Day 15 in Japan: to Hiroshima



Yesterday I was talking to yet another Japanese person who knew nothing about Naoshima: she had at least heard of it, because she works for a travel agency in Sydney and they've recently had a couple of enquiries about it.

A month ago today we had our last breakfast on the island. When we arrived, a little early, in the dining room, we sat at our usual table,and were just about to get stuck into the mouth-watering salmon on the main dish when our hostess appeared from the kitchen, crossing her forearms in our direction, and calling out urgently, 'Iie, iie!' (Actually, I made that dialogue up, but iie is Japanese for 'no', and that's definitely what she was trying to communicate.) She ushered us to a different table, one where we had much more elbow room, and where she had laid out for us a Western breakfast. So, with many a longing glance at that salmon and the steaming miso soup offered to other guests, we tucked into a perfectly edible omelette, some cooling strips of bacon, and white toast with excellent blueberry jam, appreciative of our host's thoughtfulness, but not unambiguously grateful.


I took a last photo before we left the ryokan. In case you don't know, the Japanese custom is to remove your street shoes on entering a house, and to put on indoor slippers for everywhere except two placces: tatami, where one goes shoeless, and the toilet, where one wears a different set of slippers. At the ryokan Minatoya, the toilet slippers were clearly inscribed so no one could mistakenly assume they were meant for anywhere else. In case you can't read it, here's a transcription:

comfortable place
TOILET
je fais pipi et caca



It was something of a wrench leave Naoshima, but leave we did, and ferried across the Inland Sea again to Takamatsu, trained back over the bridge to Hoshu, and into the Shinkansen to Hiroshima, the wide island, in my opinion another of Japan's well-kept secrets. It was a shortish walk from the train station, much of it underground, to our hotel, the Hotel Flex (whose web site has some cool effects, and some sweetly off-kilter English sloganeering: 'I stand still in a riverside.')



There were still several hours of daylight left, so we caught a tram to the Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA, where we spent a couple of hours. As you would expect, there was a bit of a theme at this gallery. Apparently artists from all over the world donate works to it on the theme of peace, and there was a grim exhibition, which I believe was temporary, called Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Hiroshima is blessed with an excellent map for visitors called Get Hiroshima, which has a website. It recommended a little cafe just a couple of blocks from our hotel, saying it was run by two cool dudes and served excellent okonomiyaki. We went there and were very satisfied. Meanwhile, back at the hotel, there was a free open-air concert featuring a young woman who, the people at our front desk told us, was very famous. We mingled with the young, hip crowd for a little, then went to our room and listened the rest of the sweet performance from there.

Posted: Mon - September 29, 2008 at 10:52 PM           |

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