Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Last Thursday, looking at our calendar and counting the days until we had to start work at Mukogawa again, Brenda and I realized that we would have to go to Hiroshima the middle of the following week if we were to go at all. So, found a friendly travel agent at local department store and booked a three day, two night stay in Hiroshima via the Shinkansen, the world's fastest train.
For more on the Shinkansen see this link.
Pretty slick looking, huh? The weather behaved very nicely for our stint in Hiroshima. This was our first trip as a family without any Japanese friends along to help us translate, book or explain everything to us. We had a great time. We saw the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum that presents an extensive and graphic exhibit of the facts of the atomic bomb explosion at Hiroshima in 1945. We skirted the kids past the more graphic displays. It really is something though.

This watch stopped at the time of the blast. The hand that wore it was in a display case to the left. Just kidding, but not far from kidding, seriously. Some of the photos are very graphic and yes there are some human body fragments (skin, hair, fingernails) on display as well. Scary stuff. The truth that the museum wants the observer to take away is that nuclear weapons are a bad thing, put them away.
There were some other features of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park worth noting. This is called the A-Bomb Dome.

It was a building that was 490 feet away from the hypocenter of the blast. Its ruins were preserved (there's a contradiction in terms for you) so that future generations could witness the destruction of nuclear weapons.

Delay Fees for Those Who Hate Their Family

Standing on a train platform in Japan is fascinating. There are local trains and express trains and on some lines many variations in between. The local trains make every stop on the line whereas an express train doesn't, therefore at some stations an express train will just go whizzing by quite fast, too. You can tell when a train is about to arrive because they play music telling you when that a train is coming. On the Hanshin line the music is the tune, I've Been Working on the Railroad. If the train is an express and you are at a non-express station there is a different type of music. If you are at a end point station (one where the train is going to 'turn around' and go back the way it came) it sits for usually about 5 minutes then a third type of music will play and that is when people start running even if they wearing high heels.

Sometimes I've wondered what would happen to a person if they stood too close to the track when an express train went whizzing by. Some have discovered on their own, usually intentionally. Committing suicide by train is one way that some commit suicide in Japan. A friend of mine told me that is the way preferred by those who hate their families. You see, the trains run on a tight schedule. Thousands of commuters are relying on the train to get them to their destination or their connecting train on time. If you consider time equal to money, that is a lot of money if a train gets delayed. As you can imagine, someone jumping in front of a train could cause significant delays. Therefore, the railways companies charge the surviving family of the deceased a delay fee. Often the fee runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So it is said that person hates their family if they commit suicide in such way. Very often it is discovered afterward that the person who did the deed had a beef with her mother-in-law over her husband or something to that effect.

This is platform and the railway is below. If you look on the left side of the photo on the left, you'll see a train approaching. A potential jumper would wait until an express train was passing by the station.

The photo below: in the foreground you can see how fast the train passes by and how close the platform is to the passing train.