[JAPAN] Sadako and a thousand paper cranes
February 27th, 2010
We made a day trip out to Hiroshima. It was around 1.5hour from Kyoto, it was infact closer to Osaka. But anyhows, one shinkansen ride later, we boarded our first trip on a Japanese ferry to Miyajima Island, located about 15mins ferry ride away.
We were thankful for the beautiful blue skies! The shoreline was rather breath taking! (bye bye Hiroshima)
Our first encounters on Miyajima island, were DEERS! lots and lots of deers, which were free to roam around the island. It felt so odd. I found out later that, this was to maintain the free ‘edo-era’ like town, as it was in the past. Note: these animals chew on ANYTHING. Paper, plastic, =/ silly animals.
We had a taste of one of the local delicacies, it was like a giant cuttlefish ball in the shape of autumn leaves (which is iconic to the island, i don’t know why). But of course it came in different flavours, eel, prawn, squid, oyster (is very popular there too because it’s like the main source of oyster in Japan). I had an eel one, and it was goood… filled with oily goodness!
This is another iconic spot on Miyajima Island, the floating O-tori gate. Sadly by the time we got there, the tides have gone down, hence it doesn’t really look like it’s floating. Glad I took this instax though, because an hour later, the tides went down and it no longer appeared ‘floating’, people where able to walk out to shore for it. So get there early in the morning!
Miyajima was a very sacred place of Buddhism worship, hence several shrines were found there. Another popular icon in Miyajima were rice scoops, the one below was found in a shrine. We had no idea what its significance was to the town, and later found out it actually represents ‘scooping’ up goodluck and enemies. interesting eh? rice scoops are sold in all the souvenir shops, and indeed makes a useful souvenir, especially if it scoops you some goodluck!
posing outside a shrine with o-tori gate in the background! see how low the tides are?
we took the cable car highh up in the mountains to this observation point. it was around 30mins cable car to get there. You may come across wild monkeys, and definitely wild deers 
lovely views but was quite foggy unfortunately.
Miyajima was quite a lovely place to visit, it has such a different feel to it. The culture, and atmosphere… love it, and would go back again.We allocated a a few hours for the island, but honestly, it deserves more than that (if you want to go sight seeing too). We had to make it back to visit the Hiroshima bomb site, so couldn’t stay longer.
This is the A-Bomb site, the only building that survived the explosion, which still stands to remind us all of the tragic past.
As it was getting late, it gave off an eerie atmosphere. Its amazing and sad to imagine that this city was once blown to nothingness, and it had to be built up from scratch again.
This is the part of the memorial park that I could relate to, the true story of Sadako and a thousand paper cranes.It’s such a touching story.
I remember studying it in year 6, and that my friend and I tried to make a thousand paper cranes which we hung around the classroom (and totally wasting the schools resources haha). I don’t even know what started it, come to think of it…
It’s nice hear how many students in Japan contribute their thousand paper cranes in different ways each year, just to commemorate Sadako and most importantly for World Peace. The creativity amazes me
Peace V
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