This past week we had off Monday and Friday for Japanese holidays (Respect for the Aged Day and Autumnal Equinox Day, respectively). Thursday evening I flew with a colleague to Hiroshima and nearby Miyajima island for a couple days vacation. It was really nice to get out of Tokyo for a bit and see some other areas of Japan. I plan to go to Kyoto, the old ancient capital, sometime in the fall and also skiing somewhere in Honshu or Hokkaido in the winter. Being in Hiroshima was strange, being in an area where an atomic bomb was dropped. I learned a lot at the Peace Memorial Museum. Like how the bomb was designed and why and why it eventually dropped on Hiroshima. I didn't know that Albert Einstein was involved either. Some German-descended physicists in the US knew that the fission reaction was discovered in Germany in 1939 and they convinced Einstein to sign a letter to FDR to propel the research and design of a bomb for the protection of the US. $2 billion dollars were spent on its design. In early 1945, Japan was being bombarded daily from US airplanes. They had originally intended on dropping the bomb on Germany, but later decided on Japan because they believed Germany could gather more information on developing the bomb if it had been dropped on them instead. Also the US was trying to lessen the influence of the growing Soviet Union and believed that dropping it on a weakened Japan would keep it from going to war with the USSR and eventually being overtaken by the Soviets. During the Allied bombing of Japan in 1945, a few cities were left untouched in order to properly measure the full impact of the atomic bomb. Out of the five cities on the list, Hiroshima was a military center, an education center, had a population of more than 200,000, and there were no known Allied POW camps in the city. So the decision was made to drop it on Hiroshima.
The island of Miyajima is really gorgeous and peaceful. It is an ancient sacred island in Japan, where no one is allowed be born or die, there are no hospitals or cemeteries on it. The island has shrines, the floating torii, a five-storied pagoda, an old town village, etc. You can also take a tram to the top of the mountain on the island, but we ran out of time to do that. In all, it was a nice trip.
While I was on vacation, I was trying to keep in touch with my parents in Houston via text messaging as Hurricane Rita was approaching. Luckily, they avoided the brunt of the storm, as it hit more in the Port Arthur and Beaumont areas, about 100 miles away from Houston. The only news I could get in Hiroshima was the coverage on BBC.
Nothing much else to report from Tokyo right now.
