A few months ago I realized that I had a four day weekend
coming for one of Korea’s biggest holidays: Chuseok. It’s kind of like Korean Thanksgiving, where
family gathers together and games are played, special treats are eaten, and
thanks are given. Sitting at my desk,
trying to prep for the day, I decided that I didn’t want to stay in Korea for
it. So I pulled up a Chrome window on my
computer, neglecting my reports, and looked for a plane ticket to Osaka. Twenty minutes later I was two minutes late
for class but with a plane ticket in my inbox.
I somehow forgot to mention to most people that I was going,
except for a few coworkers who I knew had recently travelled there. I decided not to spend any time in Osaka, but
rather to take a train to Kyoto and tour around to a few of the cooler temples
in the area, take a day trip to Hiroshima and another to Nara, and just
generally do whatever struck my fancy on a particular day. By the time Chuseok weekend rolled around
(two weekends ago), I had discovered that a good friend and former coworker was
likewise headed to Kyoto for a few days.
Everything was going well.
And then the security line was insanely long at Incheon on
the way to Japan, made infinitely longer by the racist middle-aged Frenchman
who’d decided I was his best friend. I
tried to keep the conversation light and humorous, mentioning Supernatural’s
ideation of hell as infinitely waiting in lines, politely declining to point
out that Jean Paul Sartre’s iteration of hell was other people. The trip didn’t seem to be going quite so
well after all.
However, I made it away from the Frenchman and through
security without incident, and a few short hours later I was in Japan, jumping
on a train from Osaka to Kyoto. Straight
off the train, I went outside to catch a bus to my hostel, and once I found the
proper place to line up, I heaved a sigh of relief and dropped my bag to the
floor. I turned around to look around,
only to discover two full-blown geisha lined up behind me. You know you’re in Japan when…
I really messed up my first day timing-wise, and didn’t get
to see anything in Kyoto because the temples were all closed even though it was
only four in the afternoon. Apparently
temples close at four thirty, which seems a bit on the early side. I found myself wishing I had just left my
bags at the bus station and taken off to explore, without heading to the hostel
first. You know what they say about
hindsight. On my way back to my hostel I
thought I’d go a few stops further to Gion (a.k.a. historical geisha town) and
see if there was anything to see. There
were: some random, amazing, bright red temple-style buildings, and scores of
Geisha. Then it started pouring, so I
sat there in the rain, on the edge of a vermillion temple, trying to wait out
the rain. By the time I gave up on the
idea that it would ever end and just took off, it was past dark and I was
soaked. I stopped in at an Indian
restaurant that was on the way back toward my hostel and had the best garlic
naan of my life, ignoring the guilt for not eating Japanese food whilst in
Japan.
The next day I got up early, intending to hop a train to
Hiroshima, not knowing how to get anywhere once I arrived at Hiroshima
station. When I first woke up though, I
had some trouble lifting my head, which seemed to be weighted to the pillow. I finally realized that I was not ill or
exceedingly exhausted, but merely physically held down. You see, my bed was a mat on the floor next
to another mat, so close together that with blankets on top you couldn’t
distinguish one from the other. Or, you
know, so close that you wake up with a random dude’s hand twisted in your
hair. I untangled myself, made my way to
the train station and got on a train to the allegedly still radioactive
destination of the first atom bomb.
After jumping on a
random streetcar in Hiroshima and getting off at the stop the driver told me
was closest to the museum, I wandered around for a while, looking for signs of
where I was going. I finally started to
see markers pointing me in the right direction, and headed off toward the
museum.
The museum was moving in a lot of regards. I’d heard that it was quite biased, but I
didn’t think so. I mean, yes, I only saw
one mention of Pearl Harbor, but there wasn’t any vicious attack against the
US. From what I could tell, it was a
factual, unflinching, objective as possible representation of the effects of
the bomb. Most moving stories: A mother who forced her daughter to go to
work “so she could help her country” even though her daughter had a
headache. Only part of the girl’s
schoolbag was ever found. Her mother blamed
herself until her own death. A girl who
swam across a river to get home, but was so badly burned that she was only
recognizable by her voice. She died a
few days later because her family didn’t have enough medicine to help her. A mother came into the city to look for her
12 or 13 year-old son. She found an
unrecognizably charred corpse curled up around a lunchbox, which proved to be
her son’s lunchbox. The carefully
prepared lunch consisting of the first harvest of his own garden, which he had
been extremely excited about that morning, was completely charred inside. The item I found most interesting was a
watch, carried by a man who died, its glass face smashed, and its hands stopped
at the exact moment the bomb hit.
The other part I found most intriguing was the children’s
monument. The idea for the monument came
from the classmates of one girl, Sadako Sasaki, who got Leukemia ten years after the blast at the age of twelve. She’d heard that if you made 1,000 paper
cranes, your wish came true. She folded
1,000 tiny cranes in the hospital. She
died anyway. Ever wonder where those
paper cranes you folded in middle/elementary schools went? They’re here.
Maybe I folded that blue one. Or
the purple one there. They even had some
of the cranes made by the girl herself in the museum. The truth was that there were huge numbers of
children in the city at the time, particularly kids ages twelve to
sixteen. These students were used after
school or during free hours as demolition teams, tearing down old houses to
make fire lanes. When the bomb hit there
were thousands of them in the city, working for their country. Almost all of them died within just a few
days of the blast.
The next stop was the dome, one of the only structures to
survive the blast. Inside weeds,
grasses, and flowers were taking over what was once the floor of what was once
a government building. Steel support
beams for the frame of the dome were twisted but remained in what was
recognizably a dome shape. Rocks
crumbled, and the floor of the second story were mere holes. And yet, the walls, the beams, and most of
the basic structure of the building endured.
It stands as a testament to what was once in the park where I walked
between museums and monuments, just below where the bomb detonated. Before, this area, now cleared for tourists,
had been the bustling center of the city.
Now its entire identity was shaped by the bomb, ever building, ever stone,
either left behind by the blast or put there to honor those whose lives had
been forever changed, or whose voices had been forever silenced.
I sat there in the shade at the park, thinking about all the
things I’d just seen, read, and heard.
The weather was beautiful; a perfect blue sky filled with the hot sun and
fluffy white cotton ball clouds. My
favorite kind of weather. I kept
thinking about my Pop-Pop, my mother’s father who fought in WWII. I couldn’t stop. I wished he could be there, that I’d somehow
brought him before he died. He either
would’ve been moved or he would’ve hated it.
I was having trouble contextualizing it, though, trying to really
understand what it all meant. Something
that massively important, something that shaped the world we live in today,
something that will forever be a part of the entire world’s history, is so
colossal that it’s hard to really conceptualize in a mind so unaccustomed to
violence and large scale mortality. I
wonder if anyone can really imagine it who wasn’t there, who hasn’t experienced
something similar.
Afterward, I had a few hours left to kill before my return
train, so I walked to Hiroshima palace. I was quite unimpressed. It was basically just two buildings with a
dirty courtyard in the middle, where people dressed in garish attempts at
historical costume were singing and dancing to J-Pop tunes while fan girls
screamed and foreigners took videos.
Annoyed more than anything else, I moved on to some nearby botanical
gardens. I saw a land crab, carp, and a
few turtles, one of whom came and sat with me.
It was beautiful and relaxing. My
camera battery had died at the castle (of course) so I only had my iPhone but
the camera on it is surprisingly good.
Then I found out I had missed most of the castle, so I went back. I was still unimpressed. The tower was somewhat interesting, but the
coolest part was the ruins from the A-bomb.
There were two foundations, both with small sets of stairs leading up to
the outline of rooms, a stone blueprint built and filled in with grass. A few trees nearby had barked scorched white
by the bomb, which was still noticeable even this many years later. I researched what those ruins had been in
their former life and discovered that they were the headquarters for the
Empire, which had set up camp in Hiroshima during the war. The place was absolutely decimated, though it
was almost a kilometer from the center of the blast. I hadn’t realized that Hiroshima had been
such an important target to the Allies, mostly because I’d never known why. If the Empire’s high command really operated
from here, however, it makes sense as a target.
The next day I decided to go to Nara, a nearby town with
some interesting temples and shrines and a large park filled with deer. The rapid train to Nara was by far the better
choice, but I took the local train to a stop called Inari. Just outside the stop I climbed up the side
of a mountain through hundreds of vermillion Torii gates, the most popular
tourist destination of Kyoto. I’d read
it took thirty minutes to the mountain’s top, but forty minutes in I wasn’t there. When the third map in a row, spaced a quarter
to half a mile apart, had the self-satisfied red “You are here” sticker in the
same halfway spot, I realized that either I wasn’t moving or I was in the
Labyrinth, in which case I had to get out of there before David Bowie’s spandex
junk mulleted me straight to the Bog of Eternal Farts. So, after 40 minutes and 2 miles of hiking, I
threw up my hands, said “Fuck this shit” and went back down. It was still cool even if I didn’t reach the
top.
I went to Nara and went to a Buddhist temple that had three
massive Buddha sculptures. I used to
live in Thailand, so you know when I say a Buddha is big, it’s pretty damn
big. I bought a few Buddhist charms
there, for family and friends. The
temple was gorgeous inside and out, and within walking distance of an amazing
Shinto Shrine. The shrine supposedly was
the final resting place of four Shinto gods.
It was interesting, filled with stone lanterns all the way up the walk
through the woods, and metal ones all the way through the paths of the shrine
itself. Between the temple and the
shrine I stopped to buy deer cookies, thinking I’d feed a few deer. What really happened was I took the cookies
from the woman selling them, took two steps away from her, and was instantly
mobbed by deer who tried to bite my fingers when I couldn’t get the wrapper off
the cookies fast enough. I ripped
through the package and basically just threw cookies into the wind, hoping to
make a getaway. Aside from getting my
stomach bitten (hard enough to bruise), I made it out unscathed.
Having seen what I wanted to see in Nara and with time to
space, I sat on a shady bench in Nara Park with a bottle of water and my
Kindle. A few deer came to check me out
occasionally (one tried to abscond with my garbage bag) but mostly I was
alone. People walked along the street in
front of me (about 50 feet away) or walked through the grass about 30 feet
behind me, but I was alone on the benches.
All of a sudden, I heard a sound like thunder and I looked up. At some unknown cue, all the deer in Nara
Park had started sprinting toward the woods just beyond me. They ran mostly on two paths- one just in
front of me (my bench was on its edge) and at the edge of the grass just behind
me. Mothers and babies, bucks and does,
all sprinting determinedly toward an invisible something that called out
silently to them. I pulled my feet up on
the bench, surrounded, and watched these seemingly docile animals do something
altogether organized yet wild, answering some call of nature that my
domesticated human ears could no longer hear.
Girlish squeals from farther down the road toward the temple announced
the impending arrival of deer too far away to be seen joining in the wild
dash. Every person on the road and in
the park froze and watched these animals be just that- animal. Conversations stopped, conversations in
Japanese, Korean, Spanish, English, and French, and everyone silently watched
the blatant, naked spectacle of nature.
I didn’t see a single person raise or even reach for their camera. The sight was so sudden, so shocking from
such tame creatures, that everything else was forgotten in favor of just seeing
the glorious, thunderous, inexplicable flight of the deer.
That night I met up with Mayte, my friend and former
coworker, and we had dinner and a few drinks.
We started with Japanese food, which was delicious but not filling, and
then moved on to a pub. The next day we
headed to the Golden Pavilion, which is one of the most recognizable sights in
Kyoto. A man who wanted to show off his
wealth covered the top two floors of his home with gold leaf. It was set in a gorgeous lake with great
trees and bushes, and it was beautiful.
After that we jumped on a train and headed out to an area
called Arashimaya, which had an amazing temple, a stunning bridge over a river
that snaked between hills, a bamboo forest bisected by a path, and a hill whose
top was covered in monkeys. As we
adventured we met a guy from California who tagged along through our
sightseeing. I had to leave early to
make the train to the airport and make my flight. Of course, being me, I mistimed it all,
missed the train, missed the next airport bus, and only made it to check-in 32
minutes before my flight, despite the fact that the ticket said 50 minutes prior
or no flight. They still let me on the
flight, THANK GOD, and I made it back to Korea in one piece. All in all it was a fantastic trip.
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