A deer ate my map - Hiroshima, Japan
Hiroshima, Japan
You've all heard those stories about deer on Miyajima grabbing people's rail passes. I've even repeated those stories. Today, I took the train from Hiroshima to Miyajimaguchi (guchi = gate)and then the Japan Rail Ferry from Miyajimaguchi to Miyajima (yes, the JR ferry is included in the rail pass). I was sitting quietly at Miyajima looking at my map, thinking I'd mark the places I really wanted to go, so that I wouldn't miss anything. A deer came up and bit off a corner of my map. Then the deer bit off another corner, then more, and then more. A small group of Japanese tourists gathered around to take pictures of the remnants of my map, as I posed smiling, holding up the remnants of the map. But if they didn't get that picture fast, it was too late. In just moments, the entire map was gone!
Costco continues to expand in Japan. Some of their stores are near minor train stations; others are a long walk from the nearest train station. But now there is one just a short walk from a major Shinkansen station. Just a 20 minute walk from the Hiroshima train station, there is now a Costco, on the same block as Mazda Zoom Zoom Stadium, new home of the Hiroshima Carp baseball team (cheer!), about a 20 minute walk east from the main train station. The Costco store is taller than their usual USA store, with all the parking above the store. There is an escalator ramp (no steps) which you can use with your cart in front of you, although when I took it from store level to the parking level above, I felt like I was going to fall over backwards. I doubt that the angle would meet US building code standards, but then the steep stairs at the front pedestrian entrance probably wouldn't meet US codes either. The merchandise included a lot of the usual American Costco items, along with many local brands, all in big sizes that would be a strain to fit into a typical Japanese house. The floor are concrete, but much smoother than the concrete floors in the American Costco stores, and they are immaculately clean. As in California, the pharmacy is open to non-members. Unlike the stores in the USA, the food court is outside the main store and you can eat there without showing a membership card. The pizza slices there are enormous, so you could have a pizzza and drink (free drink refill) meal for less than 500 yen. Costco is a great resource for tourists who encounter catastrophic luggage failure, lose their glasses, didn't pack enough shirts, etc.
The Toyoko Inn near the train station must have some of the smallest rooms in the chain. At breakfast, I sat next to a man who had grown up on a farm in Gumna (a prefecture outside Toyko, near Saitama) just after the war. He said that, as a child, there were food shortages, and he was fed goat milk from the farm. Later, he was an exchanage student in Los Angeles, and was amazed at how his host family had one car for each family member. After experiencing life in Los Angeles, he said he could not understand why Japan had gone to war against the United States. I wasn't clear whether he meant that the Americans treated him well, or that the United States was economically so powerful. He was also surprised to find out how difficult it was to understand English--the education he'd gotten in English from the Presbyterian missionaries in his area before the trip just wasn't enough. After returning to Japan, he became an English teacher, which explains why he spoke English so well. Now retired, he keeps goats as a hobby, partly as a reminder of the lessons to be learned from the past. He was in Hiroshma for an agricultural seminar about goats.