Miyajima

The Nihon Sankei are the top three most beautiful sites in Japan. I had been to one already, Matsushima (the place with lots of islands), and today I was going to another, Miyajima – a large torii gate standing in the sea around a small island.

Trains run from Hiroshima to the small harbour where you can catch a boat to the island. This did not take a huge amount of timetable detective work on my behalf, or even asking any questions. Instead I was able to simply obey the golden rule of going to major tourist destinations: follow everyone else. It wasn't just the foreign tourists either, that day was a national holiday so the train was full of Japanese families and school trips.

The first time that day when I didn’t follow everyone else was on the boat to the island. It was a beautiful day, I mean too hot but that’s a given in a Japanese Summer. As the boat neared the island the torii gate was in clear view at the front of the boat. However, no one could work out whether the boat was going to the left or right side of the gate and people kept swapping sides to try and get the best view. I stood resolutely on my side of the boat, which turned out to be the wrong side and explains why the following pictures have lots of people in the way.


The island itself is full of touristy shops selling the usual tacky souvenirs and overpriced ice creams. But the shops are in nice wooden buildings, there are stone lanterns and other decorative things that make the island quite beautiful.


Including a huge number of deer.


I don’t know how they got over there, maybe they got blown off course thousands of years ago like in Madagascar. One thing is for certain though, not many are leaving the island – I didn’t see any on the ferry. So the population is just going to grow and grow until they take over the whole island and form their own metropolis.

At first they seem very passive and idyllic making a deer city seem quite a pleasant concept.


But as soon as you sit down with an ice cream you realise you’re surrounded. Tongues abound.


Anyway, this is what the gate looks like up close.


This is perhaps not the best view, the best is to be looking directly through the gate but that exact vantage point is the most crowded on the whole island. And anyway, why do we bother taking pictures of things for which there already exists a million and one photographs. In this world of Google Image Search it would be so easy to pretend that you had been all around the world. You just download the images into your camera and say about everywhere, "it was nice," buffered by comments about the weather and someone getting ill.

Once you are there the next thing to do is to get the cable car up mount Misen. A bus runs from near the torii gate to the cable car station some way up the mountain road.

I found the bus stop just as the bus was leaving but feeling Zen, and full of ice cream, I didn’t chase after it. I sat down in the sunshine and waited patiently for the next one. After some time I realised that I was cooking and went into the shop next to the bus stop and pretended to look at things.

It was really nice in the shop, there were several fans blowing cool air in the direction of the sale items.

I was looking at puzzle boxes; I had bought one previously for myself in Tokyo. They are small boxes decorated with tessellated patterns. By sliding different parts of the edges in a certain sequence you can eventually open the box. The one I have takes seven steps to open but there were larger, more intricate, versions in the shop. A woman came over to me to ask if I wanted any help. She told me more about the boxes, one of the more expensive ones, it was about £300, took 60 steps to open. “60!” I said in shock.
“60,” she repeated impassively.

It was so nice in the shop that I ended up buying something – a puzzle version of the Miyajima torii gate. It’s a nice souvenir even without being a puzzle, and the shade was worth something too.

I returned to my bus stop, I was the only one there. Not having anything else to do I took out my puzzle and started finding the one loose bit by which the rest of the puzzle comes away. I kept at it for about 25 minutes until I had taken the whole thing apart and spread the pieces onto the bus seat. For the next 5 minutes I was trying to put it back together again. I felt genuinely Japanese, sitting at a bus stop working my way through a wooden puzzle with infinite calm. I probably looked like a genuine tourist as only tourists buy and use these things.

While I was puzzling I was faintly aware of other people coming up to the bus stop, looking at the timetable and then walking away. A small family had come and sat next to me for a while but they too had eventually looked at the sign and walked off.

After I emerged back into reality from the puzzle I took a closer look at the sign. It turned out that even though I had been waiting for nearly an hour, the bus would not come for another two.

I started walking up the hill and not far along was a sign pointing to the cable car station and stating, "10 minute walk, but 8 if you run a little."

I soon came to a Japanese garden that led to a small bridge.


Posing happily on the bridge was a young Japanese couple. They were both smiling towards their respective cameras which were balanced precariously on a rock. Considering my photographic skills comparable to that of a rock I offered to take their picture. Barely hearing my question they both replied in unison that no thank you, this was what they wanted.

It sounded like they had been asked this question a thousand times before, which is quite probable really: People readily offer to take your picture for you in Japan, and many other countries.

This couple preferred to get a more idiosyncratic set of holiday snaps with the same pose taken from slightly different parts of a rock at slightly different times. But can you imagine how dull it would be to look through their holiday snaps:
"This is us on a bridge in Miyajima. And this is the same but one inch to the left. Which do you think is best? See Honey, Mum thinks one inch to the left is better too."
"Well I can't make my mind up, let's go back."

Over the bridge and up some steps began the cable car.

The view was amazing and increased proportionally with the altitude. Looking forward you could see the long cable car system disappearing over the mountain.


Looking back and you could see how built up the mainland has become.


At the top there was another cable car, a larger one this time which led to an even higher peak. The young Japanese couple happened to be in the same cable car as me and we smiled at each other.

On the main peak there were many views.


But still this was not the top. The official peak of the mountain was another half an hour walk and scores 530 in altitude points (metres).

There were quite a lot of monkeys up in the mountains, and some deer too – building their empire I presume.


The walk up to the top was a little crowded and I kept overtaking people. There were some English speaking people there and they suddenly stopped in front of me to point out a snake in the shrubs at the edge of the path. Everyone who understood stopped to look at it, except for me, I just slid by like an opportunist.

Up and up, the path got narrower and rockier. Every now and then a small stall selling drinks would appear as if randomly around the bend. I think the price increased the further up you went – would make sense, market forces and all that.

At the top was a sort of restaurant with an open air flat roof – definitely the highest point on the island.

The top of the mountain looked like this.


And the ground looked like this.



I became slightly obsessed with an ashtray that I thought probably had one of the best views of all the ashtrays on the planet. Very hard to get the right thing in focus though.


On the way back down a deer was sniffing around two Caucasian men sitting on a rock. They had beer which they poured into their hand and were feeding to the deer. The men were laughing sadistically while the deer seemed to become instantly hooked and, ingeniously, tried to cut out the middle men and go for the beer can itself.

It can’t be good to feed animals alcohol; it’s just going to make them sick and ruin their football career. Having said that I’m not much of a prude because I can imagine that a TV show about drunk animals could be quite funny. Owls flying into trees, cats not landing on all fours, hamsters tripping up in their hamster wheels, octopi getting into tangled and dolphins just being dolphins.

Here is the deer before it met the ne’er-do-wells.


What an odd phrase ne’er-do-wells is.

I was pleased with this picture: a tiny yacht sailing toward a tiny island.


On the way down I decided to walk rather than take the cable car. One of the main walking routes down the mountain starts near the cable car and follows a stream flowing down the mountain.

The whole walk was shaded under the trees and was idyllic in the extreme. I was feeling really happy again and stopped to sit on a bench and admire the scene.

A large fly landed on my leg. In my happy state I didn’t brush it off but did become suspicious when it settled. “Do you mean me harm?” I asked it. It turned to face me and I got a painful sting in my leg.

It was a horse fly, or some other bastard of nature.

I shook it off and started walking again when I heard a buzzing. The buzzing stopped and I felt something on my arm. The fly had settled on my wrist ready to strike again. I did one of those tantrum movements people do when there’s a bug flying around. But the fly came back, landed on my arm again entirely unperturbed.

I started to pick up my pace to shake off the thing. I was listening intently for its sound, I couldn’t hear it but then I felt something on my back. It wasn’t paranoia either, the damn thing was there, I felt it fly away as I brushed my hand over my Tshirt.

There was no shaking it off and I resorted to running down the mountain as fast as I could to shake it off. My face turned red and I was in danger of tripping over. I slowed down but buzzzzz, the horse fly was back, apparently able to fly as fast as I could run – which is rather depressing.

I ran and ran and ran and ran along the path. Leaping from soil to stone to tree branch, half falling half sprinting down the mountain. I was determined to get away from the horse fly. I slowed again and STILL it was there. I was swearing at it by now, there was no one else around so I gave it the full force of my vocabulary.

When I emerged through the trees at the foot of the mountain my face was bright red and my Tshirt was drenched in sweat. On the flat again, walking through nicely kept Japanese gardens the fly eventually let me go and I was safe.

I stopped to buy myself a drink and try to cool down before I went anywhere with people.

The tide had gone out by this time and the torii gate now looked like this.


You can safely walk on the mud and go right up to the gate to take pictures.


I bought a hat from a shop to protect myself for the sun during my epic cycle ride the next day. Although I liked the hat I suspected it was for elderly women and was always a bit reluctant to wear it in public.

Later on when I was back in my hotel and telling Yoko the horrors of the fly saga she said, “I’m not surprised; you use too much gel in your hair, it attracts them.” This was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted sympathy not advice, especially not advice that makes it out to be my own fault.

Bastard fly.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

When in Hiroshima it’s not easy to forget about what the city is most famous for. There are plaques on many streets displaying how many people died, or some other fact relating to that day: August 6th 1945.

In fact the location the atomic bomb actually exploded has its own bus and tram stop called the A-Bomb Dome.


Here stands the old Industrial Promotional Hall which, remarkably, survived the blast and remains today. The roof of the building has a dome shape and, though just a skeleton of its former self, its stark appearance amongst the gleaming modernity makes for a powerful reminder.

One of the walls where a window used to be.


Just next to the A-Bomb dome is a memorial featuring doves roosting on different levels.


Further on is the Children’s Peace Memorial featuring inspired by Sadako Saski, a girl who developed leukaemia as result of the bombing.


There is a belief in Japan that if you make 1000 origami paper cranes then you will get one wish. Sadako set about making the cranes but died before she had finished 1000. Her classmates made the rest in her honour and a memorial shows her holding a huge crane above her head. Long colourful strings of paper cranes hang around the memorial, donated by people all over the country.

The A-Bomb Museum is the largest building on the site and charges only 50 yen for admission, such a small amount that it may as well be free. When you first enter the museum you come to a large round room that explains the events leading up to the dropping of the bomb.

In the middle of the room is a model of what Hiroshima looked like after the explosion.


This particular sign really puts things into perspective.


In a way this is the only part of Hiroshima that stills looks the same. There is great debate as to whether the A-Bomb dome should be left standing as a morbid monument, or whether it should be taken down so that the city can move on entirely.


A large video screen showed black and white newsreel of the Enola Gay taking off, the bomb falling and the vast mushroom cloud bursting into the sky.

Later in the museum is a system of rooms featuring actual artefacts from the explosion. Melted coins and twisted metal signs give an indication of how monstrously powerful the force of the explosion was. People were turned to ashes instantly; one photograph showed a wall with a black smudge across it, a smudge that used to be a person.

Every turn gave another story of someone who had been lost; another artefact that had belonged to them and another reminder that it wasn’t just a country that was bombed, it was the people.

Further still into the museum and the displays talked of atomic bombs themselves, how weapons have been developed now that are far more powerful than the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima. Einstein and Bertrand Russell are presented with their Russell-Einstein manifesto on Nuclear disarmament. There are tables showing how huge numbers of nuclear tests are still carried out every year, especially by America and Russia.

There is one important document and one fact that the museum does like to remind you of. Japan was so weak by the end of the war that one official (I forget who) wrote that he was concerned the country was in such a state already that the bomb would not be allowed to show off its full power. Other documents claimed that so much money had gone into developing atomic weapons that really they had to be demonstrated in order to justify their expense. I’ve heard some foreigners complain that this point is overemphasised, but in balance I think the museum is focused on education into the horrors of atomic weapons rather than historical blame.

The most moving part of the museum for me was the survivors’ testimonies. A corridor with video screens and wooden benches allows you to sit and choose from about 20 different videos. There is a similar display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington and both really excellent in getting over the reality of what happened.

One man described how he was in school when they heard the plane fly over, then there was the most intense flash of light like lightning. A huge explosion was heard and the roof caved in. Although he was very close to the blast point he survived, coming to around his dead and dying classmates.

What many of the survivors mention are the dying people they came across, people who were severely burnt and unable to walk. These people all asked for water, but the advice everyone had been given was not to give burn victims water because it would kill them. Some survivors had tears in their eyes when they thought back to the agony they had witnessed and how they had not been able to help these people in their dying torment. Some of the survivors had given water, and then carried the guilt of seeing those who drank fading away before them.

Next to the museum is the Peace Memorial Hall which catalogues the names, photographs and memoirs of all the atomic bomb victims. Computer screens allow you to look through a massive library of information. The building itself has a unique design and feels very sombre. A fountain stands in the centre to symbolically answer the needs of all the dying who’d begged for water those 60 years ago.

The walls of the Peace Memorial Hall display a vast mural of Hiroshima with one tile for each of the victims of the bomb.


Step outside Peace Memorial Park and you find yourself on a busy main road that could belong to any city in Japan. Further down the road you’ll find passages leading into an underground shopping complex, perfect for sheltering from the heat. Young families try to control their tearaway children, teenagers yell into their phones, babies cry in prams, the elderly walk so slowly they get in everybody’s way, mobiles ring, music blares, people shout…

and you appreciate it all just one little bit more.

To Hiroshima

I love trams.

I never expected to find trams in Japan, they always seem to me like the kind of transport system that doesn’t exist outside of Northern England.

But there’s something simple about them, something harmless where you know you won’t end up in the middle of nowhere with a fine for sitting in first class. Instead it seems more likely that you might inadvertently get off in the 1920s and be stuck for something to do in the interim.

So when I got off my coach from Tottori to Hiroshima and found myself far away from my hotel I just leapt onto the nearest tram and it took me where I needed to be. Ok it wasn’t quite that easy, I did have to wait for it to stop.

I was staying in Hotel Yamato near JR Hiroshima station. I recommend it for the two men in reception who both seemed to be in their sixties and were always very polite and welcoming.

My room wasn’t anything spectacular but the view was. It looked out onto the back of the surrounding buildings; it was bare walls, air conditioning vents and pigeons. There were lots of ramshackle nests built on tiny ledges. It was a real no man’s land between high rise constructions; there were no doors, no access from the street. My window seemed to be the only opening into this secret place and the pigeons looked at me with such settled content that I realised that I was the one on the outside, they were looking through a window at me.

I was badly in need of somewhere to do my laundry. The men at the hotel desk nodded to each other that no, there were no washing machines in the hotel. But there was a laundrette nearby, but quite far away.

I got a more specific answer from the tourist information office in JR Hiroshima Station. It was great to be living so close to them, I could have gone every 30 minutes with a different query: “Why was there a manga about the son of Hitler in my hotel room? Why did the woman in Timely laugh at me? Was it really an act of God to sit me next to a British Missionary on the Shinkansen, or is there a ticketing conspiracy?

I filled my rucksack with dirty washing, got an ample supply of 100 yen coins and made my way to the laundrette. It was down a main street which ran parallel to one of the many rivers which cross Hiroshima.

When guidebooks talk about going off the beaten track and really exploring a country I think they could include this laundrette. Japan is a civilised and clean country but this laundrette was a metal shack with dirt on the floor, rows of rusting machines, a beaten old laundry powder dispenser and an old man in an ancient hat leaning against one of the machines and staring into space.

I tried not to look at the old man. I had a premonition of his starting a conversation with me in colloquial Japanese through missing teeth. I wouldn’t be able to understand him, but knowing me I’d just nod politely through a 40 minute spin cycle and an uncomfortable hour in the drier.

My clothes spinning and my rucksack stowed on a shelf I went back outside. Opposite the laundrette was a large 6 floor Bic Camera selling everything from food processors to radio toilet seats. Outside the entrance a pretty girl was giving out fans – this is a common marketing ploy in Japan, you can fit a lot of information on a plastic fan and in Summer you can be certain people will take them. And employing a pretty girl to give out advertising, well, that’s a marketing ploy everywhere.

I wasted time for two hours and then returned to my laundry. A very similar but different man was standing in a very similar but different pose to the earlier version. I took my laundry and left the laundrette for time to continue to consume: men and machines aging together in a dirty shack built to make things clean, a plastic fan lying on a dusty shelf that was once in the hands of a pretty girl across the street.

I Love You was the name of the Internet Café nearest my hotel. It was on the sixth floor of a bookshop and game store but after going up various flights of stairs and in lifts I discovered that the only means to get to this Internet Café was via special lifts at street level. Once inside I asked in Japanese about the different rates, the guy at the desk replied in English, but bad English.

We continued this language ping pong for some time, neither of us wanting to back down to our own language – for that would make him the loser.

Well anyway, I never was quite sure what the price was but the more times you went the more stickers you acquired – which I could only assume led to some sort of incredible prize like a knighthood.

I wonder if dentists these days still give out stickers. I wonder why orthodontists don’t do it - they should be legally required to. The experience of getting a brace is so traumatic that a sticker is the least they could do to provide some compensation. Ideally, the sticker should look like a beautiful set of teeth, and be the right size to stick over your brace and hide the Frankensteinian mesh.

With these thoughts in mind I returned to my hotel, said goodnight to the pigeons and retired.

That Evening

Back in my hotel room something on my bookcase caught my eye. The corner of a magazine was poking out from under some larger books, there was a picture of a high school girl but she looked strangely… not like a high school girl. I pulled the magazine out. The cover had six high school girls all looking rather sheepish.

“OK,” I thought, “this is either a brochure for school uniforms or…” I opened it up. Naked girls filled pages. Explicit but censored in that way Japan insists on – no pubic hair ever: the result of people sitting in warehouses spending their unhappy lives airbrushing it out.

I looked at the cover again, it was called Mekiru, and then in English it said, “Make it love.” I checked the date, it was August 2008, that was next month! As in this was the newest edition, not some mangy old magazine a previous guest had left years ago, this was up to the minute cutting edge pornography.

And the strangest thing was that I was pretty sure it hadn’t been there the day before. It was lying under the hotel information booklet – which I had looked through when I arrived.

This was very odd. Had the kindly old cleaner from this morning left me a present? Had she thought, “Oh he’s a young man all alone, I’ll get him something to keep him going.” Or maybe it was all part of the service - perhaps there is a rule among Japanese hoteliers: If you cannot provide Pay For View pornography on the television then you must provide it in literature.

I looked through the stack of magazines and comics on the shelf wondering if there were any more surprises. A comic called, SON OF HITLER, provided a resounding YES to that query.

“What?” I said to Japan.

Yes, it was really SON OF HITLER. See.


I had a flick through, well you would wouldn’t you. It was not pro Nazi stuff, but seemed to be about a young Nazi who was either metaphorically, or really, the son of Hitler. He was getting up to some unpleasant stuff, branding swastikas on captive women chained to his wall, that kind of thing.


The copy I was holding was printed in 1962, it was old, maybe even an antique.

I put it back in its place, next to the pornmag.

And not a Gideon Bible in sight.

Day in Tottori

I came to Tottori to see the only desert in Japan, but that is an exaggeration by the tourist board. The desert is really just some big sand dunes on a beach with some imported camels to star in people’s holiday snaps.

However, before setting out I wanted to do some laundry. On the map of the hotel was a little space marked “Coin Laundry” and it’s not for washing coins. The confusingly divided each floor in two without explaining where they joined up.

I followed the map but seemed to cross an invisible threshold from hotel into house. There were ornaments and trinkets, piles of laundry on the floor. I found a washer, and a drier, but neither had any kind of coin slot, just towels and men’s shirts. I crept out again feeling like an accidental intruder.

It was baking outside at around 33 degrees and there I was making my way to a desert.

The bus from Tottori station to the sand dunes is 20 minutes of glorious air-conditioning before you get out, climb some steps and the view opens up to this


Sand and the bluest sea I had seen for a long a time. This might sound like just a beach but the difference is the sand dunes: they are enormous, like hills.


Everyone was climbing the largest dune and I followed suit.

The view was stunning. The sea was calm like an enormous mirror lying flat across the earth and. A small island poked out from the sea to make the view even more idyllic.


A man was sitting under a blue and white striped parasol. He was alone among sea and sand, the rest of us were just passing through.


I thought he would be meditating or composing Haiku but no, he was listening to horse racing on a radio.


The sand dunes feature strange horizontal lines made by the wind.


On the way back to the road a Japanese woman walking in the opposite direction called me over. “Sumimasen,” I forget what she said next because I didn’t understand a word. She pointed at the sand. Ahh, I twigged. “This pattern?” I asked pointing to the lines in the sand. She nodded. “Over there, there are lots,” I tried to say. She bowed and dutifully walked in the direction I had pointed.

I was pretty surprised that she would even think I could understand such a specific question, I mean I was expecting her to ask about toilets, not something that I’d find hard to describe in my own language. Maybe I looked Japanese to her from a distance; I must have got the walk right.

There was a sand museum, and doesn’t that sound boring. They should have called it, “The Giant Sand Reconstructions of Famous Places Museum” but I guess the sign would have been too expensive.

The ticket was just 300 yen (£1.50) which is pretty cheap, even though it is just sand.


It was a collection of about 13 sand recreations of ancient world heritage sights, mostly from Asia and the Middle East. It was pretty good and I only partly wanted to jump over the rope and destroy the Great Wall of China like a giant in shorts.


After the museum I got the bus back to Tottori and had a shower at my hotel. This was my usual habit, then I would fall asleep and wake up too late to do anything else. This happened today too. By the time I got out again at 4:50PM the gardens and French Villa were shut and they were all I wanted to see.

There is a 100yen loop bus which drives around Tottori, a red line one and a blue. I got on a red one for no particular reason. I was looking through the Tottori information booklet, which reads more like a Geography textbook: “Tottori is the 10th biggest agricultural centre in the whole San’in region and eighth biggest industrial…” yawn. But it did mention a park near a forest with no closing time so I got off at that stop.

It was a beautiful spot with lakes of gaping carp and well trodden paths endlessly curving into the forest where herds of joggers run wild and free. Herd is the wrong word for joggers; they are naturally solitary creatures. Sure they all get together for a marathon but after 10 minutes they’re trying to get away from each other. The joggers in the park were from a school sports team with their coach.

So there was me, joggers and then retired people. This latter group kept walking in the opposite direction and saying hello, which is something I’m not used to. In the small village I live in back home people do the same, and it freaks me out there too. I know people are just being friendly but sometimes they sound like they’re trying to prove something, like “I’ve got a dog and you haven’t, that’s why I’m so much better than you.”

On my walk I took time to think about my trip so far: 18 days old. I had to admit that I was getting lonely and exhausted by moving around so much. Thoughts of home made me excited to be returning so soon, but at the same time miserable that it was all ending. After all the reunions are over, my rucksack empty and the pictures shown I can imagine myself sitting, looking sadly at the walls I left for adventure a year and a half earlier.

Travelling, I decided, is just an invitation for things to miss. It may be places or people, or the things you lost on the way.

Yet hey, this is life and it is not without effort. It took effort to get here and find those things to miss. It will take a lot of effort to restart my old life and make it seem fresh again. But in the interim between Japan and the rest I will squeeze all of the names of the places and people I have met into one breath – a sigh.

This was what I thought whilst walking through the forests of Tottori on the 18th day of my journey. Only lost men do not look ahead.