Thanksgiving Rice Balls

No Turkey in Japan, our Thanksgiving was both ironic and a bit sad. We awoke early (it was fRiday here) and took a train to Hiroshima. Our morning ritual has been grabbing two rice balls (rice, seaweed, and whatever is inside) from a convience store before hitting the train. Very good but not exactly a subsitute for turkey day. IT was a two hour train ride on the shinkansen (super express) from Kyoto to Hiroshima. Arriving in the city, you would find it hard to imagine that a mere sixty years before the whole city had been reduced to rubble by an atomic bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of people. There is one remainding building that has been preserved in order to show visitors a small piece of the atrocity that was committed on the city of Hiroshima-but besides that, it looks like any other built up Japanese city.

Before visiting Hiroshima, I hadnt taken the time to consider or really learn about the events leading up to the US dropping a nuclear bomb on Japan, and dropping it on Hiroshima in particular. The museum contained probably more information than I wanted to know about why Hiroshima was the target, but it was information that every American should be knowledgable of. Of course we learned that the Japanese were responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and perhaps the public sentiment at the time was retaliation at any cost to the Japanese. However, it just doesnt make sense and there was and will never be an excuse to drop an atomic or hydrogen bomb on any innocent civilian population. THe amount of people who were killed either on the day the bomb was dropped, August 6 1945, and the people who died as a result of the radiation, burns and such after the fact in the wake of the bombing totals over 400,000 people. Yes, HIroshima was a military town in the sense that it housed facilities and factories for building weapons, but it was also a bustling prosperous city home to innocent people going about their daily lives. IT is just sickening to think of the propoganda used by the U.S. government to try to justify the bombing, no matter what kind of atrocities Japan had committed in the war. Reading all of the top secret letters between government officials regarding the attack, it seems as if America only wanted to scare Russia and maybe justify the billions of dollars the government had spent on building a nuclear weapon. Its pretty sickening really.

On a lighter note, we are now in Osaka and are staying at a very neat hostel. We met a nice English friend who showed us to a local bar by our hostel which literally consisted of 3 1/2 stools(the top of mine kept falling off) and was only protected from the elements by tarps. As you may guess, our hostel is not located in the most posh part of town. very neat nonetheless, and we were able to get a taste of a couple good local restaurants. Today we went to the aquarium which was very neat, and tomrorow we will head to Kobe for one night before working on another farm. SHould be a different experience from the last farm we worked on, and we are all excited ot stop spending money!