Man, okay. So I’m back from Japan. I’ve been back from Japan for about five days now, trying to figure out the best way to present all of the goddamn pictures I took. Because, um. I took a LOT. (I filled my memory card, um, two and a half times.) So I’ve decided I’m going to break this into three posts, and each of those is going to have a jillion links to my Flickr, where I’ve organized the photos a little better.

So.

I got into Osaka airport on Wednesday the 6th, where I. . .was promptly weirded out by not being able to understand the people or read the squigglies. I mean, my Korean is pretty bad, but I can read all of the letters and say/understand basic one-subject one-object sentences. It was surprisingly disorienting being in an Asian country, both not being able to understand people and having to suppress my natural instinct to speak Korean to people.

But despite not being able to read or speak, I met up with Jessica (Jessica from neuro – Chris, I believe you know her from Shad?) eventually. And she was delightful, and took me for tasty ramen and tasty dumplings and helped translate when I bought my train ticket for Thursday, when I was going to go to Hiroshima.

I took this train:

And it was AWESOME, OH MY GOD. Like, the train was almost as good as the city. GUYS IT GOES 285 KM/HR. IT IS WHITE AND SHINY. IT IS THE BEST TRAIN I HAVE EVER TAKEN EVER AND I WANT TO GO BACK TO JAPAN AND RIDE IT MORE PLACES. Um. Also, Hiroshima was neat?

Anyway. I got to Hiroshima, and hopped on the streetcar to the big “A-Bomb Dome” park. (There are a lot of really nice parks in Hiroshima, which is very refreshing until you realize that. . .there is a reason they have all that extra space with no buildings on it right in the middle of town.) The A-Bomb Dome is, well – it’s this:

Basically, when the bomb exploded, it naturally obliterated a lot of buildings into so much radioactive gravel. But because the bomb exploded almost directly above this building (which used to be this fancy-pants government office), most of the walls stayed intact, including the big decorative dome at the top of the building. They’ve decided to save this building as a monument/guilt trip dedicated to the explosion, which is really. . .like, it’s cool. Actually seeing the thing up close was a really awesome experience. Also, there are photos from more angles here.

As was this:

It’s a memorial devoted to the “children killed in the explosion” but primarily put up because of the story of Sadako Sasaki. And because it was in memory of Sadako, there are cranes. Holy fuck, are there cranes.

It was very cool. And then I wandered around and saw some museums and had some very serious thoughts on atomic deproliferation and war in general, but this post is already getting kind of long, so: after the park, I went to a castle. Let’s focus on that, guys.

The moat around the castle, and a little bit of the walls.

The castle was, naturally, blasted to rubble in the explosion. (They may have mentioned it a few times) But they rebuilt it!

And it’s gorgeous. I. . .have a LOT more photos of Hiroshima, and I want to share all of them, but this post is getting dangerously long already. So instead, I’m going to link you all to my Hiroshima Set on Flickr, and hope you look at them there. There are a lot that I didn’t include. And tomorrow, I’ll post about Day Two of my trip: going to Nara!

(PS. Jenn. I found a tree that I’m 80% sure has cancer. It’s here.)