Our trip to Hiroshima and the wrong places to bring electronics

It's good to be back home! We were only gone four nights, but traveling around Japan with your 65-year-old mother and two kids can be a lot of work. After seeing the sights in Kyoto, we rode the train to a town called Uji (OO-gee), famous for its green tea and for the beautiful Byodoin Temple, the 900 year old building which appears on the back of the Japanese ten yen coin. We then went on to Nara, a small city that was the capital of Japan hundreds of years ago, and took in the quiet beauty of Nara Park while feeding the deer that overrun the place.

In preparation for our trip, I had made sure to pack all the various electronic devices I'm accustomed to carrying with me: Powerbook, digital camera, cell phone, iPod, Canon Wordtank, PSP, and all associated chargers, of course. I have to admit, I felt a little odd, carrying electronic gadgets while going to see such beautiful and ancient places, such as Miyajima, a shrine established in A.D. 593, built above the beach so that it seems to float when the tide comes in. I wish I could have left all my electronic gadgets at home and gone on my trip with nothing to detract from the ancient beauty of what we were seeing, but I'm just too much a slave to electronics, I guess.

The last day we visited Hiroshima, something that's always a solemn experience for any visitor to Japan. Hiroshima was a bustling commercial port and wartime center when the first atomic bomb used against humans exploded over it at 8:15 on August 6, 1945. The destruction was devastating, killing at least 50,000 people instantly, including factory workers, soldiers, children, and Koreans and Chinese who were made to work in factories in the city. The Peace Park, located at ground zero, is a beautiful place to walk and reflect on what happened, and see the famous symbol of the city, the A-Bomb Dome, a former commercial building that managed to partially survive the bombing. It was important for me to show my children the site, as well as the sobering exhibits in the Peace Museum, which include before-and-after models of the city, glass bottles that had melted in the heat, and a wristwatch that had stopped forever at 8:15. My son asked me many probing questions about what he saw -- why did America and Japan start fighting? What happened to people like him, who were both Japanese and American, living in Japan at the time? I was glad that my mother and children were able to visit this important place with me.

Here are today's "really cool products" that I thought were especially noteworthy. Note: the J-List links below may be for adult products and should probably be considered "not safe for work." To see all the J-List products, check out J-List or the JBOX.com updated products link.

	Shitsujun -- Sumire Ogawa All I can say is, wow. Something about this girl caught my eye when her calendar came out last year. Her face is pretty, sure, but also playful in a sexual way that makes you want to sit there and fantasize about her. Or am I going overboard?
	Japanese Keychain -- Nozomi *Type300* ~ Shinkansen. Ha! I just rode this train almost to the other end of Japan, so it's funny that it would appear on a keychain on the Monday when I get back. Japan's Shinkansen (bullet trains) are really fun to travel on, although trying to entertain two kids for a long trip is always a challenge.
	M ~ Katsura Masakazu. One of the best manga I've ever read was Denei Shojo, aka Video Girl Ai, by Katsura Masakazu. It combined a saucy girl-comes-out-of-the-TV sci-fi plot with real edge-of-your-seat love triangles between interesting characters. But through it all, the characters never really did the nasty, which was always kind of frustrating. Now the artist has done his first really erotic work, and I have to say, I approve. This may be based on I's, I'm not sure -- if it is I'll have to hunt it down and read it.
	Glico Shall We? -- Chocolate Chips & Maccadamian Nuts. Glico's latest snack from Japan is titled "Shall we?" no doubt a reference to Shall We Dance?, a hugely popular Japanese film that was remade by Hollywood (blech). I thought this packag title was worth posting,.
	Japanese Sake Brand Cap ~ Otokoyama. This is such a good idea -- take cool-looking logos from famous sake makers in Japan, and put said logos on hats, "scissors pouches" and so on. I am totally in favor of it, since I love the look of kanji, the way they are both a picture and a descriptive word.
	SIX NINE - Special Love Toy for Adult. There are some darned innovative sex toys in Japan, among them this little ditty, a long snake-like thing filled with soft beads, with a mouth at one end and another type of oriface at the other end. God bless those wacky Japanese!
	Decamelon vol. 10. In the past, Dekamelon (which means "big melon") was an exclusively Race Queen oriented adult mag, with girls dressed as F-1 circuit gals. Now they've done an all-OL issue, which may or may not represent a total change for them. OL means "office lady" and refers to female office workers, who can be pretty sexy when they want to be.

Our expensive trip to Kyoto

Hello from beautiful Kyoto! I took a couple of days off work to take my mother, who is visiting from the U.S., to see Western Japan. While the Kanto region (where Tokyo and Gunma prefecture are) has a lot to see, it really can't hold a cultural candle to the Kyoto area.

Kyoto is one of the most amazing places in all Japan. The former capital of the country for 800 years or so, it's filled with many amazing temples, shrines, pagodas, and ancient streets that have been in use for centuries, despite the fact that Kyoto is also a modern, vibrant city. Yesterday we hit most of the most famous sites, starting with the Golden Pavillion (perhaps the most famous single building in all Japan) and Silver Pavillion (which isn't really silver). We took in the Hall of 33 Bays, a long building containing 1001 intricately carved Buddha statues, each with a unique face (supposedly, you can find one that has your face if you look hard enough) and Ryoanji, a temple with the most famous rock garden in Japan. The cherry blossoms are later than usual this year, so we've missed catching the "season of the sakura" here, however Kiyomizu-dera, a raised temple and pagoda overlooking Kyoto (which was nearly destroyed during Godzilla vs Mothra), was really lit up beautifully when we went there last night. Today we're off to another favorite place of mine, Nara, the first capital of Japan and home the amazing Todaiji, a huge wooden temple that houses the largest Buddha statue in Japan.

I've lived in Japan for thirteen years, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to me, but traveling in Japan sure is expensive. Although we're only to be gone four days, we're spending a small fortune, enough to live like kings in most other parts of the world. My wife is in Hungary right now with a friend who always wanted to visit Budapest, and they're spending a lot less than us, despite flying to the other side of the world. I dearly love Japan, but it can sure cost a lot to see it properly.

Japan's pagodas ("goju no toh") are an amazing part of Japan's architectural history. Usually containing five levels but sometimes more, these multi-tiered buildings on Buddhist temple grounds are fitted together with no nails or cements of any kind, and they're so perfectly balanced that they withstand earthquakes better than any other structure in Japan. We caught a TV show the other day in which scientists built a complete replicas of the pagoda at Horyuji, built in the 7th century, on top of a platform that simulated earthquakes artificially. No matter how they shook the pagoda, they couldn't make the balanced structure sway more than a few degrees from center. And in fact, there's not a single record of a pagoda collapsing in a quake in Japan's history.

And for the pictures and product images today I have...nothing! Yes, thanks to the stupid hotel I'm in now (the Hotel No Internet or something like that), which promises me broadband Internet and a ride on the train, there's something the matter with...oh nevermind. (Apologies to A.A. Milne) I have done my update with my trusty Bluetooth phone, which is packet-based and can get very pricey when it wants to, thus I am going "all text" today. Ever so sorry.