Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Spirited Away

Near the end of July my mom came to visit us in Japan. We had a wonderful three weeks. It was great to get a hug and to catch up on hours of missed conversation. She made friends with our students and with the neighbors. Mom came with us to pottery and proved to be an excellent pottery student. Her first attempts on the wheel put our months of learning to shame. Other highlights of her trip include making Japanese paper, going to the hot springs (despite the hot weather), bargain shopping, and best of all polishing off an entire season of “Gilmore Girls” with mounds of popcorn.

The last day of Mom’s trip was the beginning of our own vacation. About the time her flight home was taking off, Daniel and I were forcing our aching muscles off the overnight bus from Nagoya to Hiroshima. After throwing our backpacks in a coin locker we were off to explore the city. At 8:15am on August 6th 1945 the world’s first atomic bomb exploded about 200 meters above the city and incinerated everything within a two kilometer radius and destroyed far more. At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial museum we were able to see exhibits and artifacts from the tragic history of the city. Now Hiroshima is unique among many Japanese cities for its large park areas and modern city centre.

The next day we went to Miajima Shrine a sixty minute tram ride and six minute ferry ride away from Hiroshima. Miajima shrine is considered one of the three most beautiful sights in Japan (the other two being the Golden temple in Kyoto and Mt. Fuji). The temple itself is over 1300 years old and is built on stilts in the water. The tide flows in and out under the Shrine, its bridges and its arches. It was obviously designed by someone who loves the water because where in most shrines there would be gardens, in Miajima there is the ocean. This temple is also the grand setting for fireworks and theatre to mark celebrations in the Japanese calendar.

The last stop on our trip was an overnight excursion to the Island of Shikoku which is one of the three main Islands making up the body of Japan. There we made a pilgrimage to Dōgō Onsen. Have you ever seen the Japanese animated movie Spirited Away? If not we highly recommend it. Spirited Away is on both of our top-five-favorite movies list. In this movie a young girl finds herself in a magical world where she must work in a Bath House to save herself and her family. The Dōgō Onsen where we visited was the inspiration for the bath house in this movie. It was wonderful! We got bathrobes to explore the building in and we were fed tea and cookies after our trip to the hot spring baths.

After some bad instructions to the Youth Hostel we made a wrong turn and were ourselves spirited away to a strange temple and an ascending underground cave that brought us up to even stranger overgrown temples and an abandoned shrine to buffaloes…

Now we are facing the first aching week back to work after vacation. Though it is far less exciting than a buffalo shrine we are glad to be back home.

1 Comments:

Blogger jackattack said...

Great to hear from you guys! I love the quality of your reflections. I think I remember watching Spirited Away with you in England!

11:58 AM  

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