ranger and I are checking our internets in an internet cafe in hiroshima. I wasn:t going to, I mean, I kind of love the part about my 2 week foreign vacation where I:m not in touch with anyone at all. but they would have made me sit out front while ranger checked her emails so I thought I:d go ahead and see if anyone had responded to my birthday party invite. Not many people have, so I:m going to assume it:ll be me and my closest friends in the american legion hall in rutherford.
about japan: we:ve been here for just over a week. it seems longer because we lost two days when travelling — one to travelling and one to the international date line. we stayed in tokyo for 5 days and then kyoto for 3 and we:re in hiroshima now overnight. after today we will go to kobe, because there wasn:t any room in osaka or nara for us to stay.
this keyboard is kind of exciting. the space bar is really short and I can:t make an apostrophe. if I push a wrong button kanji comes up instead and luckily I figured out how to switch back to the roman alphabet! I don:t know if this will come up on y:alls western computers but I could be typing like this:
祖ã€Âティsæ„Âsã¨他llyç›®tyãƒâ€Ã£Æ’³gå°感ã˜。ãˆãˆｋ。
I just wrote: so, this is totally me typing in kanji. see. see?
we:ve been staying in ryokan, which are traditional japanese style hotels and rooms. we sleep on futons on tatami mat floors and they have yukatas, which are robes, for us to wear. it:s been really great and ranger and I haven:t wanted to kill each other so far, which is super. I obsessively map, she says. ranger talks smack about people from boston, and also, germans. we:re getting along very well and learning new and exciting things about each other. tomorrow we will see the a-bomb memorial and peace site, and then we:ll go to kobe and shop. see? perfect travelling synergy. the night after that is koya-san, where we will stay in a monestary overnight. it might be freezing cold. kyoto was really freakin: cold. koya-san is on a plateau where this guy who brought zen buddism was lead by a two headed dog that he got from a red-faced hunter. see how exciting japan is?
I:m gonna go. tonight I will find out if my 110AC camera battery adapter does awful things when plugged into japans 100AC outlets. ok, 30 min. up.
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I hope you went to the peace park while you were in Hiroshima. Visiting there was one of the events I can point to and definitely say that it adjusted my world view. Not that I was ever in doubt about nuclear explosions being bad, but the visual representation of the earliest example demonstrates exactly how bad, especially the scale models in the museum showing before and after for the entire city based on a single bomb. Incredible. Powerful. War is bad, nukes are worse. Instead of telling Iran they can’t have them even though we do, we should be saying nobody ought to have them including us and get rid of them because they are so incredibly freaking dangerous and a single moment of stupidity will alter the landscape of civilization forever. Not to mention the fact that we’ve bombed ourselves for fifty years. Sure, people don’t live in the desert, but some things do. Or used to anyway.
we did go to the peace park. it was so powerful and sad.
I read a book by Terry Tempest Williams that spoke of her families problem with ‘downwind-er’ syndrome, wherein all the women in her utahan family gets breast cancer b/c of their proximity to the test site.
this culture of violence we live in only creates badness. there is no good, ever, that could come of violence. I just don’t get why people think it ever could happen.