distraction, but only mainly if you're versed in Japanese. I couldn't
count the number of times I was enthused by some videogame or book,
only to have to put it back on the basis of being incomprehensible.

When we got a chance to go on vacation last year, we struck out for a
day in Japan, just to see what could be found there.

This was a trip of legend.

As a pre-emptive sidenote, I have to take this chance to digress and
try to answer some likely questions in the minds of the uninitiated:
Why go to Japan? Isn't Korea pretty similar to Japan, in most ways
that count? And don't you usually bitch about having had bad
experiences in Japan?

And in reverse order, here are the simple answers: Yes, I do. No, it
really isn't. Because it's that much different, in all the ways that
tend to matter.

You see, Japan, despite its coldness and the unwelcome feeling that
comes with being a stranger in a strange land, is a pretty neat place.
And while Korea is generally more welcoming of foreigners, it isn't all
that neat of a place to live.

For whatever reason (and we've worked this one over in our minds most
of the time we've been here), Korea is dull. Perhaps it's as a result
of being the conquered nation, time and again. Maybe it has something
to do with not wanting to take on the aspects of its neighbors. Who
knows. The upshot and the end result is that it's basically dull.

Here's why:
In America, we've gotten used to a certain level of media saturation
and leisure time activities. We've gotten to the point that being
bored is one of the hardest things to do, given the amount of things
that we can come up with to fill our downtime. I cite my own interests
as example, and I'm pretty basic in my tastes, in comparison to some...

In my downtime, I've got a media library that consists of hundreds of
DVD and VHS movies and thousands of music CD's. I've got a half dozen
video game systems, ranging from a SuperNintendo and a Jaguar to a PS2
and an X-Box. On my computer, I've got several dozen movies I've
downloaded, thousands of songs I've either ripped myself or downloaded,
and far more games than I'll be able to get to this year (including a
collection of old arcade games that I've run across). Personally, I've
got something like four MP3 players, a PDA that I use for reading books
that I've gotten from the net, and various other gadgets. There's the
internet, e-mail, and books that I can access. Outside of electronic
media, I've got a collection of books that ranges easily into the
$50,000 range (collected over my 32 odd years... even bibliophila can
get to be pricey...), board and card games galore, and various toys
that I've picked up and still keep around.

In short, I've got to be pretty ambitious to find myself with
absolutely nothing to entertain me. And I'm an academic sort, in the
scheme of things. Were I to take up surfing, mountain biking or
similar, I'd have even more diversion to keep me away from the
doldrums. I don't follow sports teams, collect things from the
Franklin Mint, or anything of the like...

Now, of the things that I've mentioned above, you can find analogues
for a lot of it in Japan. In a lot of cases (in terms of electronics
and media), they've come up some of this stuff before we (as Americans)
even got around to it. Therefore, when you're in Japan, there's a lot
of the same things that you could get at a Best Buy or Circuit City,
just laid out in a weirdly different way, usually with more glitz,
noise and neon. All of the kids have GameBoys or Playstations,
skateboards, rollerblades or the like. Sure, this is a heavy
generality, but it holds water for this example.

In Korea, none of this applies.

The schooling is pretty similar to the way Japan does things, as is the
mindset of growing up, getting married, and working 12 hour-days until
you fall over dead from lung cancer at 55 years of age. The thing is
that they don't have any real diversion, either as kids or adults.
Where a kid in Japan (and America, depending) will be able to rattle
off a few hundred of their favorite Pokemon, showing you all the while
their vast collection of licensed toys and merchandise, a Korean kid
can't. At best, they might have a schoolbag of their favorite
character, but that's probably as good as it gets. Compared to
American kids or Japanese kids, Koreans don't have toys. It's just not
done. They don't play the same way, for whatever reason.

Tina's example of this is pretty grim, mainly because I've seen it all
myself. Their favorite games are things that would have been popular
in America in the past, such as a form of milkcaps/pogs. (You know,
the game where you set something like a coin or cardboard disc on the
ground and try to make it flip over from the kinetic force of hitting
it with another one...) Another one is a modified form of jacks that
forgoes the little rubber ball. And their all time favorite?
Rock/Paper/Scissors.

I kid you not. I've seen kids play variants of this for upwards of
half an hour, where the penalty for losing is to step back one pace
while your opponent steps forward. They think it's the greatest thing
that's ever been, to the point that I've seen entire classes dissolve
into chaos at the prospect of playing it. I mean, I remember playing
this back in fourth and fifth grade, when you'd trade stinging welts on
the forearm as penalties, but it isn't something that lasted for any
length of time. In the broad scheme of things, I found better things
to do.

And while it's widely accepted that South Korea has one of the highest
percentages of high speed internet connectivity, their computers are
some of the oldest, clunkiest machines that I've seen in a long time.
All of their favorite computer games (StarCraft, Diablo II,
CounterStrike, etc.) are artifacts from three or four years ago, at
best. The kids get all enthused that I have a computer, but if I tell
them the games I play on it, they stare back at me blankly.

Anyway, that was a longer digression than I had intended, but it goes
to illustrate the kind of situation that we're living in. In some
ways, it tends to be a less expensive life, since we don't have all of
the various gizmos and toys to be tempted by. On the other hand, we
have to import all of the interesting things, since there's nothing
here...

As I was saying, we went to Japan last year, when we had a free week
for vacation. And it ranks high on the long list of goofy and
memorable things that we've undertaken.

The long and short of it was this:
We got tickets out of Busan on the 1st of May last year. It was a
short, three hour trip, and while we were at the terminal, we picked up
tickets for our return trip, the next day. We had about $1000 in
Korean Won with us, with the intent to just change it over when we made
landfall. We'd wander around the town, see what sights there were to
see, eat out at a nice Japanese restaurant, stay overnight at a hotel,
and come back the next day. Easy, right?

Well, that is, up until the point that we found out that May 1st is an
international labor holiday that America doesn't celebrate.

When we got into the terminal, the money exchange was closed, with a
little note that advised seeking out one of the banks in town.
Logical, we guessed. We got in around 4:30pm or so, so it made some
sense. So, we wandered down towards the main commercial district.

No banks open. They'd all closed early. But then, we'd read in one of
the guidebooks that the bigger hotels change money.

But as we were to find out, that only applies to American Dollars. For
whatever reason, the currency of the country that was 14-odd hours away
was more legitimate than the one that was less than 3 hours distant.

We found our way to the post office, which we knew to exchange money.
And as we were to find out, the money exchange section of the post
office had closed some fifteen minutes previously.

"Can't you make an exception, as otherwise, we'll be unable to eat or
get a place to sleep tonight?" This was met with the blank stares that
you become so used to in Japan, when you try to step outside the book
of regulations. How could we even have this thought? Didn't we just
say that the section closed a couple of minutes ago?

In the end, we slept outside, in a park that was already inhabited by a
sizable community of homeless. (The bus station, you see, had marble
floors and all of the good spots were taken... seriously...) I made a
point of taking a picture of the tree that we slept under, for the sake
of posterity...

In the end, we got up early to exhange money, caught breakfast at one
of the local McDonald's, did some shopping, and got on the ferry back
to Korea at noon. It wasn't the best time we've ever spent, but we'd
be sure to never forget it...

This year, we made a weekend trip to Osaka to get our E-2 working visas
for Korea, seeing as we'd pretty much been rushed onto a plane when we
lined up the jobs at the public schools. Unlike the Fukuoka trip, we'd
made sure to exchange our money beforehand, but instead we ran into a
wall when it came to finding a room. For some unexplicable reason, all
of the hotels in the city were booked up, on account of being Thursday.

I have yet to figure this out, but in the end, we got a room despite
the whole Thursday aspect of things and had an interesting time anyway.
(We would have been able to spend the night in a capsule or coffin
hotel, had things not worked out with our eventual lodging... But
while it's such a mainstay of cyberpunk science fiction, it wasn't
really the experience I was looking for at the time...)

Which, after all the digressions and so on, brings me up to the present
day, such as it is...

As I stated before, we had a list of places that we'd wanted to go to
in Japan, while we had the opportunity. And having come at last to
summer vacation, we had a week of free time to consider our options for
travel. We had all of the various details to work out in how to go
about getting a car, but those could be spaced out enough to still
afford us the time it would take to get away from things. (And while
getting a car is one of those exciting sorts of things, in a lot of
ways, it's also fraught with needlessly dull administrative duties...)

We already knew most of the steps required in getting ourselves to
Japan in the first place (including getting money exchanged), so then
we had to look at what we could feasibly do, once we got there. I'd
figured that we would be able to spend a day or two in-country,
depending on what kinds of things we would be trying to do before and
after, so that further informed our basic travel arrangements.

In the end, it happened that Hakata/Fukuoka is about an hour from the
city of Hiroshima, if one were to take the Nozomi (rat) bullet train.
If we were to take the local train, that would take far longer, yet it
would end up costing a fairly similar amount of money. Japan's odd
that way. Travel is really expensive, but it doesn't matter what
method you take to do it with. Looking things up online, I found out
that there was a lot that could be done in Hiroshima, once you got
there, which solidified it even further. The only thing was that, as
the website stated, "A visit is naturally depressing."

How can something like this go wrong? I mean, how can you turn down a
trip to a place that's promoted as being "naturally depressing"? I
guess they don't really have a need to invest in tourism, since people
pretty much know what they're getting themselves into when they sign up
on the tour... It's not like they're likely to get there and say to
themselves, "Oh, is this the place where an atomic bomb was dropped? I
didn't know that it happened here ..."

So, we had a destination. All that was required was to get there and
back again, without any worse undertaking than any of the last trips
had given us. (Basically, as long as we didn't have to sleep outside,
we were going to be upgrading our experience, eh?)

We left out of Hanam on Friday night, on our way to Chungju. We had to
come down to turn in my application for the driver's license test
(which I took today... more on this later...), and then we could head
out from there. Matt and Dae-Sung (the friend of ours from last year
and his wife, who we're buying the car from) had called around and
found out that we could take a train from Chungju to Daejeon (one of
the main cities in the middle of South Korea), where we could take the
newly opened bullet train service to Busan. This cut a lot of time off
our travel, as we didn't have to rely on the interminably slow bus
system, as we'd done last time.

We ended up getting down to Busan around 4:00pm on Saturday, which made
it too late to catch a ferry over to Japan that day. We found a hotel
room in a cheap place in the Russian ghetto in Busan, got some food at
the Bennigan's downtown, and crashed out for the night.

Quick sidenote: Most of the Russians in Korea tend to be of the
"exotic dancer" variety, if they're outside of Busan. Busan is the
closest real port to Russia, so there's a lot of sailors drifting
around the city as they wait for the container ships to be loaded.
Granted, there are more than a few of the "exotic dancer" types to be
found drifting about in Choryang, but most of them are these hard-eyed
guys drinking soju and vodka in plastic chairs on the street corner.
We hadn't really been aware of the Russian population in Busan the
first time we had gone there, which is why finding that half of the
signs are in Cyrilic really threw us off at first.

The next day, we set out to find a money exchange before heading to the
ferry terminal. To our dismay, there were none open when we wanted to
set out (and being Sunday, none of the legitimate banks were open), so
instead, we found ourselves at the movie theaters instead. It was a
hot, blazingly bright day, so there were worse things that we could
think of doing than parking ourselves in air-conditioned darkness for
two hour stretches. We ended up watching King Arthur and the third
Harry Potter movie, both subbed in Hangeul, before we got bored of
sitting still. I mean, we'd spent the previous day on trains, and we'd
be parked on a ferry and another train the next day. Even the prospect
of being out of the summer heat couldn't make more sitting seem that
interesting. We ended up wandering around a little bit, looking at
some of the local parks for a while before heading back and crashing
out. It's amazing what that kind of weather will do for your levels of
fatigue.

On Monday, we went down to the local branch of our bank, Nong Hyup
(which is pretty much the Farmer's Co-Op Bank, if anyone is keeping
score... we also buy yogurt that's produced by our bank...), got our
money changed over to yen, and away we went. At the ferry terminal, we
got tickets out at noon that day, with a return trip from Hakata at
noon, two days hence.

By the way, in case anyone has been wondering about why I tend to
switch between terming the city as Hakata and Fukuoka, there's a reason
for this being done. I'm not entirely sure why, but the port of the
city is known as Hakata (which is what the ferry terminal welcomes you
to), as is the train station, yet the maps and various things around
the city refer to the place as Fukuoka. And oddly, there seems to be
another city in Japan that's known as Fukuoka as well.

I found this out when I was monkeying around with the train schedule
website and got some really weird results back from it... Things like:
To get to Hiroshima from Fukuoka - Take a plane to Tokyo, another
plane to Fukuoka, a bus to the train station, a train to Hiroshima. I
realized fairly quickly that there were two cities involved here.
Either that, or the Japanese just love to take the weird and
complicated routes to get places...

Anyway, it was Monday, and we had tickets to return to Korea on
Wednesday following. I only note this in that, considering our luck
with Japan so far, having to wait two full days before we could return
had a weird air of finality to it. Would misfortune ensue, making it
so that we ended up being stranded, again, until our tickets out could
save us? (This was also bearing on our first trip to Japan in 2001...
We underestimated how blazingly expensive it was to survive in Japan,
and we were looking at running out of money in a matter of less than
two weeks... and while we had plane tickets home (thankfully), they
weren't until three full months later...)

We got into Fukuoka without incident, noting on our way out of the
ferry terminal that there was a money exchange in operation on the
ground floor of the place... It just wasn't open when we'd come in on
May 1st of the year before. (The things that they expect you to
know... Sheej...)

We walked downtown, mainly because I wanted to revisit the park full of
homeless people where we'd passed the night on our last trip. It was
an interesting walk, in that I was mildly surprised at how much I
remembered about the time before. I distinctly remembered what book
I'd brought along with us and read in the park (Stephen King's "From a
Buick 8"), the route we'd taken to get downtown, the location of the
various places that we'd tried to get money exchanged, and so on.
These were things that I had pretty much put out of my head in the
intervening time, yet the act of retracing my steps brought it all
back.

Once downtown, we broke one of the 5,000 Yen bills I'd gotten in Korea
at a convenience store, and we caught a cab for the train station.
>From there, we'd be able to get the bullet train for Hiroshima, where
we'd spend the night.

As a note, it's surprising how quickly you adapt to thinking in terms
of one foreign currency, and how much that screws you up when you have
to switch to another one. Korean money, despite its basic flaws, is
fairly simple to adapt to. One American Dollar is equivalent to about
1,200 Korean Won. More or less, you can think of a 1,000 Won bill as
being about $1, without a lot of problem. Sure, it's less than exact,
but it isn't too far off for most things.

The main problem that I have with it is that there are only three
denominations of bills used in Korea, which are the 1,000, the 5,000
and the 10,000 bills. This means that the high value bills are pretty
much just $10 bills, which makes carrying money a very bulky
proposition indeed. When we came back from Korea last year, I changed
in something like 7.5 million Won, all in 10,000 bills. (Do the math;
this works out to be 750 discrete pieces of paper, which is pretty
sizable.) When it changed to American money, all I got was this
weirdly depressing stack that was less than a tenth the size. It
didn't seem fair, in the slightest.

Anyway, when you're able to mentally translate from your native money
to the specific foreign one and back, it's not too bad. When you
introduce a third monetary system into the mix, things go really weird.
Where the Won is working on something like 10 Won to 1 Cent, the Yen
is closer to being 1 Yen to 1 Cent. Again, this isn't precise, but
it's close enough for government work...

The result of this is that, when you go from Korea (where it's not out
of the question to pay 400 Won for a candy bar) to Japan (where a candy
bar costing 400 Yen would have to be hell of a thing), things can get
weird fairly quick. You also have to factor in the weirdness that the
Japanese currency only has 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 Yen bills (roughly
the $10, $50, and $100 values...), leaving the lower denominations as
coins.

The point where I realized that there was a problem was actually at the
convenience store. We bought some drinks and a candy bar, which were
fairly pricey in comparison to Korean prices, but I pulled out what
amounted to being a $100 bill for $6 worth of stuff. Granted, I had to
break what amounted to being a $50 bill regardless, but still...

We headed to the train station from there, using our handy index cards
to help the cab driver navigate. (Random bitch: Cabs in Japan are
neat and all, with their automatic opening doors and the whole bit with
driving on the left, but I have a problem with the fact that a trip
that would cost something like $2 in Korea costs around $10 over
there...)

Once inside the train station, we found our way to the ticket office
for the bullet train, only to discover that we had no idea what the
Kanji for the city of Hiroshima actually looked like. And from what I
could tell, there wasn't anything in the way of English menus available
on the machine. Accordingly, we went to the ticket office, got across
the idea of two tickets for non-reserved seats to Hiroshima on the
Nozomi bullet train. He rattled off a price of 16,300 Yen, which is
about what I had figured, but I caught myself counting out bills as
though we were still in Korea. It was going to take me a while to
realize that I didn't need to pay $1,600 for train tickets...

The bullet train was clean, well kept, and fast as hell. Our
impressions of Japan, as seen from the Nozomi, were that it was green,
punctuated by moments of black. It was a little faster than the Korean
bullet train, but it was quieter, for whatever reason. I have the
feeling that there were different technologies at work, but I can't
prove it. At the high end, we were running at about 200 miles per
hour, which made things all the much faster.

The train station in Hiroshima lets out into a shopping mall of some
fair size, which then lets out into a massive square. We paused in the
train station to get an idea of the layout of the city, copy down the
kanji for the places we wanted to go, and check around for a tourist
map. There wasn't much available in the way of maps with affordable
hotels, so we just figured to look around once we got down where we
were going.

The main tourist attraction in Hiroshima, such as it is, happens to be
the massive Peace Park, a sizable chunk of land carved out of the
center of the city, where the damage from the atomic bomb was the
greatest. We gave the cab driver the notecard of where we wanted to go
(he was very pleased about the fact that we'd made it a lot easier on
him... I'm sure that there are more than a few tourists that stumble
through their less than helpful Berlitz phrasebooks, attempting to get
an idea across) and settled back for the quick cross-town trip.

Hiroshima (and this will probably qualify as an understatment of epic
proportion) is an odd city.

Japan, as I've noted, is not a terribly welcoming sort of place. They
have one of the most complex written languages in existence, having
taken Chinese and complicated it by adding a couple more writing
systems to the mix. They tended to kill anyone who came in from
outside the country, as well as killing anyone who had the misfortune
of having contact with the outsiders. And when the United States
forcibly opened the ports for trade in the late 1800's, they retaliated
by invading the surrounding countries and starting wars. When we were
in Tokyo, we got sworn at by random old men on the subway and heard
more than once that many people thought that the US was still their
enemy, despite what anyone else might think about things.

Therefore, when we showed up in Hiroshima, we weren't expecting
anything in the way of a warm welcome. Hells, in Korea, we'd happened
upon more than a couple of protests over the presence of Americans in
their country (which struck me as really weird, since they wanted us
here in the first place...), and Korea's a friendly place in
comparison. In a lot of ways, I figured that the memorial at Peace
Park would have a certain glint of "Look what the enemy United States
did to us..."

Instead, it was one of the most laid back and casual places I've seen
in Japan. Admittedly, Osaka was a lot livelier, what with its reggae
bars and jazz clubs, but the people acted as though wandering
foreigners were an expected, everyday sight. And indeed, we probably
are.

Peace Park is an islet at the confluence of two rivers. On one bank of
the river, across from the memorial, is Genbaku or A-Bomb Dome, the
only surviving structure from August 6th, 1945. It's a stark, skeletal
place of broken masonry and rusting, irradiated metal. There's a fence
around it to keep out the curious, and an oddly well tended lawn around
the debris field. It looks every bit like what it is, the shattered
remains of a post-holocaust structure, lending credence to the
apocalyptic vision of all the film-makers that have tried to set films
in this kind of grim aftermath.

A bit of history:
Hiroshima was the first of two inhabited cities (Nagasaki being the
other one) to be bombed with the nightmare of a nuclear weapon. It was
hit on August 6th, 1945, at 8:15 in the morning. It was one of seven
cities that were selected as targets by the US military, having made
the list on the basis of its military importance (where Nagasaki was an
industrial center). Also in its favor as a target was the fact that it
hadn't been extensively bombed before, which allowed the military to
assess the full impact of the bomb when it went off. The target was
the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the center of the city, mainly because it
was a very easily recognized structure from the air. Hiroshima was
selected first because it had the misfortune of being a sunny day on
the day in question. The bomb, Little Boy, detonated in mid-air, about
half a mile up.

According to eyewitness accounts, the sight of the Enola Gay flying
over was nothing terribly interesting to the residents, as they were
getting used to the sight of American warplanes. And when one of the
two planes that accompanied it dropped out three parachuted bundles,
there was more mystification than worry. (These were to take
measurements of the bomb as it went off, in terms of atmospheric
changes and so on...)

A sizable portion of the initial casualties were middle school students
that had been pressed into service demolishing homes as a means to make
firebreaks against the eventuality of bombing.

To be honest, I've spent too long away from these e-mails to be able to
maintain the same sort of tone with them as I'd started out with. In
some ways, this is probably good, since I probably would have sent most
of my recipient list into information overload, had I continued on the
same way. I was feeling a little bit like an encyclopedia entry with
the earlier segments of this e-mail. Sure, it was immediately in the
aftermath of the experience, but there was too much that I wanted to
get down on paper (such as it is) that I couldn't apply any sort of
filter to it and cull it down to anything of reasonable meaning or
length. (Mind you, waiting nearly two months to finish talking about
this is also a pretty lousy method of engaging a filter, but you make
do with what you have handy, eh?)

Anyway, when we had last left off (discounting the history lesson that
I was in the process of writing), we'd just gotten into Hiroshima.

Every train station, no matter the size or importance, has a map of the
surrounding area near the station, marked with hotels, main streets and
attractions, and so on. We stopped at the one just down from the main
tracks and tried to orient ourselves. (Feel free to make any bad jokes
on that that you'd like... After all, weren't we already oriented by
coming to the Orient? Heh. Yeah, anyway...)

The train station was a fair distance from Peace Park, which I had
already figured on. Most of the hotels were situated around the main
station area, with others scattered around the city in varying sorts of
concetration. There were also a lot of them on the main Peace Boulvard
that ran parallel to the station, so that was an option as well. We
figured that it would be better to have a place to stay at that was
closer to the Park, so we wouldn't have to do any real travelling once
we got up the next morning. It was already getting on towards sunset
at this point, so we'd figured to do our touristy things the next day
and leave out for Fukuoka around dinner time. We copied down all of
the relevant Kanji from the map, including the Genbaku Dome and the
Hiroshima Castle, and headed out to catch a taxi.

As I've said, the Japanese on the West side of Japan are a lot better
about dealing with foreigners than the ones on the East side, nearer to
Tokyo. That doesn't mean that they're altogether thrilled, since they
still have to deal with the language barrier. It's a weird sort of
social stratification: The people that are most likely to speak any
level of English aren't going to be driving taxis, which is really
where they need them to speak English... Sigh. The reason that I
bring this up is that the measure of relief that the taxi driver had
when we pulled out our index card for the Genbaku Dome was almost a
palpable thing. We definitely made things that much easier for him on
that count. He was almost effusive about thanking us and making sure
that we were happy about being delivered to the place without fuss.

So, there we were. Evening was coming on, the day was cooling off from
the late July heat, and we were standing under a tree, looking up at
the stark metal outlines of the only structure left standing from some
sixty years ago. There was a white crane perched on the curving metal
strut that had held up the metal of the dome, a strikingly oriental
image next to the sharp angles of destruction that were left. People
were wandering nearby, talking in low tones, holding hands near the
river that flowed past, and generally seeming like ordinary people on
an ordinary night. And somehow, there was this odd, crushing residue
of history that hung over all of it. It was as though you could feel
all of the past emotions that had been burned into this place, mixed
with the odd perceptions of all the people that had passed through here
since then. The horror had been dampened and dulled over the years by
the curiosity and (perversely enough) the wonder that went with this
place. Countless people had stopped where we had and looked up at the
sky, trying to imagine how it must have been like to have gone from a
normal everyday sort of city in one instant to a barren, deadly waste
land in another... What must the flash have been like, that was so
deadly that it seared clothing into skin and left shadows burned into
the side of buildings? What sort of thought could you have had, in the
last instant of your life before your blood vaporized in the heat?

One of the exhibits mentioned the title I've given these missives: The
Fires at the End of the World. And the only accounts that remain from
that time are the people that were far enough away to have not been
injured in the initial destruction. Those that were close enough to
have seen the true extent of the bomb's effect were either killed in
mere seconds or badly enough damaged that they'd succumb within days.
In some ways, there's no way to get any account that's not second or
third hand, and even those are sketchy at best. But I think that title
is as close as one can come to capturing the feeling of that day. The
world had ended in sudden, bright death, and the only thing that came
after was fire and black rain.

We walked along the river at sunset, browsing amongst the monuments and
statuary that had been erected for the victims. Each had a different
sort of focus: This one was on the spot of a factory that had stood at
the time of the bomb, and the victims within; here was one that was put
up for the middle school students that had been impressed into service,
tearing down buildings for firebreaks, as they'd been near the center
of the fires when the bomb fell; here was another that spoke of the
dead in the river, as the survivors of the initial blast were seeking
water to cool themselves off with, not realizing that river water was
boiling when they plunged into it.

The impression that I come back to is that the Hiroshima of today is
just another city, where the monuments are a litte more personal. But
in the end, it's just a city. People walked along through the trees,
talking, and behind them was the neon of the city as night fell. I saw
hotels and restaurants, their names picked out in Romanji or Katakana,
advertising for whatever patronage they could reach. No matter what
may have happened in history, it was still alive and functioning.

We found a hotel nearby (The Parkside Hotel, obviously enough) and got
a room for the night. It wasn't expensive, by Japanese standards,
which was nice, and from there, we headed out to see what kind of food
we could lay hands on. It was a weeknight, which meant that we'd be
less likely to find the late-night places as easily. (And barring a
good Yoshinoya Beef Bowl restaurant, we'd probably have to rely on bar
food anyway...)

We ended up in the main commercial district, Hondori-Bashi, which was a
massive covered street that extended for about six blocks under a great
glass roof. There were a lot of various places of interest, including
the requisite flashy glitz of Pachinko parlors every block or so. In
the end, we found a nifty little sandwich place in the basement of one
of the mall buildings at the end of the street, where we had chicken
Caesar salads that seemed almost like flower arrangements. They were
nothing that you'd ever find in the States, in terms of simple artistry
and presentation, but they were tasty. The whole place was set up in
this oddly cosmopolitan way, with artwork and bohemian decoration so as
to set it apart from the standard Japanese cafe. We could just as
easily been anywhere in the world, had it not been for the Kanji mixed
through the signs. (Which were, as point of note, mostly in English.)

The next morning, we sat down to a well-appointed, yet strangely quiet
breakfast buffet in the hotel before setting out. Looking back, I have
to think that our tolerance for what most people would call weird is a
bit high. We think nothing of getting scrambled eggs, toast, miso soup
and seaweed as a breakfast. And sitting on a raised floor at a low
table, while maneuvering pieces of breakfast salad on chopsticks...
Isn't that normal? How weird can something be, once it's routine?

The sunlight in Japan is something else. We set out early, before nine
in the morning, and already it was deathly bright, telling us in no
uncertain terms that it wasn't going to let up.

>From the hotel, we walked about two blocks, crossed the river, and went
into the shade in front of the main Peace Park Museum. There were a
couple of monuments to a noted Swiss doctor, Dr. Marcel Jurnod, who was
amongst the first of the relief workers from the Red Cross to arrive in
Hiroshima and demand more medical supplies to try and deal with the
aftermath.

The Peace Memorial Museum itself was a rectangular, modernistic looking
building with a walkway on the second floor that joined another
building to it. As it happened, the East building held the exhibits on
the historical background to the war, where the West building was where
all the documents and artifacts dealing with the bomb's aftermath was
held.

The admission for the museum itself was negligible; something under a
dollar, if I remember correctly. However, they did hit up the proper
sort of tourist for rental of the earphones and audio guide in native
tongue, which was closer to five dollars per. The audio guide reminded
me of the devices that we had when I went on the tour of Carlsbad
Caverns back in 1980. Sure, you could do the exhibit without it, but
there was a whole lot of information that you'd be missing out on if
you forewent the luxury. And well, we'd made a point to come to this
place as tourists; why scrimp on a minor expense, hey?

The lower area of the East building had a replica of the Genbaku Dome,
as well as scale dioramas of what the city looked like before and after
the blast. Around the edges of the room were exhibits detailing the
military history of the city and explaining why it was a target of the
US at the time. Included were facsimiles of the documents detailing
the military planning by the US, weather reports and maps of the
bombing run, and so on. Also included was a lot of the background
information about the Japanese mindset in the run-up to the war.
Interestingly enough, they had devoted over 80% of their budget to the
war, to the point that pretty much everything that was outside of the
war effort had to be sacrificed for the sake of the war.

This was the first serious indication to us about how weird a place
this was. Not only was there evidence of how Japan had geared itself
up for the war, there was a certain amount of "yeah, something like
this was probably inevitable" feeling to the place. You get closer to
Tokyo, and there's still the feeling that they'd still be fighting the
good fight. Here, there was basic condemnation of how the government
had dealt with the war and sacrificed the good of the people in the
process.

Also included on the lower level were copies of the telegrams sent by
the mayor of Hiroshima to world leaders, protesting every time a test
was carried out for nuclear weapons. They read similarly, in that the
mayor and the people of Hiroshima were trying to remind people why the
whole nuclear weapon thing was bad.

I probably shouldn't find amusement in that, but I still do. I mean,
how do you argue with a telegram like that? "This is a bad thing. You
know how I know? Because my city was nuked. Next question?"

A half level up from there was an exhibit detailing how certain public
buildings survived and were used as relief centers, complete with
models of the buildings and photos.

On the second level itself was a history of the Atomic Age, and how
many nuclear weapons remain today. This sat in a shadowy area next to
a more brightly lit section on the yearly memorial events that are held
in the park on the anniversary of the bombing.

Just beyond was an area where the gift shop was located. (On a
sidenote to this, they're now selling souvenirs at Buchenwald. I just
read an article about how they were wrestling with the idea, unsure
that they could do it without seeming ghoulish. The end conclusion was
that enough time had passed that the reasons for visiting these sort of
places was different, and the experiences that people wanted to come
away from the with weren't the same as their parents and grandparents.
If I remember correctly, Buchenwald is intending to sell packaged birch
saplings, as Buchenwald means 'Birch Forest' in German.)

The gift shop was pretty much as one would have expected it to be, with
postcards, t-shirts and commemorative books. The difference came in
the exhibits that surrounded the kiosk, which were the artifacts
donated to the museum by families of people killed in the blast. A few
feet from the cash register were the student cards of kids that died in
the fires, along with brief bios about who they were and how they
happened to be identified later. The stories were all fairly similar,
in that the families were only able to identify them from specific
items that they carried with them.

This was where the museum started to get personal and tragic. Up to
this point, it had all been statisics and history. Here, it started
into the lives of people and the things that they had carried with them
when everything came to a fiery end. This was obviously the point of
the section, to drive home the fact that ordinary people with lives and
potential were the victims of this event, rather than trying to hide it
all behind simple numbers.

Here was the lunchbox carried by a 13-year old boy, the remains of rice
and vegetables carbonized by the heat. Over here are the tattered bits
of cloth that were the school uniform of a 15-year old girl whose body
was never identified, but whose uniform survived unburned because she'd
taken it off to work on building demolition. This was the sandal of
another girl, the imprint of her foot burned into the wood, which was
only identified because the cloth of the toe straps was taken from the
mother's own kimono. All of it was chillingly similar; tales of people
that had left in the early morning and were never seen again, their
bodies lost in a field of charred corpses that were unrecognizable.

A short sidenote to all of this:
The effects of the war effort were nowhere more evident than in this
section, as they had mannequins wearing the school uniforms of the
middle school children. I know that I'm no expert on the relative size
of kids (even being an elementary school teacher... Go figure...), but
these kids were small. Seriously so. These clothes wouldn't fit most
of the fifth grade girls that I have in class, and it'd be a hard bet
if it would fit the fourth graders, to be honest. Yeah, the Japanese
aren't giants by any measure, but still... I have to figure that the
rampant malnutrition (as noted in the animated movie, Grave of the
Fireflies... One of the most depressing flicks I've ever watched...)
was the reason for a lot of this, as even modern Japanese are far
larger than these poor kids were...

>From here, we passed across the connecting corridor to the West
building of the museum, where the brightly lit hallways of the giftshop
gave way to the blasted brick and mortar of a recreation of the
aftermath. We rounded a corner to come face to face with the one
visceral shock of the whole exhibit.

Standing in the shattered and burned brick of a ruined building were
three ghoulish wax figures, their arms held up in front of them with
their skin hanging off in tatters. (As I later read, this was a fairly
accurate portrayal of the more severe victims, as their blood would
collect in their hands and arms (causing further pain) if they didn't
hold them aloft.) Behind them, the sky was black with smoke and
clouds.

>From there, the exhibit displayed a number of various artifacts from
the destruction, including segments of buildings that showed the burn
shadows from the nuclear flash, aggregates of bottles or metal that had
fused together in the heat, and roof tiles whose paint had bubbled and
glazed from the bomb. There were pieces of furniture that had been
embedded with glass hurled from broken windows, as well as fragments of
glass that had risen to the surface of people's skin as long as forty
years later.

In one corner was a tricycle and a helmet that had nearly disintegrated
with rust from being buried, the artifacts of a three year old boy that
had died from the radiation of the blast a couple of days afterwards.
His father had refused to cremate him to be put in the family plot, so
he had buried him in the backyard with his beloved trike and helmet.
It was some twenty years later when the boy was exhumed and placed with
the rest of the family, and the artifacts donated to the museum.

I'd kept up on most of the audio segments up to this point, but it was
simply too much for me to listen to all of the exhibits after this
point. The individual stories, rendered with personal strokes by the
people that had managed to live on, were proving to be heavier than I
was willing to keep up with. As the museum had intended, they'd taken
the stories out from behind the glass and made them accessible to the
visitors, giving voices to as many of the victims as they possibly
could. Looking at things in a museum from a clinical and dispassionate
eye is one thing. Having to confront the sudden end to so many people
with lives and potential is quite another.

Tina, to her credit, kept up with every single audio segment, all the
way through the exhibit. She would occasionally mutter about the kind
of dreams she was sure to have from the experience, but as it happened,
she didn't even have that visited upon her. I think, to her, this was
a great deal of history that she'd been familiar with all her life,
made real and solid. I'd thought I was the main, motive force for
coming to Hiroshima, but I think she'd been every bit as interested.

There was an exhibit on the mutations that resulted from the radiation
and heat, in particular how it affected hair and nail growth. And in
the next room beyond, there was an entire area that dealt with the main
symptoms of radiation sufferers, ranging from burst capillaries under
the skin that produced pin-sized bruises to massive, horrifying keloid
scars that covered vast stretches of people's skin. (This was a really
weird part, as they had preserved the keloids and had replicas of them
on display.)

The final section dealt with two girls that had survived the bombing.
One dealt with the story of a girl that had been in middle school at
the time of the bombing. She and her brother had been fairly close to
the epicenter (in relative terms, of course...), and she had come down
with radiation sickness almost immediately. Her younger brother seemed
fine in comparison, for about a week, at which point he developed the
symptoms of radiation sickness and succumbed. The girl lived through
it and apparently is still alive.

What drives this exhibit home is the fact that her hair was on display,
as it had all fallen out shortly afterward. And on the tag, it shows
that she was the person that had donated it to the museum.

The other girl, by the name of Sadako, was in kindergarten at the time.
She came through the aftermath without problem, but around the point
she was in sixth grade, she came down with leukemia. They put her in
the hospital and began running tests to see what they could do to save
her. While she was there, she started folding origami cranes, with the
idea that if she was able to fold 1,000 paper cranes, she'd be granted
a wish. She wished to be able to live through the leukemia that had
struck her so many years after the tragedy that had killed so many
other people.

In the end, she folded over 1,300 paper cranes, many of which were on
display in the hall. A number of the rest were buried with her.

I feel like I should apologize for this running as long as it has. On
the other hand, I know that most of you are aware that I ended up with
a degree in writing from college, so this shouldn't be a huge surprise.

I'd figured that I would be able to finish this out in three segments,
but that ended up being something of a farce, as there's no way to talk
about something like this in a short, abbreviated form. Sure, I could
have mentioned something like: "So, we went the museum, it was all sad
and stuff, and then we went home." But at that point, I might as well
have not bothered writing about it. Yeah, this might be a headache to
wade through (it's been something of a bear to write, to be honest),
but at least it's not sketchy and vague.

Sadako wasn't the end of the exhibit, but she might as well have been.
The only thing that remained after that, of note, was a photo of a
flower emerging from the rubble of a burned building, a few months
later. They had assumed that nothing would be able to grow in the soil
of the irradiated area for nearly seventy-five years, when it took less
than a year for plants to start re-populating the area.

We went downstairs and back to the East Building of the museum to grab
something to drink and ponder the rest of the day. It was interesting
to see that there were some Korean tourists poking about (sometime,
I'll have to tell you how to tell the difference), and they seemed to
be every bit as miserable in the blazing sun as we were. It was kind
of heartening to see, as we've had to deal with the prevalent Asian
attitude that we live sheltered lives and can't deal with any level of
temperature extreme. (To an extent, this is true, being as we know
what such things as central heat and air are...) Of course, we've also
had to deal with the weird Korea-centric theory that they're the only
people in the world with four seasons. Nevermind that they only have
spring and fall for about a week each... Sigh.

On the park grounds, there are a number of sculptures scattered around,
serving as monuments for different aspects of the city's memorial. The
main one is an odd arch that houses an eternal flame, through which you
can see the Genbaku Dome in the distance. There's also a monument to
the Korean forced laborers that were killed in the blast, as well as a
clock counting off the time since the blast occurred.

The clock deserves some extra space, as it was fairly neat. Crafted in
twisted steel and copper, it's a Seiko clock with three faces, set at
the northernmost point of the park. Directly across the river from it
is the Genbaku Dome, and a short distance away is the t-shaped bridge
that served as the main landmark for the bomb to be dropped on. I took
a number of pictures in this area, simply for the sake of being able to
stand on what should have been ground zero. (Since it exploded a bit
prematurely, it was actually an air-burst a few hundred yards to the
southeast.) A few paces away from the clock was a pavillion with an
Asian temple bell, the kind that are about ten feet across and rung
with a small log suspended from the pavillion's roof. The surface of
the bell depicted a map of the Earth, with an atomic symbol at the
point where the clapper struck the bell. This is the Bell of Peace, to
be rung in the hopes that another nuclear weapon will never have to be
used on a population.

One of the interesting things about the time in which we were wandering
about the grounds of Peace Park was that there were scattered groups of
school children on tours, ranging in age from elementary to high school
and generally small in number. I wrestled with this for a little while
during the time we were walking around, and I had to settle on the idea
that this was no different than our class trips to places like the Ford
Museum and White Pine Village. This was a part of their history, the
same as such analogues are for us. It's just a little odd to think on,
as we'd come halfway around the world for something of such deep world
significance, where they'd just gone on a day off from regular class
sessions. They were probably as bored as we'd get on history trips,
just because they'd heard it all before and would probably have to
write a paper on it afterwards.

This is the point that I have to note that being an adult is a little
bit weird. Granted, I was always more interested in trivia and history
than most people, but seeing these schoolkids made me realize how much
different your priorities can become as you get older.

Yeah, anyway. On with the travelogue.

Just a little ways away from the Eternal Flame for the victims of the
bombing (updated every year to include any survivors that had died over
the preceding year) was the Children's Monument, made up of a central
bell-like structure, on top of which is perched a girl holding up an
origami crane. This was easily the most colorful of all the park's
various sculptures, as it was draped in long chains of folded paper
cranes, donated by visitors to the monument.

On the other side of the Eternal Flame from the Children's Monument was
a low circular building that descended past a field of rubble and the
sculpture of a clock stopped at the time the bomb went off. Inside the
building, visitors descended a spiral walkway, around which was a sort
of timeline that recounted the bombing and its aftermath. At the very
bottom of the structure was a small fountain in the center of a large
circular room decorated with a panoramic mural of the city as it was in
the week after the bombing. Neighborhoods and buildings were picked
out from the photo, noting where population centers, hospitals and
schools had once stood. In the distance, ghostly grey mountains rose
over the bleak vista.

Continuing on, we emerged into the library of the facility, a spartan
and oddly collegiate area that housed computers, microfiche and similar
reference machines, mostly (as should be obvious) set up for Japanese
access. Not having any personal stake in things, we browsed through
the photo archive of victims, accessing Japanese names at random.
Other than a plethora of the Hirano family and a couple of American
servicemen that had been held as prisoners of war at the time of the
bombing, there wasn't much that we took away from the exhibit. Having
not had relatives here, these were just names.

Nearby was an interactive display where the visitors could access first
hand accounts of people that had been present in the aftermath. These
stories ranged from accounts by nurses at the clinics to guys that had
been pressed into service cleaning up the dead. They were all pretty
much uniform in the grim stories they told, speaking of things like
trying to pull the bodies from the river after they had been boiled
("If you tried to pull them out by their hands, the skin came off like
a glove. If you tried to take hold of a foot, the skin would pull off
like a sock.") to using chopsticks to remove the maggots from wounds.

Particularly telling was the account of a nurse that talked about the
triage and temporary clinics set up in the buildings that still stood.
She covered about a week of horrors, only to end with the appearance of
some regular Japanese soldiers telling of the surrender of Japan in the
days after the bombing of Nagasaki. At first, she was incredulous that
they had surrendered, as they were the chosen people. The soldiers
told her that the Americans would be coming soon, and all women should
leave the city and hide in the hills, fearing the retribution that was
to come. "You need to leave. We have done terrible things in China."

Bearing that in mind, we left the exhibits of Peace Park behind, having
gathered our bags from the coin lockers in the main hall and braced
ourselves for the suffocating heat and brightness that was the early
afternoon in Hiroshima. If the lack of cloud cover was reminiscient of
the day of the bombing, I can see why it was chosen. Clear skies for
all. It made me wonder, vaguely, if it was possible at all to bomb
cities in Korea, given the near-constant haze that overhangs that place
for most of the year. Perhaps they only could be bombed in the winter
months... Something to keep in mind.

As we were leaving, we chanced to see a Korean guy suffering under the
late summer heat. Given that we have gotten all kinds of nonsense for
not being adjusted to Asian climes, it was heartening to see another
person, who in theory should be better set to deal with it, suffer just
as much as we were.

With the history lesson out of the way, we did the next logical thing
for American tourists: We caught lunch at KFC and went shopping at the
local mall, replete with a Tower Records.

Japan is a bizarre sort of place to visit, after a monk-like existence
in Korea. Compared to the weird sense of denial that you come upon in
Korea's stores, Japan comes across as a bizarre of kitsch and neon, a
wonderland of licensing, electronics, and media. It's sort of like a
person whose entire life has been made up of a diet of red beans and
white rice, only to find out that, not only are there a myriad of rice
and bean varieties, there's an entire smorgasbord of different foods as
well. Seriously.

For example: Korea likes to pride itself on the high tech nature of
their cel phones. (Hand-phones, in local parlance... An odd sort of
Konglish that has stuck...) They can take pictures, instant message,
download music, etc. There are cellular stores in just about every
block, with a good dozen different models of the latest phone.

In Japan, on the other hand, there are literally hundreds of different
phones to choose from. They can do everything that the Korean phones
do, with the added weirdness of a private sort of World Wide Web that
only exists on the cellular network. They check horoscopes, play weird
and miniature online games, ask advice, check different e-mail accounts
that they have, and participate in this odd subculture community that
centers around their specific age and interests. And that's just the
difference in phones.

Your average Korean electronics shop will stock an X-Box display and a
Playstation display, with the occasional cheap knock-off brand that
will play games from about ten years back. Japanese stores set aside
an entire floor of a building for the various permutations of personal
gaming interest. Yeah, I have both an X-Box and a Playstation, but the
variety of consoles (not to talk of the games) that are seen in the
average Japanese store range into the esoteric and weird, not to
mention the consoles that will never make it outside of Japan.

Amusingly enough, we happened to see a display for Grand Theft Auto,
recently translated into Japanese for importation. Given that most of
the games for the PS2 are imported to the US from Japan after a lag of
at least six months in most cases, it was goofy to see an American game
being brought back to Japan.

Music stores are another point of difference.

I'm pretty sure that, by now, everyone on this list will know that I am
a bit of an audiophile, to stack things mildly. I've got well over
1500 CD's to my name, most of which I've gotten through used places or
hole-in-the-wall stores that you have to search out. While I like to
think that I have fairly broad musical tastes (everything from folk
music, circa mid-60's, to the latest industrial albums to roll off the
line), I'm not terribly mainstream. I don't own anything by Britney,
Christina, or even Whitney.

This makes living in Korea something akin to Hell. Since living here,
I've taken up instrumental albums, because that's the best selection I
can find over here. Otherwise, I'm stuck with the weird discographies
of obscure 80's metal bands (Anyone want a Rainbow collection? They
got it over here... Yngwie and Manowar, as well...) or the latest pop
junk to make it over here. If I want Bob Dylan, I've found one store
at the Bus Terminal that stocks a good selection. David Bowie? Well,
that takes a little work. Things like Black Tape For A Blue Girl, Nick
Cave, or even Gary Numan? Yeah... Keep dreaming...

Japan, in the meantime, is the promised land of music stores. A lot of
the time, back in the States, the Japanese Import of a given album was
often the better version and commanded a price to reflect it. Often,
these versions would have an extra track that wasn't found any other
place, making it worth the price of the import without question. And
as I have said, Tower Records was one of the destinations.

Oddly enough, so was a store that specialized in Beanie Babies. You
see, a few years back, when we first came to Asia, we'd been sent on a
sort of wild goose chase, looking for a Japan-only iteration of the
overly popular collectible stufftie. Namely, we were looking for a
little pink bear named Sakura, with an embroidered cherry blossom on
its chest. Sadly, we were unable to find one at the time, mistakenly
picking up the rather less collectible larger version. This time, we
found a store that specialized in these things and picked up two of the
newer version. As it happened, they had two of the older version in
stock, but at $80 per, we weren't so interested that we had to pick any
up. The newer, less valuable ones are enough for us. At this point,
they're just conversation pieces anyway.

We caught the train back to Fukuoka that night, found ourselves a nice
sort of hotel in the shadow of the train station, and ate out at what
the Japanese call a Family Restaurant. (This is to differentiate, I
guess, from the basic bars or fast food joints...) Rusty as we both
were at Japanese (Tina moreso than me, as I'd never studied it...), we
relied on the glories of a picture menu and the simple expedient of
just pointing to what we wanted.

The next morning, we caught the ferry back to Korea, from whence we had
to catch a train back to Chungju for the previously referenced driving
test that Friday.

I'm sure that there are details that I've glossed over or events that
I'd meant to get around to illuminating, but for the time being, I
think the nearly 80K worth of e-mail (I shudder to think of how many
pages this would translate out to... I guess I'll find out at some
point later...) should cover things well enough for the time being.

Anyway, that covers the "What I did for my Summer Vacation" aspect of
things, and sooner or later, I'll get back to the "daily life" sort of
e-mails that I'd grown so accustomed to in the past... If nothing
else, I figure this should show why my missives have been absent over
the last month or so... I've been trying to get out from under this
particular white elephant...

Otherwise, I hope all is well with people... Shorter e-mails will
follow....


=====

Reuben B.


"The churches are empty
The Priest has gone home
And we are left standing,
Together alone..."
- October Project, "Dark Time"

-----

And that's the end. For those of you who've made it to the end, thank you for taking the time to read. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope even more that it inspired some thought.

I really liked reading that. Although from the start he sounded like a real English-writer type person. It was almost like a book. :p

But the difference between Korea and Japan was the most interesting to me. I didn't know it was like that. I always though Korea was almost as advanced as Japan in all aspects.

This was a great sortof insiders guide on how to navigate Japan. He should post it as a travelogue somewhere for people to read.

Thanks Hack, for posting that.

Japan sounds like a very poor place for a vacation, it seems.

That was excellent, I must say.

I agree - my best friend has been to both South Korea and Japan to visit family there; I wonder what his reactions would be if he read these letters . . .

Very good reading. I feel like I just visited Hiroshima myself and saw all the exhibits in that museum, imagining the suffering the people had in that city when the bomb fell. Thank you :)

It certainly showed us the side of Japan you don't see in anime.

Hey, cool, responces.

I really liked reading that. Although from the start he sounded like a real English-writer type person. It was almost like a book.Yeah, he's always been a verbose little bastard, heh. We've had conversations over e-mail that have gotten into the 100kb range. Of course, he's even more amusing when he writes after being up for 30 hours or so and starts babbling about "three-tinged forks" and "word salsa (which is like word salad but zestier)".

Very good reading. I feel like I just visited Hiroshima myself and saw all the exhibits in that museum, imagining the suffering the people had in that city when the bomb fell. That's what convinced me to post it, actually. He and I differ greatly in our politics, and I was a little curious as to what he'd have to say about Hiroshima. I have to admit that I was deeply moved by that third part, and it really makes you think about it. I mean, who here knew that the water was boiling after the blast? I never even thought about that. I also found it interesting at how much more welcoming the people in Hiroshima were. If anyone had an excuse to hate Americans, I would have expected it there.

It certainly showed us the side of Japan you don't see in anime.He did a good thing mentioning Grave of the Fireflies. I highly recommend that people watch it, even if it really is very depressing. Both Reuben and Tina were Japanophiles, for lack of a better phrase. They were, and are, big fans of anime, and were quite enthralled with Japan and the culture. When they first went there a few years ago, it was a major shock. He even had one store clerk refuse to sell him some Magic cards, claiming he didn't have any, despite the fact that the cards he wanted where on the shelf right behind the clerk. Needless to say, living there for 9 months was a lesson in crushed illusions.

Also included on the lower level were copies of the telegrams sent by
the mayor of Hiroshima to world leaders, protesting every time a test
was carried out for nuclear weapons. They read similarly, in that the
mayor and the people of Hiroshima were trying to remind people why the
whole nuclear weapon thing was bad.

I probably shouldn't find amusement in that, but I still do. I mean,
how do you argue with a telegram like that? "This is a bad thing. You
know how I know? Because my city was nuked. Next question?"Wow. I think if I ever got a message like that, I'd immediately and guiltily scrap whatever nuclear weapons program I was doing.

That was an amazing email - I've some very good friends from Japan who moved here a couple years ago, and never really got across to us Americans how incredibly different we are. They are. Whatever are...

The misplaced self-pity in Japan strikes me. Sure the nuking of Hiroshima was tragic, but that is not the only lesson of humanity that needs to be learned from the Pacific War. Like the Germans who repented for their sins, Japan needs to confront its disgusting WWII history and build museums to the Holocaust they perpetrated in East Asia, and not just build museums to commemorate Hiroshima.

Japan needs to confront its disgusting WWII history and build museums to the Holocaust they perpetrated in East Asia, and not just build museums to commemorate Hiroshima.Needless to say, the average Korean doesn't much care for Japan...

Random bump.

The A-bomb attack on Japan was a necessity. Hundreds of thousands of American GIs would've died in a ground invasion of the Home Islands, not to mention millions of Japanese. Read about the battles for Iwo Jima, Saipan, and Okinawa and you'll understand why Truman made his decision.

The A-bomb attack on Japan was a necessity. Hundreds of thousands of American GIs would've died in a ground invasion of the Home Islands, not to mention millions of Japanese. Read about the battles for Iwo Jima, Saipan, and Okinawa and you'll understand why Truman made his decision.
He wasn't talking about the pros or cons of dropping the bomb. He was talking about the very real after effects; the human side of the story. It's the human side that will, hopefully, keep people from using such weapons in the future.

Also, this isn't the place for such a discussion, there's another thread on the pros and cons of using the weapon.

Dropping the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a necessity. It was just about as necessary as firebombing Dresden. Japan was trying to surrender and if not, dropping the bombs somewhere with not a city at the same location, would have been more humane. But the US are by now known for spindoctoring their atrocities and lies to the degree that they must be true because they say so. Dropping a nuclear bomb like this was not necessary.

The misplaced self-pity in Japan strikes me. Sure the nuking of Hiroshima was tragic, but that is not the only lesson of humanity that needs to be learned from the Pacific War. Like the Germans who repented for their sins, Japan needs to confront its disgusting WWII history and build museums to the Holocaust they perpetrated in East Asia, and not just build museums to commemorate Hiroshima.

You kidding? There's STILL upheavels going on about that. some of the most contraversial books in Japan were written about the horrors of the war-and they were contraversial because a LOT of the older citizens wanted to just shut their ears and pretend they didn't happen.

Maybe if you give it more time, things'll change, but...as it stands now? Very, very unlikily.

AHEM:

Also, this isn't the place for such a discussion, there's another thread on the pros and cons of using the weapon.

Sorry :)