Greg and Mandy's Travels

Today was the day to explore a whole new side of Japan that most people don’t know about. Nagasaki, for a time, was Japan’s gateway to the world.

Around about 1550 the first foreign traders made their way to Asia from Portugal and bumped into Japan. They started a fairly lucrative trade with Asian countries and tried to tie up the whole of the Asian trade routes. But the Dutch were having none of that. By 1600 they had arrived too, having first established the Dutch East India Company in what is now Indonesia as their base. In 1602 Dutch trading ships started arriving in force, but this coincided with the commencement of the Edo period in 1603 when the newly crowned Shogun seized power from the emperor, and started ruling Japan by himself.…

Just a travel day really, so there’s not much to report, though there was a lot of hectic transferring as we had to take three trains, and transfer between them with only a couple of minutes to spare. The first train was a fairly long one to Shin-tosu, but when we got there we only had seven minutes to get out from the bullet train, through the Shinkansen gates, into the local station gates, up the lift, over to platform two, back down the lift, and find the carriage we had a reservation on.

We made the train with a couple of minutes to spare, but like everybody else who was doing the same thing, we all piled in to the closest door and spent the next 10 minutes or so as the train took off walking up and down the passage to find our correct carriage and seat.…

You might wonder what the hardest thing about being in Japan is. Is it the language? Nah. Is it the crowds? That’s tolerable. It’s the packaging. I’ve talked before about how a chocolate bar often has four layers of packaging, and it certainly adds to a huge amount of recycling. Well, actually, it’s not recycled. It’s burned. You only get to sort your rubbish into burnable and nonburnable, and by nonburnable, they mean glass and metal. Everything else, including plastic, is burned.

However, it’s the packaging which is the biggest issue. Everything is wrapped. We bought a tart for lunch today and it was folded in a plastic sleeve, placed inside a plastic bag, taped to show you’d paid for it, then put inside a plastic carry bag.…

Miyajima is a small island less than an hour outside the city of Hiroshima. It is most famous for its giant torii gate, which at high tide seems to float on the water. The sight of the floating gate is ranked as one of Japan’s three best views (according to a Confucian scholar in 1643, so that settles it!), and is a World Cultural Heritage site.

4.6 million people visited in the year prior to COVID, and most of them catch the ferry. That’s over 13,000 cramming on every day, so if you can’t beat them, you better join them was our philosophy.…

One atomic bomb can ruin your whole day.

Back in 1945 on 6 August, just after breakfast, the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima and 60,000 people didn’t make it home for dinner. Estimates of casualties are always hard to make depending on whether you count who died immediately or in the next week or in the next few years, but best estimates are around 140,000 over the next few months out of a total population of 250,000.

What trees survived the atomic blast? Eucalyptus trees, of course, and we saw some of them in the castle grounds later.…

A leisurely walk down to our local café for my last honey latte in Osaka.

Packed up, checked out, and walked down to one of the 4 Noda stations to catch a local train back to Osaka Station, then transferred to Shin-Osaka station where all the Shinkansens and other fast trains depart from.

The train system is incredibly impressive. There are so many train lines running in every direction coping with huge number of passengers every day. However, there are a number of different train operators which all have their own networks, and not all of them are interconnected. Of course, if you were a local, that’s no big problem.…

We’ve now been in Japan for two weeks, and this last week we have walked 163,000 steps which is 102km, and climbed 133 flights of stairs. That’s further than last week, but mercifully not as many stairs.

And I’ve told you about our heated toilets, but not that many of them have a very nifty system where there is a hand basin built into the top of the cistern so you can wash your hands in the water that is refilling for next time. There’s a picture below.

It also seems that every train station has a different song that they play when the train is approaching.…

So, prepare to be confused. We were.

Addresses in Japan, are not written like anywhere else in the world. The address of this unit is 1 Chome-7-30 Sagisu.

So the first part is easy. Sagisu is the suburb. Got that. Then it gets complicated. The next thing you need to find is Chome. But Chome is not a suburb, it’s a sub area. If you live in Melbourne, this probably doesn’t make too much sense. However, if you’re in Queensland, it’s really your subdivision or estate. So in Queensland, we live in the Brightwater estate which is only one small part of our suburb.…

Went down for breakfast to our favourite bakery for the last time.

We must live in dormitory lane. Every morning as we’ve gone down to the bakery, the main road has been lined with tour buses. Today they were eight of them. Then as we headed down the small lane towards the bakery and the market, we were passed by three or four large hordes of school children, all being marched single file by their teachers with a flag waving attendant at the front, down to the buses which were waiting to whisk them off to the daily sightseeing. They must be up reasonably early as they’ve already had breakfast and are on the road by half past seven.…

Yesterday, as we were out walking, we passed a coffee shop with a hoarding out the front that proudly said ‘Melbourne coffee’. We weren’t going to let that one slide. So, early this morning, we hoofed it back, and decided to take up their challenge. I assumed that the owner or the barista would’ve actually been to Melbourne, probably speak a bit of English, and want to bring back the culture to Kyoto. I was wrong! Neither the server nor the barista spoke a word of English, and it didn’t even register when we said we were from Melbourne. I guess it was called a Melbourne coffee shop as it didn’t have an Americano anywhere on the menu.…