Leaving Japan

Convenience-store sushi, Hello Kitty chopsticks, sky-scraping mountains and funny-smelling grocery stores are just some of the peculiarities I will always recall when I think of Japan. But most importantly, I will remember the friends and family who helped me adjust and sought companionship in a foreigner as much as I did in them.

In all, they range from age 2 to 70-something. Among them are a musician, an aspiring writer and a man whose father died in the atomic bomb blast. Some are still trying to define themselves. All of them are childish in some way, the way that brings people from across the world together in a single moment.

I don't know when I'll be back, but when I am, I'll be looking these people up.




Kohei, one of the best friends I've ever had, who gets really excited about pants on sale.




Mika, the closest thing to a rebel I could find, and Hanae, a care-free spirit.




Jeannie, Jenni and Diane, three Wake Forest students who shared the joys and tribulations of living with a Japanese family just as I did.




Yuta, my humble translator for stories and a self-proclaimed master of baseball chants.




Ami, soft spoken and inquisitive, and Emi, not soft spoken at all.




Hisae, the 31-year-old student who looks as if she's 18.




Jina, the only half-Japanese, half-Iraqi person I'll ever meet, and Ayumi, a lover of procrastination.




Andrew and Korin, who had never tried takoyaki (fried octopus balls) until that day.




Nakamurasan, whom I only knew for a day in Hiroshima.


And, of course, all of the Hiraos, who cared for me, taught me and, most importantly, included me. They are my Japanese family.

3 Japanese Friends and I Fly Down a Mountain

That's going to be one of my final memories of Japan. Take that, American Disney World.

Actually, Tokyo Disneyland isn't that much different from its English (and I presume French and Chinese) sister parks. But there are discrepancies:

1. Mickey ears. I know it's popular to buy the headbands with Mickey Mouse's ears at pretty much every Disney park, but in Japan, it's required. There might have been an actual written rule about it in the ticket I was given that I couldn't read. Even the boys have to buy the acccesories, which are modeled after many popular characters.

Also, most of the people at the park were junior-high and high school students, and although there were some very little kids with their families, the rides were dominated by teenagers and many in their 20s pretending (wishing?) that they were 6 years old.

2. Popcorn flavors. I counted at least four popcorn stands selling the snack coated with caramel, honey, salt and curry. That's right, curry. But the honey stand was cutest, because Winnie the Pooh was stirring the ... popcorn maker?

3. Historical inaccuracies. I guess because of Disney's global legal laws, every park employee has to dress in the costume of their themed area. Naturally, this is hilarious in the Far East, which has no history of Japanese pirates ...

Japanese safari hunters ...

or Japanese train conductors from the Wild West.

But out of all of the parks, Japan is probably the only one qualified to beam in Japanese people from the future. "Tomorrowland" probably should have been called "Yesterdaytown." Look how suspiciously comfortable these Japanese spacewalkers are!

The last time I was at Disney World, I was 12 years old and too terrified to ride Space Mountain, the speedy roller coaster in a dark room with thousands of tiny starlights fluttering around so they look like fireflies that just overdosed on Adderall. And I was probably too short to step foot on Thunder Mountain, the railroad coaster that barges through mountains like that Emily Dickinson poem I don't really like. I did ride Splash Mountain, although I'm still looking for my stomach that popped out during the adventure (see first picture).

This time, I was fearless. But I couldn't say the same for one of my friends who will remain nameless (Kohei), who emitted a stream of swear words directed at either Thunder Mountain itself or nobody in particular, apparently scared out of his mind on his first real roller coaster ride.

Equally amusing was the borderline racist safari cruise and boatride through "It's a Small World," which I apparently overlooked 10 years ago in my prebuscent state of mind.

In case you're wondering: Yes, we traversed through Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blast. And yes, I had the highest score (Level 3, with 48,900 points for zapping Emperor Zurg's alien minions.) Woody would have been proud of me.

Tokyo Disneyland is a place where "magic and dreams come true," but more importantly, it's a fantasy-world oasis just outside the city limits where thousands of young and mostly adult Japanese people visit every day regardless of the economy to escape the pressures of their culture. In Disneyland, nothing matters.

And when night falls, the dream really comes true, particularly when a neon-float parade (with "more than 1 million lights") romps around Mickey's castle and electrifies the dark sky. At least 5,000 visitors sat by the ropes for hours just to be in the front row.

But if you ask me, the real magic is where it always was, at the Magic Kingdom. Never mind that Disneyland is like a drug for overstressed Japanese people, or a completely superficial way to fall into a dreamscape for an entire day and ignore all the problems of the outside world.

Mickey is smiling as big as ever, and that's all that matters.

The Old Meets the Very Old

There's nothing modern about Nikko, nothing commercialized, hyper-jolted or dazzled in neon squiggly.

And why should there be? Nikko, a three-hour drive from the outskirts of Tokyo, houses some of Japan's oldest temples and shrines, beautifully preserved forestry and natural treasures high up in the mountains. Some of the buildings -- many of which are covered in gold and statues of dragons and other animals -- date back to the eighth century.

One of the first sites at the ancient city is an old Japanese garden, and although it's very small, its charm is its simplicity.

Inside one cavernous temple were three large, golden buddhas. (No pictures were allowed, so my pictures are a little off-kilter.) Another enormous room was built so that if a traditional wood-block instrument is struck in the middle, its sound bounces off all of the walls for about 10 seconds. The ceiling was painted with a blue-and-white slithering dragon.

Without much explanation was an old stable/shrine adorned with monkey scultpures, and it housed the "sacred horse," a sign of good will from New Zealand, for reasons I don't know. The shining-white mare makes its appearance only four hours each day, but all it really does is eat and stare.

The rest of Nikko farther up the mountain is the stuff of postcards. One of the first places we passed was a bare open field that was the site of a samurai war in the Edo period.

After that is a spacious lake enclosed by more ominous mountains.

After the long journey through the historic trail, the reward is Kegan Falls, a mystical waterfall whose essence trickles down throughout the mountain. In a more macabre light, it's actually a popular location for suicides, which are heavily rampant in Japan because of a variety of reasons, like overwork, stress and depression.

But, the waterfall was gorgeous!

The day trip was calming, and kind of reminded me of the previous weekend, when I trekked through the raw nature of Miyajima island in Hiroshima. The seasonal ways of Japan make it so that there are two absolutely ideal times of the year: now, during the cherry-blossom spring weeks, and in the first few weeks of autumn, before it gets cold again.

But one thing I've missed terribly is baseball. I've been catching up with MLB news as much as I can, although it's impossible to get any highlights aside from Ichiro and Daisuke over here. And that made it all the more worthwhile to attend the Hanshin Tigers vs. Yokohama Bay Stars game last week.

In Japanese baseball -- if you can call it that -- the home and visiting teams sit on opposite sides of the field and take turns cheering their players on when they're at the plate. Nobody claps, but they instead bang together ThunderStix in choreographed rhythms while singing the teams' songs.

The Tigers, one of the better teams this year, trounced the Bay Stars despite being the visiting team (but having about 10 times as many fans present in their area, where we sat).

It was impossible to get a bag of peanuts (I imagine the stadiums don't want to clean up all the shells on the floor); the seventh-inning stretch was performed by cheerleaders who sang a Bay Stars pop song (though I led our section in the real "Take Me Out to the Ballgame"); and the beer, served cheap, is carried around by girls in neon-green uniforms.

I bought a Hanshin hat. Go Tigers.

Hiroshima, of Peace

This city was erased on August 6, 1945.

When the atomic bomb exploded 1900 feet in the sky at the end of the second World War, nearly 140,000 people here died. Hiroshima was gone.

For the United States, the devastating bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stoked a triumphant ego and justified the cost of developing the most powerful weapon to ever be used on human life. For Japan, the attacks crippled two cities, hundreds of thousands of lives and a national identity.

But there is no reason why I should have felt any sort of guilt on the long night-bus ride to Hiroshima. I realized this in the course of meeting two Hiroshima residents.

After eating a quick breakfast obento that my host mother had prepared for me, I walked toward the Peace Pagoda, a silver dome sticking up from the top of a mountain near Hiroshima Station. The 45-minute hike wove through a calm neighborhood, a variety of small temples and several paths covered by cherry blossom trees providing shade on an otherwise very bright morning. From the top of the short mountain I could see both the golden Buddha statue given to the city from India and, as I looked over the edge, the entire city of Hiroshima sweeping out beneath me and vanishing into the rivers and mountains around it.

Sixty-four years after an American pilot dropped the world's deadliest bomb here, more than 1 million people call Hiroshima their home.

One of them is Nakamura-san. On my way walking toward the Peace Park after my morning hike, a man who looked to be about 70 years old caught my eye and smiled, realizing I was a traveler. He gently walked over and asked me about myself, and why I had come to visit.

Nakamura, who speaks no English, lost his father in the atomic bomb blast. He's lived in Hiroshima for his entire life, and on this particular Sunday morning, he was walking toward Chuo Park, the city's biggest open green space, to fly paper airplanes with his friends. He invited me along.

Everyone in the paper airplane club that meets regularly at the park is as friendly as Nakamura, who bought me a pink plane to fly and introduced me as simply an American he had just met without being able to pronounce my name. The club's leader was teaching little children how to assemble their planes, and he helped me put mine together before showing me how to launch it a hundred feet in the air with a rubber band.

Nakamura smiled his toothy grin the whole time.

As unexpected as it was, flying airplanes with the group had been the most perfect way to start my three-day trip to a place I had been emotionally compelled to visit for years. Nakamura walked me to the trail leading to the Peace Park, and we parted ways forever.

The first structure most people see upon walking into the gorgeous memorial park in the middle of Hiroshima is the A-Bomb Dome, the building almost directly beneath the explosion that was one of the few structures left standing after the blast. Its walls were ripped apart by pressure, and its copper beams were melted by intense heat, but its steel reinforcements nonetheless remained intact enough to preserve the hall as a symbol of the city's strength forever.

The rest of the park is, in a way, built around the dome, which sets the tone for the entire green area full of statues and memorials to the innocent people who were killed. Yet despite the tearful feeling that building evokes, the park has an upbeat life and colorful activity. Just across the river, a clarinet ensemble was filling the warm air with contemporary music.

Nearby, a statue for the bomb's youngest victims memorializing a girl who made paper cranes while she was sick with radiation poisoning drew people to the colorful origami surrounding it.

Not far off, a monument frames both an eternal flame and the famous dome, and is decorated with flowers in front of which people stand and pray.

It was near here where I met Matsumoto-san, a woman studying English so she can live in Australia with her husband who just got a new job there. As I walked by the memorials toward the city's famous atomic-bomb museum, she beckoned me over in English and asked me to sit with her on a bench so she could practice her new language, and I could practice mine.

Matsumoto told me about how she's lived in Hiroshima, and the history of the city during life after the bomb, from what she had heard. She told me about the "black rain" that fell shortly after the mushroom cloud, and the intense heat that melted nearly every material around, evaporating the city into ugly nothingness. She then took me by the river and showed me a few of the last cherry blossom trees still in bloom from sakura season, laughing while she talked.

Matsumoto walked me to the front of the museum and said goodbye, more confident than ever in her English, and leaving me more confident than ever that I will never learn Japanese as quickly as I wish.

Hiroshima's flagship museum, though, is a sharp curve into reality that separates itself from the park that is a beacon of peace. The first half of the museum is devoted to the history of the war in the years before the bombing, and eventually leading up to the actual day. It repeatedly makes the case that the United States chose to use the weapon on Japan to justify its expensive research and manufacture, and ultimately to bomb Hiroshima because there were believed to be no American prisoners of war there.

The second part of the museum is about the victims. It describes how thousands of citizens -- especially children -- lost their lives instantly, or later burned to death, or died from radiation poisoning, or lost their families, or any number of countless other horrible circumstances. There are display cases with charred school uniforms worn by children who died, hair and fingernails and skin from their bodies, and destroyed materials from August 6, 1945, that have been preserved.

But I'm sure that the saddest stories are the ones that were never told.

I don't need to say that after experiencing the museum, I was emotionally jarred. I had just spent a very tired morning hiking a small mountain, flying airplanes with the son of a bomb victim and walking through the most beautiful park I had ever seen. I don't know if it would have helped to have someone else there to talk to about everything. I couldn't think very clearly, and the only thing I could do was keep walking.

I stayed in the park for a while longer before the clouds began to gather. When it started slightly raining, I really felt Hiroshima crying.

There was nothing to do but take my thoughts with me as I continued on my first day. I next stopped at Hiroshima Castle, a towering reconstruction of the 16th Century fort that is still surrounded by its old moat and foliage.

I then walked a half-mile to Shukkein Garden, a small escape from the city in the north that is as carefully trimmed as the bonzai trees inside it. A giant pond in its center with a contemporary-looking bridge is surrounded by scores of forested and flower-filled areas that took up an hour of my time, most of which I spent meditating in peace as the rain fell around me.

As I lost track of time, I thought about how Hiroshima may be the most beautiful city I've visited in Japan, and certainly the most peaceful. But it was time to take a streetcar to Miyajima, where I was staying for two nights in a hostel near the next part of my trip, the most beautiful island I've ever seen.

During high tide, the bright-orange tori gate at the island of Miyajima appears as if it is floating on water. With cascading mountains behind it and ominous clouds soaring over, the entrance to Itsukushima Shrine cannot be fully appreciated in one visit, at one point during one day. Like you can only understand a person after seeing them in happiness and in sadness, the powerful shrine entrance has different personalities at morning, noon and night, and during sunshine and rain.

And of course, then there are the deer. Technically "wild" but more or less tame, the island's free-roaming animals love to eat just about anything, including bags, dropped food and, particularly, my map of Miyajima.

As I was sitting on a stone slab gazing out at the gate my first morning on the island with a Dutchman I met at the hostel named Joost, a deer crept up behind me and swiftly claimed my guide for breakfast.

Joost (pronounced "Yosht") was able to salvage the most important part, but that damn deer and its kid also managed to snag some treats from another visitor.

Yet the true treasures of Miyajima are far from the pier and seaside view of the world's most famous tori gate. I had to travel around the shrine and village to reach a gorgeous temple at the base of Mt. Misen to begin the laborious and rewarding climb that took nearly two hours to reach the top, 530 meters above sea level.

Details omitted from the treacherous hike with my Dutch partner, we reached the top of the mountain sweating and panting after what seemed like an infinite maze of steep steps and twisting roots. But the panoramic view from the top would have made Hallmark jealous.

And one kilometer away, near the cable-car station, is a colony of small, pink-faced monkeys that have pretty much taken over the few man-made offices perched atop the mountain.

The rest of Miyajima, not unlike what paradise would be, also includes Daishoin Temple, at the bottom of Mt. Misen, home to about a million Buddha statues big and small, childish and serious, in animal masks and in robes, in sunlight and in caves.

As the sun set behind the mountains across the water, the paths behind Miyajima's looming trees became as dark as the underground passageways of Daishoin. Halfway up a nature trail a while away from a popular shopping street, red lanterns suddenly illuminated a path that led to a surprising clearing with cherry blossoms and quiet deer. From the lookout, some parts of the island were viewable in their dusk faces for just a short window.

I spent the first half of the next day on the island again during the rain, and then left for Hiroshima once again to walk through a large park in the southern end of the city before catching my night-bus back to Tokyo. I walked along the aptly named "Promenade of Peace" along the river, underneath cherry blossoms and beside blossoming flowers. The rain had given way to the spring smell of freshness.

Hijiyama Park -- with its own small mountain at its highest point -- is home to acres of undeveloped and practically untouched forest, as well as a manga library and a contemporary art museum. There are also dozens of stray cats running around in any given area.

Departing Hiroshima was like leaving Japan for the first time in June. I had seen so much -- the stunningly beautiful, the humanly sad, the naturally growing -- and I felt being pulled back even as I got farther away from it. I thought only of how I wanted to return.

Perhaps someday I will.