Tokyo Revisited

So I'm afraid to say that the majority of my Tokyo write up will be used for the fourth issue of the Walnut Tree zine, but it only seemed fair that I finished this holiday blog off.

Tokyo is everything you expect it to be. It's incredibly busy and full of cool electronics and littered with advertising and neon signs. That's hardly surprising to most people I'd imagine. We arrived early Saturday evening as Tom had work first thing Saturday and the shinkansen train took us into Shinagawa. The hotel was literally just over the road and it was mental. Having seen the website before I knew that it had rides, cinemas, 3860 rooms and a dolphin show (yes, you read that right) but I didn't imagine it to be on such a scale. The queue just for checking in was 10 people long! Room was pretty standard but did have one of those toilets that warms the seat and spray a quite foreceful jet of water back at you!

After a bit of guidebook reading we headed into Shibuya and Harajuku for a bit of wandering around and people watching and had a pizza at a little restaurant just up from the famous 'busy' crossing. The train was easy enough as the Yamonate line pretty much mirrored the Osaka Loop Line and I could use my JR raill pass on it. Shibuya is my favourite place in Tokyo as its where the youth predominantly hangs out and was therefore lively and exciting - but you never felt uncomfortable or rushed. Harajuku seemed like the Camden town of Tokyo - in fact I think they should twin the two. There were enough "metal" shops to please a whole marching army of My Chemical Romance fans on a protest mission (how topical!).

The rest of the weekend we spent treading the streets and covering as much ground as we possibly could. It was tiring and our feet ached afterwards. It seemed like the natural end to my holiday and the train journey home to Osaka was spent playing DS and listening to Hey Mike!

Good times.

Wednesday - Day 6 - Hiroshima

"And off to my right, the sky split open over the city of Hiroshima"

The above is an extract from a letter sent from a survivor of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima in August 1945, and that event is the exact reason why I caught the train to Hiroshima today. The sight of the first atomic bomb may not sound like the most fascinating of tourists attractions compared to other cities but practically a whole city was wiped out in a few seconds so I figured it was worth finding out more about it. The train journey was fairly easy - caught the local trains to Shin-Osaka station and then a ninety minute shinkansen direct to Hiroshima and sat rocking out to Drive Thru Records bands of the past (the good ones, of course) to fill the time. However getting off the train and finding my way from there was a bit of a nightmare. The station had two main exits and it took me a good ten minutes after leaving the first exit to realise that I'd gone off in completely the wrong direction. The exit I needed to take was disguised as a shopping centre so I bought myself a few drinks for the walk and finally got on my way.

Hiroshima as a city is completely dull. The streets are all very similar, the shops are nothing to write home about and the rivers were wide but lacking in any colour. If it wasn't for the historical sights the other side of town then you'd have no reason, as a tourist, to visit. The first thing I came across was the Municipal baseball stadium (home to the Carps) and despite being a huge place it was in a poor state and again wasn't something really to write home about (yet...I continue to do so). However yards from the stadium is the hypocentre of the "A-Bomb" in the re-named "A Bomb Dome". The atomic bomb exploded almost directly above this building and it's become the symbolic figure for that day in history. As the bomb exploded directly above it the outer walls of the building just survived and the metal dome on the top was almost fully in tact - as the bomb spread from there and the impact wasn't as severe. Today the building still sits in almost the same shape as it was left that day, and although a touch of restoration has taken place the city intends to keep it like that forever. Across the river is a number of monuments dedicated to the different groups that passed away and it's also home to the museum - which for 50 yen (25p) was a bit of a bargain. It showed videos and pictures of the event and charted the decisions taken by the US when deciding where the bomb should be dropped (Hiroshima was on a short list of three and was chosen finally as the sky was clear over the target the day the bomb was to be launched) and like all good places in Japan it housed thousands of japanese school children on this day. To be honest the school children ruined it a bit as they'd swamped round everything worth seeing and you could barely get a look before another load had just pushed in front and started touching everything in sight. That meant I stayed shorter than I had planned and just as I left the rain poured down and I decided that I'd seen all that was worth seeing in Hiroshima so I headed back to Osaka and for a night of wild karaoke (I rocked out to Editors, danced to Hanson and felt like crying to Elton John).

Shinkansen

The Shinkansen is awesome. It's the high speed rail network that runs across Japan and makes our trains looks amateur (although they do a good job at doing that on their own!). It's better organised too as they have a number of reserved and unreserved sections so you don't have to wander down the train trying to find the odd spare seat - and you can also reserve a seat almost right up to when the train pulls away from the station. The seats give more leg room and more space between the person sat next to you - I had much more space than I did on my flight over! Another thing I found fascinating was that the ticket conductor and the train crew would bow everything they walked in and out of a carriage - after a while it seemed a little pointless but it's a nice sentiment nonetheless.