The Home Stretch: Happy Wedding, Kyoto and Hiroshima

Japan! Finally! Back to seeing people I know! Most importantly the wedding of a lifetime was going to take place here in Tokyo! I met Julio about 5 years ago through work, and once you meet him, it’s an instant friendship. He is really more of a big brother and I really appreciate our relationship. He became a happier and fulfilled person when he met Yumi, who was studying English at the time in SF. Love prevails and they got married in the City on July 17 2011 and had their baby Saya August 14 2011. The Japanese wedding has been in the planning stages since then!
So now we are here, Saturday October 20 2012. Yumi’s family couldn’t have been nicer! They opened their home to me the first weekend in Japan. They also bought more accessories for me to wear with my kimono. Yes, have I mentioned that I bought my kimono in San Jose, Ca before I came here? I was so excited to wear it. Her mother and grandmother are helping put it all together the night before.

There are a ton of accessories! It took one extremely strong woman around 20 minutes to wrap me up and tie me together with all her might. The “belts” are thin strips of fabric that are tied in knots all over your body and in different layers. You don’t want the whole thing to fall apart and apparently you also don’t want to breathe. Here I am, finally dressed up on wedding day.

It’s lovely and is a beautiful tradition, but my goodness it’s super tight, and HOT and borderline painful! My rib age the next day was sore and I had red marks on my body for two days from the ties! Oh what we women do for vanity…
Here is the lovely couple.

Yumi changed a few times. The white kimono was for the ceremony.

Then the black one was for dinner.

And then finally the American one.

The ceremony was very traditional. The groom and bride’s families walk in different lines into the shrine and sit opposite of one another. We sat at a long table facing the other side of the room. Then the couple process in with their immediate family. Yumi has a big red parasol covering her in the procession. They walk in and there are a few dances performed for them, there are drums beating, they then share a sake and all of us get served the sake and we all drink it together. Then Julio had to say out loud a very additional saying. Here is his cheat sheet.

Then the ceremony is over and we go to the reception which was a 10 course dinner! Here are a few highlights.

Julio’s mother and I at dinner.

Throughout the reception there were some great traditions. One great one was dimming the lights and the couple lighting one candle at each table. This started the flame for everyone’s own candle. Then we all made a wish for the couple and blew it out. Loved that!

There were toasts and video tributes that made me cry! The saying here is “Happy Wedding” and it was expressed everywhere. It was just an awesome evening and I was so honored to be there. Here is the group that came out from California to join Julio and Yumi.

Then there was the after party which included a Japanese favorite, karaoke!

We got back to the house at 6am. It was such a fun night!
the next day (or rather same day) was family sight seeing day. Yumi’s father rented a big van and we headed north from Tokyo for about three hours to see some beautiful Japanese mountains and waterfalls. We also stopped, for some ramen and these savory dumplings with squid. Super good.

Kyoto and I’m exhausted, I barely slept but not being able to check in yet, I walked around trying to find a spot to watch the game. Go Giants!
I asked my hotel who pointed me to the street I could probably find it but it was early in the morning and everything was still closed. I decided to eat at one local spot. I had to point to the picture in the window to order. It was my first Katsu bowl in Japan. Yum!

I walked around like a zombie and then checked in to the hotel and crashed for a few hours!
After my nap I walked around and looked for food and a place to watch the Tokyo Giants play in their Japanese league championship game! I was literally looking for the glow of a television.

I took a long walk back through the small alleyways and then along the river where I actually saw from afar, Geishas at work!

The next morning I went to see the Golden Palace, which looked close to the subway station on the map. It was raining the whole day so by the time the subway dropped me off and I walked forever, constantly checking the map, I was cold and getting a little frustrated this was taking so much time. Luckily, the palace finally appeared and I took a few pictures around the whole site.
I made sure to take a bus ride back, which was a little tricky understanding how to pay for it, but it all worked out in the end and it saved some time. I walked around the geisha district, Gion, hoping to find some more Geishas, but I was unsuccessful.

The next morning, I had a little time to shop around at the outdoor food market before my train to Hiroshima.

I only had 24 hours in Hiroshima and after the Memorial Peace Museum, I checked out a nearby island called Miyajima where they have a few beautiful shrines.

This shrine is actually named one of the three most peaceful places in Japan. The deers like it too. They are everywhere, at first it was cool and then it was a little creepy.

What’s wrong with this picture?

He was hungry.

I was getting hungry too. I had a traditional dish, Hiroshima style. Delish!

Back to Tokyo, but this time I was staying downtown. After checking into my Japanese style room I dropped my bags and met up with Yumi, Julio and friends for one last all-night’r together. We went to two places. You rent a few tables at a negotiated price for all you can drink. We also ordered some things to eat and share. It’s a lot of fun, a lot of beer but totally draining. Since the subway reopens at 5am, we didn’t have a choice but to stay out. One last stop, only a few of us had some energy to go to the Tokyo Fish Market. It happened to be walking distance to my hotel, so what the heck, I can sleep on the plane.

Now I’m about 1 hour away from hopping on my SF flight home. 41 days on the road, 14 cities, 9 countries. I’m not going to lie, I am ready to come home and sleep in my own apartment and eat my own food. I’m excited to share more stories and pictures with my family. I know myself well enough though that after I settle down, I’ll get the urge to get up and go again. Where will the next trip be? I’m open to taking suggestions 😉

Japan,
You are so fun! Tokyo was intense, but I loved it. I’m glad I got out into the suburbs and hung out with my new Japanese Family! Kyoto and Hiroshima were beautiful and memorable. I can’t get over how clean you are, no trash, no dirty sidewalks, it’s sparkling. The trains are really efficient. I couldn’t believe how many people were on a 10pm train last night, it it shows how much they rely on this system. The food was great but it was hard to get into an eating pattern, some days I snacked all day, some days I had one big meal. It’s nice that there are options wherever you are though. Thanks for the memories, can’t wait to visit in the future.

Justine (on the way to The Bay)

Not to be Forgotten

History has a way of repeating itself. There is always a person or a group that abuses power, always a people’s revolution, always a religion that gets involved with politics, there’s always war, and there’s always peace. Every single country I have been to has elements of each of these, some more recent than others. All the museums and tours to date describe a time in the past that seemed out of reach until I saw Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
Auschwitz is a 5 hour drive outside of Prague across the Poland border. I booked a tour with Wittman Tours, a Jewish based organization in the Czech Republic. I was the only person on the tour along with my guide and our driver. It was a very rainy drive to Poland which sounds bad but it was really appropriate to see this place when it was dark, wet, and cold. There are two sites to visit, neighboring each other. The first site is the large death camp that at one time could house up to 90,000 victims. It was the site of multiple gas chambers, barracks and the infamous train tracks that brought people to their fate.

As far as you can see are the camps borders. It is enormous.

The Nazi’s on the brink of defeat, destroyed a large part of this camp to get rid of the evidence as best as possible. The gas chamber exteriors are demolished but since they were underground, you can still see the structure one floor below.

There are pits surrounding each gas chamber which hold the ashes of the deceased.

A scary thing about this entire operation was how efficient the Nazis were with the massacres. Coming off the train was a decision point and if one didn’t look healthy enough for laborious work, death was immediate although the victims were under false pretenses that they were to “bathe.” The gas chambers looked like houses with chimneys on the outside. In the first room, hooks with numbers were supplied in order to play along with the shower lie. Then the gas chamber was packed with people ready to shower in a room that had shower heads and drains, but of course what really happened once the door was locked and the lights were shut off was the poisonous crystals dropped from small holes in the ceiling that killed the entire room in a horrible manner in about 40 minutes. All together, 1.5 million innocent people were murdered at the time Auschwitz was in operation.

There are lots of stories, facts, and pictures throughout the camp. There are also memorials and statues to remind you to take moments of silence. I also saw tours of young Israeli teenagers who visit this site as a program prior to entering the military. One really touching room was a display of photos that prisoners, most likely from one of the last trains of people sent to the camp, were forced to abandon as they registered.

The whole thing is sad and depressing. There is tons more, but the whole blog is not supposed to be a repeat history lesson. It got quite real when I was walking through the second Auschwitz site where the museum is and you see piles of people’s belongings. Toothbrushes, combs, suitcases, belts, and shoes, things I have in my own bag. That was incredibly poignant, there was a connection there because these victims were just like me and you.

There was some hope that I was left with that day. While I was being showed the female barracks, I noticed a small gathering of people in the same barrack. Questions were being asked such as, “do you remember,” “where were you” etc. and I realized a survivor of Auschwitz was actually right there in front of me. She was there with her immediate family and she was trying to pinpoint the exact bunk in the barrack she slept in. She said she was close to one of the windows in the barrack because she remembered seeing her mother and sister some time after she had been at the camp, walking down the path to the chambers right out of the train. I was just amazed that there was a survivor right in front of me. My guide, who is also an independent film maker, caught quite a bit of this on film. She said she has never seen a survivor making their own personal journey before. They have served as guides and sometimes accompany the large groups of Israeli students but a survivor returning to Auschwitz on their own terms, is very rare. So it was a blessing for me to see this woman and get a glimpse of her past and know she survived this terrible place and has lived a new life since then. It was really incredible.

Hiroshima saw another side of this terrible war, and this felt even more personal, being that my country is responsible for the destruction that occurred here on August 6, 1945. Early in the morning, a U.S. B-29 dropped the worlds first atomic bomb. This instantly killed around 75,000 people and demolished the area in a 2km radius from the hypocenter. Within the next few months, 65,000 more died from the after effects such as radiation exposure and burns and countless more to this day suffer today from lasting effects.

I visited the very beautiful Peace Memorial Park on my first day in Hiroshima. The remnants of one of the original buildings very close to the hypocenter has been preserved and is a protected world site.

There is also a students memorial because many Japanese and Korean students were mobilized as a result of the war and were in this area when the atomic bomb dropped.

The part that was emotional was seeing the children’s monument which has a statue of Sadako Sashaki and a paper crane. This young girl acquired Leukemia after the bomb’s radiation effect and thought by the time she created 1,000 paper cranes she would have recovered. She passed before reaching that milestone and her classmates finished the task for her. To this day, schools from around the world have sent paper cranes to this site and they are displayed here. When I was there, a group of school kids were singing in front of the monument and it was beautiful and emotional.

The eternal peace flame which will not be extinguished until the last nuclear weapon on earth is destroyed.

The Memorial Hall is really well done. There are survivor testimonies you can read, listen to and watch. You see a 360 degree view of the destruction in a dimly lit hall. A beautiful tribute is a fountain that has the shape a clock face at 8:15am, when time stopped and the world changed.

It’s my opinion that it is crucial to see these places in person, to be reminded of the capacity of harm humans can inflict on one another. Being there doesn’t merely remind you of a history lesson you once had. Being in the presence, and there are so many examples and locations around the world, draws a personal connection in the hope that these events will never be forgotten- or repeated.

8 Reasons Why Watching Baseball in Japan Rocks!

#8) They like baseball, a lot. A much more positive vibe than Europe.

#7) It is actually televised here. Not every place will have it, for example I’m watching Game 1 of the World Series in a department store on a really big TV with this little dude (below)…I can live with that.

#6) It’s televised at normal times. Japan is so far ahead of time (15hrs), I can watch it at 9am, not 2am…Yea, Slovenia, I’m talking to you.

#5) They actually have Japanase field reporters asking the players questions afterwards through an interpreter. Thats cool, again, refer to #8.

#4) Black and Orange are the Tokyo Giants colors and they where it proudly.

#3) They have awesome pitch by pitch replays during game breaks. You get more highlights than ESPN who’s East Coast bias.

#2) There are no commercials. Only 3+ hours of pure baseball. It’s like being at AT&T Park with the best seat in the house.

#1) I don’t have to hear Joe Buck’s stupid broadcast because it’s all in Japanese!

Arigato Japan!

Go Giants!