Gentle readers, my apologies for my long absence in my musings on Japan. The months of sleep depravation, perpetual jet lag, and a brutal work schedule caught up with me and humbled me into submission – I simply did not have energy to devote to these dispatches. I write this to you about 6 hours into Continental flight 8 on my way back to the U.S. of A. having completed my time in Japan. I am looking forward to a two-week break my employer generously insisted upon, but am filled with some stories and photo’s perhaps worthy of your time.

During my time in Japan I had little opportunity for sight-seeing in the classical sense. In my final weeks I was determined to fulfill a prophecy of a Buddhist monk, take the ultimate Japan tourist photo and travel to the one place I have wanted to go in Japan but, upon reflection, previously lacked the courage.

As I have previously mentioned the principal belief system in Japan, Shinto-ism, is a pantheistic religion based on the principal that there are many Gods and they are found everywhere. One of the most revered places in Japan is Mount Fuji, or as the Japanese refer to it Fuji-san (Mr. Fuji). Mount Fuji is roughly 80 miles southwest of Tokyo, and on a clear day can be seen from the Shinjuku area of Tokyo. Fuji-san is also clearly visible from the Shinkansen bullet trains that travel between Tokyo and Osaka, and previously the only views I have gotten of Mt. Fuji were from the vantage point of a train traveling at 250 km/hr. I was told if I went to Hakone, I could get a much better view of Mt.Fuji, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Hakone is a small town in the mountains about 90 minutes from Tokyo. As you can see from the packed Hakone station, it is a favorite day trip for the dwellers of that most urban of cities. A special train line, the Odakyu “Romance Car” travels from Shinjuku station through the outskirts of Tokyo and up into the mountains transporting people from the concrete metropolis the movie “Blade Runner” was based on into terrain that is reminiscent of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada’s I remember from my childhood. For those unfamiliar with the Sierra’s, think clean fresh air you can almost taste, lots of pine trees, a bit of snow almost year round hiding in the shadows of the valleys, mountain peaks all around you and beautiful deep blue Alpine lakes.

On my last Sunday in Japan, after visiting Suji’s, my favorite Korean/American breakfast place (incidentally located next to the Russian Embassy), I took the trip out of Tokyo and up the mountain to the little town of Yumoto-Hakone. Upon my arrival I was surprised that Fuji-san was no where in sight. After asking the local tourist information office in Jinglish (the mixture of Japanese and English I have come to speak consisting of Japanese sentence structure and verbs mixed with English nouns), I learned to see the revered Fuji-san required another hour long bus ride to the lake at Moto-Hakone. No one said seeing a God was going to be easy. After an hour on a packed bus, with nary another Gaijin in sight, I arrived at the beautiful village of Moto-Hakone on the shores of Lake Ashi. Looking around, dejected, again no sign of Fuji-san. Determined I started to walk along the lakeshore and sure enough my perseverance was rewarded with a lovely view of a snow capped Mt. Fuji. It was quite breath taking and I spent a good hour, sitting on the concrete docks, staring at the mountain, while anglers up from Tokyo for a day of fishing cast there lines into the lake. Peaceful, beautiful, in the midst of nature, and exactly what I needed to calm my spirit after the travel on my previous day…

Pardon a digression into past history for a moment. Few people, other than Judy, know that during most of the 1980’s I worked on various components of nuclear weapons.  During my years at Honeywell I worked on the fuses used to trigger nuclear explosions, and while at GE my work related to radiation hardened semiconductors used in the guidance and electronic countermeasures (ECM) of the MX (a.k.a. Peackeeper) Missle. The MX was recently decommissioned in favor of the much older Minute Man as it was seen as an extremely destabilizing weapons system, a fact I can attest to - once launched the guidance and ECM system made it nearly unstoppable. So what’s this got to do with Japan? Reconciling guilt over my past work and a place called Hiroshima.

Hiroshima is a coastal city on the far south western tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu and is one of the lesser traveled places in Japan as there is not a lot of commerce there. It is also a LONG 4 hour ride on the Shinkansen with many stops in the larger cities of Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe. I had, however, made myself a promise to make the pilgrimage to Hiroshima and last Friday took an off early (much to the chagrin of my Japanese co-workers – she IS human!), to make the trip. I treated myself to the first class “Green Car” (shown at the picture to the left) which I highly recommend for a 4 hour train trip. I truly enjoyed the vistas as they shifted from city to farmland over and over again as I traveled the length of Japan until I finally arrived at Hiroshima station.

My co-worker and friend Mr. Honda, when he found out I was going to Hiroshima insisted that when I got there I had to find a “Hiroshima Okinomiyaki” restaurant. Okinomiyaki is Japanese junk food, and can likened pizza – except it is made on a grill instead of in an oven, has a VERY thin crust kind of like a crepe, has vegetables instead of tomato sauce, an egg instead of cheese, and seafood instead of pepperoni. Other than these differences, it is still kind of like pizza – at least in the sense that you cut it into wedges and drink copious amounts of beer while eating it. The twist is that in Hiroshima, which is famous for Oysters, they make Oyster Okinomiyaki – and it is VERY good.

To give you a perspective, if you have ever seen the food travel show No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain, that is kind of what I felt like last Friday in Hiroshima. I am the lone Gaijin, in what is clearly a local restaurant, with all these REALLY nice people kicking back after a hard week, drinking beer, eating my Okinmomiyaki, chatting away in Jinglish, and generally having a great time. I think because I made such a fuss over how good the food was the cook and I became buddies.

My schedule the next day was tight as I had a noon train to Kyoto, so I left my hotel in the early morning for the Genbaku Dome – or Atomic Dome. Outside of Hiroshima station there are lots of European style street cars that date from the reconstruction of the city in the 50’s. Although the trip to the main bomb memorial only takes fifteen minutes, I felt transported back 63 years to August 6, 1945. I was really unprepared for the emotional impact as I got off at the tram station, and walked the short distance to the dome which has been carefully preserved in the exact condition it was after the bomb dropped at 8:15 AM that August morning. I think the thing that got me the most was that around the dome, the rubble from the A-Bomb explosion, was kept intact. There were few other people at the dome early in the morning and I was thankful for that as I could not hold back my tears. A nice Japanese man, from Yokohama, who saw me taking photos kindly asked if I wanted to have my picture taken with the dome. We chatted a bit afterward and it wasn’t at all awkward. Another of my co-workers commented about how uncomfortable he was made to feel visiting Pearl Harbor, to the point that he cancelled the visit he really wanted to make to the Arizona memorial. Makes you think.

The dome which pre-war was an exhibition hall, survived the bomb attack through an odd set of circumstances and physics which perhaps Judy could explain. The dome sits on the edge of a river close to a bridge (which can be just seen on the right edge) that crosses a small peninsula and forms a very distinct T as seen from the air. That T was ground zero for the Enola Gay. As the bomb dropped winds pushed it away from the target so that it exploded almost directly above the dome. Domes are strong structures and the where the bomb exploded 600m above it allowed it to survive. Most of the rest of the city 2km in any direction from the dome was, however, completely and utterly destroyed. The dome is now a world historical site and the Japanese have committed to preserve it “for all time” as a reminder to “all humankind”.

Across the river from the Dome is the Hiroshima Peace Park, a memorial to those who died in the blast full of artifacts from the bombing. I visited all of these, but it wasn’t easy – this is not light fare. Many of the exhibits in the museum are pretty hard to see, and one exhibit, a diorama of the bombing, made the children of a couple who were also touring the museum scream in terror. The artifacts which struck me the hardest were the wooden Geta (sandal) of a child who was vaporized by the bomb, but who’s image of her tiny foot burned into the sandal. The other were the steps of a bank building that a woman was sitting on waiting for the bank to open. She was also vaporized but her shadow was burned into the buildings stone steps. Rough stuff, but a testament to what a weapon, 50 times less powerful than what I worked on, has the power to do.

One last story I want to share relates to a young girl name Sadako who survived the bombing. She was, however, soaked in the radioactive black rain that occurred after the bombing. Black rain is caused by the heat and ash from the mushroom cloud warming the atmosphere. For years after the bombing Sadako appeared healthy, until in her early teens she contracted an especially virulent form of cancer linked to being drenched in the black rain. Sadako dealt with her illness by folding origami paper cranes. She folded over a thousand of them, which became progressively smaller as she became more ill. Eventually she became famous for her paper cranes, which are a symbol of hope in Japan. There is a monument to Sadako and her cranes at the peace park. After seeing her memorial (at the left) and learning about the paper cranes I walked into the main memorial for the victims of the bombing. The young Japanese woman who was the receptionist said to me in English “a gift for you”. It was a tiny paper crane. At that point I totally lost it and burst into tears.

After Hiroshima I took the Shinkansen for the relatively quick 90 minute ride up to the ancient Japanese capital city of Kyoto, which is also famous for Geisha. I had been in Kyoto on business in 2000 and had an opportunity to visit its most famous temple – the rock garden at Ryoanji. Ryoanji is a beautiful Buddhist temple nestled in the western mountains that surround Kyoto. Viewing the garden at Ryoanji is the eastern equivalent of going to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. On my first visit after proving to myself that you really can only see 14 of the 15 rocks in the garden from any vantage point (a not so subtle lesson in faith – you know it is there even if you can’t see it) I meditated on the garden at length. I guess a Buddhist monk notice me, because as I departed he said to me “you will return, and when you do, you will be changed”. Well, he was right. I did in fact return, and after 8 years, 7 months of them living in Japan, I am in fact changed.