A Day Trip to MIYAJIMA

It was raining heavily in Kansai region and actually the local line stopped because of the heavy rain near my house. But no other day can be chosen because it was a good chance to learn about Hiroshima with my colleagues. It was lucky because bullet trains further than Yamaguchi didn't work but we could get to Hiroshima without any trouble. This time, we mainly visited MIYAJIMA, one of the 3 most beautiful scenic sites in Japan. I found it on the ferry to Miyajima looking at oyster fisheries that almost 10 years had past since I visited Hiroshima last. Miyajima was veiled in a heavy mist or clouds floating low.
We first tried HIROSHIMAYAKI, which is called OKONOMIYAKI in Hiroshima. It is always important to try the local specialty, right? People from Kansai, especially from Osaka can't call it OKONOMIYAKI. OKONOMIYAKI looks like a pancake with cabbage, egg, seafood or meat while HIROSHIMAYAKI put piles of cabbage, beansprout, fried squid flake, egg and some noodle but with the cook's special technic, they got flat like pancake. Actually some foreign people who hesitated to say not to put so much vegetables in their HIROSHIMAYAKI but when it was served, they were astonished. Well, it was sooooooo yummy! You must try one. We checked the hotels which are usually taken, visited ITSUKUSHIMA SHRINE and learned how the tour usually went.


At Itsukushima Shrine, you can see Japanese wedding following as an old Court way. It is quite a dream wedding especially girls and many people are making a reservation and wait long for their wedding, I hear.



I found an interesting sign for the ropeway(aerial cableway?) station up to the top of the island where nobody wanted to walk up to the hill and catch the ropeway because of such a heavy rain. 2 deer were taking refuge under the eaves. (Later the next couple of days, they even have more stormy weather and I saw some deer being flushed in the water. )







Because of the low tide, when we left MIYAJIMA, the food of that famous TORII gate started to appear and many tourists tried to walk up there.














I think it was 10 years ago since I planned to take junior and senior high school students in my English Classes with some foreign teachers on JET program and some exchange students from China to visit Hiroshima. On the previous year, I was leading the tour from my son's sister school in the US. 30 students and about 10 teachers and parents from the US participated. At that time, we only visited Hiroshima-City especially Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Hiroshima Peace Park. I couldn't explain the feeling causing deep in my heart which was totally different from what we shared together a couple of hours ago before entering the museum. It can't be a pleasant place to visit but it is some place people from all over the world should visit to see by themselves and think about how important it is to keep the world real in peace.