Kobe to Miyajima

The hotel we stayed at last night was surprisingly cheap for the "luxury" that it offered. Mind you, we have been used to staying in youth hostels and cheap minshukus (think japanese motels, without the motor part). This was a full-on hotel, with amenities you usually find in ¥15000/night ($170) hotels. Ours was ¥7200, plus an extra ¥1000 each for a buffet breakfast. The "B" Kobe had everything, including a state-of-the-art Japanese toilet:

I failed to mention in the video that, along with the features I mentioned, the seat is heated and there is a sensor that, when you sit on the toilet, it starts a steady, light spray of air freshener while you are using the toilet.

Update: Checking online, the price of this Washlet, as they are known, is US$2114.86

So, after our Bathroom Adventures, we caught an early morning Shinkansen to Hiroshima, and then a local train to Miyajimaguchi to catch the ferry across to Miyajima Island. After stopping at our next hostel, which had the usual, non-exciting toilets, we explored Miyajima Town, which is know for it's famous torii (gate) that sits out in the ocean, during high tide, and is about 50 feet on land during low tide.

Miyajima Torii

 On Day One, we chose to wander around town, checking out some of the smaller shrines and areas we had not seen on our previous trip. The ever-present, wild but extremely passive Nihonjika (Japanese Deer) were abundant and cute as ever. They are small compared to the American White-Tailed Deer you are used to seeing jumping in front of cars on the highway (or eating out of our bird feeder). There had been reports of them starving after the local government put a ban on tourists feeding them (why they did that, I'm still not sure. They don't beg, they aren't aggressive, and selling "deer food" for ¥100 would be a great way to raise money for the island), but from the ones that I had seen, they were not looking underfed or sick. They were trying to get a seat at a local restaurant, however.

Table for two, please

When the tide receded, we went out to see the famous torii up close. It's pretty impressive.

Japanese tourists put small coins in the barnacles that grow on the gate and make a wish. Some of the coins even manage to stay there after the tide comes in.

Many 1 and 5 Yen coins. Those are some cheap wishes.

Of course, most do not.

Of the many restaurants on the island, most were overpriced tourist traps with mediocre food. Across the street from the station, however, we found a little coffee shop that had good prices and excellent sandwiches. Now, the Japanese will never, ever be known for their sandwiches, mostly because they feel that the more processed and fluffy the bread is, the better. I honestly don't think I have ever seen anything resembling even wheat bread, let alone whole wheat or rye even in a panya (bakery). While this was indeed the case here, they made up for it with flavorful fillings. Ham, egg salad, cheese and wasabi mayonaisse, which I highly recommend for anyone who has never tried it. The lunch came with a small salad, as well, and was under ¥500.

Wonder Bread, eat your heart out

After visiting the Itsukushima Shrine (we were not allowed to take pictures inside), we called it a day and headed back to the new Miyajima Backpackers Hostel to prepare for our climb of Mt. Musen tomorrow morning. Nice, clean, quiet and simple.

Old Friends and Jet Lag

Well, we finally started our vacation! After a restless night of sleep, aided by a wonderful bout of stomach sickness that Sumi so kindly shared with me, we were off to Kobe to visit our former teacher Suzuki-san! The Shinkansen was, as usual, a fast, comfortable and easy ride. 150MPH never felt smoother. Arriving at Shin-Kobe Station, we called Suzuki-san from a payphone, which was an adventure in itself. Eventually, Sumi pushed the correct magical combination of buttons, we met up with Suzuki-san, and were off for a tour of Kobe, but first, food!

Okonomiyaki! Pork, cabbage and other unidentified vegetables with a tangy sauce, made better with mayo!

Suzuki-san found a small restaurant that we never would have known existed (or been brave enough to to open the door to!) had we walked right by it. The big one on the right was all mine. I probably should have gone for the small size, but it was worth it! Umai!

Afterwards, we took an automated train (no conductor, entirely robotic) out to a large, entirely man-made island that contains a number of important buildings, like Kobe University, the Kobe Airport and Kachoen (Flower and Bird Park). Kachoen was very interesting. Many tame birds that were free to fly around you (or land on you) that you would never see anywhere else.

(sorry, Blogger doesn't let me show them in rows, just one at a time)

There was a short bird show which featured Sakura, the Owl flying very low over all of us. She was very well behaved. No pellets, no one got clawed (though I got hit by her wing on one particularly low pass) and she posed for the camera very nicely.

In another room, there were a number of Toucans. Sumi had the "honor" of having them eat out a cup from her hand. Those beaks can sever a finger, but they were very gentle and careful.

The flower part of the park was equally as nice, with many different varieties of flora, including a water lily pond, with some enormous pads that could hold up to 100kg of weight!

After the park, we took a walk around Kobe, a very modern city with great architecture and some really interesting pedestrian streets, including many open air shopping arcades. We walked around for quite a while, which may have been a little boring for Suzuki-san, but we enjoyed very much, visiting a small Chinatown, a boardwalk by the harbor and another small, but popular, Gyoza shop for a dinner of Gyoza and Yakisoba.

The Kobe Opera House

Gyoza(pan-fried dumplings) and Yakisoba(Fried buckwheat noodles with pork and seasoning)

 After an exhausting day (for us), we called it a night at the late. late hour of 8PM (jet lag is worse on the second day, then gets better). This is the second time we've visited Suzuki-san in Kobe, and the second time we visited her right after arriving, so we were zombies and probably not all that interesting. We promise next time we'll visit later in the trip so we'll be awake! Arigatou gozaimasu!

Finally made it

Anyone who has traveled to Asia knows that the travel days (there and back) are the least enjoyable parts of the trip. That said, this was the most painless trip out we've ever had. We flew ANA (All Nippon Airlines) this time because we got the same price from United due to the Earthquake rescheduling that everyone was doing, so the terminal was different than before, which had it's own challenge: Power. When you are as electronic addicted as we are, knowing where you can plug in at an airport is critical, especially when you will be on an airplane for 13 hours with only the batteries you have charged. O'Hare is not as accommodating as Milwaukee on that score.

First one we tried didn't work. The guy next to us already tried it!

This one was already in use....behind a garbage can on the tile floor. We decided to give up on the charging in Chicago.

The flight was great. The food was the best we've ever had on a flight. it was largely empty and quiet. No kids. Long, but very tolerable. The flight attendants were amazing. Always smiling and cheerful and working harder than anyone I saw at United or Delta (or Northwest, God forbid). They would help anyone with anything. I mean, helping an old guy get his shoes on, lifting luggage for women (and these were all fairly petite women themselves), constantly reminding the dumb teenager across the aisle from me to keep his seatbelt out of the aisle(she did this at least six times while I was awake, always with a smile and a please that didn't even sound the least bit sarcastic.) And this is in Economy Class.

Now, I didn't take any pictures of the flight attendants, since that would have looked kinda creepy and they're not on parade, they're working. But I swear they must have to pass a class in flight attendant school on Uniform and Hair. They all looked like they came right out of a flyer for ANA. Hair perfect (and the exact same for all of them) even after working a 13 hour flight, matching purple jackets for seating and aprons for serving (seriously) and "fashionable" neckscarves that were probably started in the 60's and just became part of the Uniform ever since. All sarcasm aside, it was a very pleasant flight, due in large part to their great work ethic.

Got to Tokyo-Narita on time. Changed money, got our rail pass, checked in, went through Japanese security (with our shoes on!) all in just over an hour. Found a nice outlet next to some seats that we shared with a bunch of servicemen en route to their first assignment in Okinawa. And we got to experience our very first earthquake. A 6.something, according to the news. It lasted just long enough for us to realize what it was, but not long enough for us to get scared about it. No one else seemed to care, so we felt pretty calm. After a 4 hour layover, we took the final two hour trip to Fukuoka, hopped on a train, and a ten minute walk later we arrived at our hostel 5 minutes after it closed. Good news is, the guy was walking to the konbini (convenience store) and, well, let's just say I stand out quite a bit in Japan, and it's not my ravishing good looks. He recognized us and let us in, much to our relief that our 24 hours of travel finally came to an end.

I'll have a bit more to say about Fukuoka, but that'll have to wait till after some much needed sleep. Also, sorry about the picture quality. This was all done on my iPad, and the cameras are nothing to write home about.

One more day...

We travel light...

Well, we had a day to get everything in order after an interesting week. Under some very intense and critical supervision, we managed to get everything packed, get all the last minute details ironed out, traveler's checks, TSA-compliant toothpaste and all that.

The Supervisor: "You forgot the catnip"

Life has a funny way of throwing things at you. We found out yesterday afternoon that a wonderful woman who has made a real difference in not just Sumi and my world, but for many others as well, will most likely not be around by the time we come back from Japan. We were able to spend some time with her last night, and though she wasn't able to say anything, we know she was aware we were there with her. We've been faced with yet more misgivings about continuing with our trip plans, this time for reasons much closer to home. Ultimately, we've again decided to go, in large part because she would be furious with me if we canceled the trip because of her situation. Strong, stubborn, fiercely independent. loving, kind, perhaps the most accepting, most generous person I've ever known. An amazing woman in many regards, we will be thinking about her a lot in the days to come, my grandmother. 

Nuclear Boy

OK, we all know that the Japanese have a...different...sense of humor. They also don't have the same problems we have herein the west when talking to their kids about things like, say, pooping. I bring this up because of a wonderful video for adults and kids alike explaining the Fukushima reactor in a parable that we can all understand - Nuclear Boy Has To Poo. Thanks to Ariel for sending me this. This is classic, safe for work, and only 4 minutes long.

The Sky Is Falling and other US Media Myths

FOX News apparently thinks there is a nuclear power plant located in Shibuya, Tokyo, called Shibuya Eggman. Shibuya Eggman is, in fact, a nightclub in Shibuya.

So, there has been a lot of concerns and questions that everyone has been voicing over us going to Japan, and whether we'll turn green and rip our shirts off when we get angry when we come back, etc. This is actually rather understandable, since there is a whole host of news stories and reports from many places all talking about the impending nuclear doom that is going to befall the world. While I am certainly not one to downplay the very real dangers of nuclear fallout, there are a few things I would like to say about all of this:

• News everywhere is filtered and censored depending on what the powers that control that news would like to focus on in their reporting. This is why you have so many conflicting reports coming out, especially revolving around what is "actually" happening in Fukushima. This goes for both ends of the spectrum, though the sensationalist spectrum is one hell of a lot larger than the other side.

"High radiation!!" How much? "We don't know!!" They never wrote how much. The answer? 0.17 millisieverts per hour. How much is that? A normal chest x-ray is 0.2 millisieverts. Good news? No, normal levels are less than 1/10 that. It's a problem. Good headline? Absolutely.

• Western news always feels a need to somehow connect news to us. "There's a nuclear plant melting down in Japan: How does it affect your health? More at 10". We have people on the west coast buying up iodine tablets and causing shortages on medicine that could be sent to the people ACTUALLY LIVING IN THE DISASTER ZONE because of stories they heard on their "trusted" cable news channels. They have even gone so far as to explain how, if everything works out just right, we can see elevated radiation levels IN THE MIDWEST from all of this. Of course, it is a worst case scenario with all the winds lining up just right, the moon in the seventh house and the end result would be levels elevated so slightly that we would receive more radiation from flying to LA, but don't let that ruin a good headline. As a result, people were demanding the US evacuate Japan.

Evacuation! Wow, the US is evacuating Japan!

Oh wait....they're evacuating the area around the damaged plant.

• Still, they are flying people out that want out. The reactor is a problem, and for the people in that area, it is a big problem. For the city of Tokyo, it is an electrical supply problem on a large scale. But taken in context with everything that is happening and that has happened, the 380,000 now homeless people living in shelters with no heat in sub-freezing temperatures with fast dwindling food and water supplies: THAT is the real problem, and the one that should be leading the headlining every day. There have been some CNN human interest stories with the requisite crying elderly person staring at their ruined home, but the focus is being taken away from the many, many people who really ARE suffering right now. It's not an eye-catching story that pundits can tie their political views to, though, so it's taking a back seat in many places.

Refugee shelter. There's 2,400 of them in the Tohoku region, currently.

• All my ranting aside, there has been some very good reporting by NPR and the BBC and even CNN (Anderson Cooper, when he's not filming sobbing former homeowners, has been talking to a lot of people up there), complete with pesky facts and all that. NHK, Japan's public media, has been very good at not sensationalizing, almost to a fault. They don't want to panic the population, because that would help no one, and they don't report anything that hasn't been verified, which can take time. As a result, they are probably a little more conservative in their description of the reactor story than they should be, downplaying some dangers that really are there. Couple that with the Japanese power company's spin being the main source of information (until today, when US drone planes got to get some very good shots of the plant), it's been a tug of war to determine what the real truth is.

There is some good news, however. Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), the owners of the plant, successfully reconnected the electricity and are attempting to get the cooling systems back online. If that happens, much of the disaster could be averted. Then maybe they can all start focusing on the poor people in Tohoku and recovery.

Some good news links:
NHK World News (In English)
The Japan Times
The BBC
 NPR <-- Even THEY have a headline "Radiation: Is US at Risk?"

And the fun begins....

So, here we are, one week away from our next trip to Japan, and The Big One hits Miyagi prefecture. The whole weekend has been spent, rather than packing and planning, scouring Japanese news and emailing friends trying to figure out what things are like on the ground and if we should be canceling the trip. We've decided (for now), to continue on with our trip, though we've altered our flight so we avoid Tokyo completely.

The goal is to leave Chicago on March 21st, visit Fukuoka, Shikoku, Kobe and perhaps a return trip to Miyajima if time and weather permit and return April 4th, most likely craving the biggest cheeseburger we can find. It looks to be a lot of fun, and hopefully there won't be any more excitement between now and then, or we may have to rethink our trip one more time.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for more exciting updates, like "Which Socks Do I Bring?" and the always entertaining "Toiletries: Hair Gel or Hand Grenade? The TSA Files"