Golden Week 2: Nagasaki

I showed up in Nagasaki about an hour after everyone else. On the way there, I got to play with public phones and prepaid cards for the first time, since I don't yet have a cell phone and, having not reserved a train, I had no idea when I'd be arriving in Nagasaki until right about when I left Kumamoto. The first time I tried, every had their phones off on the train. The second, they'd arrived but were not yet decided on what they'd be doing for the next hour, since half wanted to shop and half wanted to find the hotel or explore. By the time I got there, though, they'd made it to the hotel, so I took a tram over there and brought the group to its maximum size for the week. Incidentally, the parts of golden week have basically been divided by size of group. Nagasaki was the only place where we had eight people and, because of the different mix we had in Nagasaki, our stay there was somewhat more... alcohol-driven than in other cities. I don't know who all is reading this blog, but since I don't drink at Stanford, some of you may not know that I do at all. Try not to be too shocked. Not all of golden week went like this, and in my entire life I can think of no other time that would compare. I've been drinking for a while with my family, but I have yet to get drunk and don't plan to any time soon.

Anyways, when I showed up it was getting towards dinnertime, so once I'd put my stuff down and everyone had had their internet fix for the afternoon, we started off in the direction of where we thought there might be a restaurant. First distraction was the bridges in front of the hotel, where we split into two groups and took jumping pictures of each other, then a few of us wandered into the temple across the bridges from the hotel. According to the sign, it was a branch temple of Nishi Honganji, a temple in the middle of Kyoto which we'd explored just a week before (and you'd already know about if I were up to date on my back-entries). It was pretty, but small, so we got back on the path for food. Next distraction was the shopping arcades in the middle of town. Didn't actually stop in any of the stores, but we spent a little time looking at what was there. At that point, we ran into Professor Macdougall, from the Stanford Center in Kyoto, on vacation with his wife, ambushed him, and then parted with photos and a restaurant recommendation. The restaurants in the area capable of seating nine people were somewhat limited, so we went to a two-story place, spanning the third and fourth floors of a building, where we were seated in one of their large rooms and had a large and various dinner, the details of which I don't totally remember. After dinner, on the pretense of looking for a bar or club for the partiers in the group, we ended up wandering the city. Though I'm not totally clear on what's in Nagasaki, much less where, I think we ended up wandering to Dejima, the old Dutch area. At some isolationist point in Japanese history, it was one of the only places in Japan where foreigners were permitted to live. I think it was the Edo period, but I don't have internet as I'm writing this, so I can't quite check. We saw brightly lit ships, apparently party boats, an old church that I think is famous, and another group of foreigners that had had rather a lot more to drink than we had and were eager to talk to us. They were also students, but in a university near Tokyo, and had driven for more than 20 hours to get to Nagasaki. Unfortunately for the partiers in our group, we walked away before anyone remembered to ask them for the location of a bar.

From Dejima, we started heading back towards the hotel until someone consulted a guidebook to find bars. The first was expensive, crowded, or exclusive -- not sure which, but for one of those reasons we ended up not going in. At the next, though, we were greeted at the door by an Indian 20-something from New York who was at the end of his two-year stay in Nagasaki. He welcomed us, introduced himself and some of the friends he was with, and encouraged us to try to stump the DJ with song requests. A few people tried -- the one I caught was Radiohead, but I forget or never knew the others -- but with no success. The wall of CD's contained everything they came up with. We all ordered drinks. I'm told they weren't expensive, though having never paid for my own drinks at a bar before (largely but not entirely because I don't go to bars much... it's a long story and fairly boring) I don't really know. Between slow katakana reading and not being familiar with mixed drinks, people had some trouble with their orders. Mine ("moscow mule") was small and not too strong, so I was fine, and Harrison ordered a black russian, which was tasty, but a couple people ordered long island iced teas and ended up somewhat worse off. After getting some more tips on places around town from the New Yorker, whose name I think was John, we headed back to the hotel, though a few people ended up going back out to bring more alcohol to the hotel. People decided to play Kings, a drinking game I'd never played before, so I figured I'd be social, put my problem set off a little longer, and join in. After the convenience store run, there was delicious calpis sake available, with only slightly more alcohol content than non-alcoholic beer, so I grabbed one of those. We ended up playing twice. The most interesting part of the game, I think, was the never-have-I-ever card. Learned all sorts of interesting things about the people I was with, which I have all sorts of reasons for not writing down here. At any rate, after the second game people started heading off to bed, so I headed down the stairs with Janet to work on my problem set while she organized surveys and wrote important e-mails. Around 6am, I had finished all but one problem. After staring at it for a while, I gave up and went to sleep.

Four hours later, we all got up and prepared for the new day. A couple people who had drunk more the previous night and less in their life up to that point were feeling less than wonderful, so we took a little while getting out of the hotel and through with breakfast. Breakfast was a convenience store meal, enjoyed on the rocks next to the river while playing with the koi. Harrison, Melinda, and I, operating in the name of science... or fun... or something... discovered that koi not only like mochi, but like sticks covered in mochi. Also, their mouths are kind of freaky up close and they're really hard to catch with your hands. Anyways, once we'd been pulled away from that amusement, we all headed off to the northern part of the city. And really, the contents of the northern part of the city should be in a separate paragraph from hangovers and koi fishing.

The northern part of Nagasaki is the area that was most heavily affected by the atomic bombing. Purely by chance, Tuesday was unseasonably hot. Natural phenomenon of course, but it sort of contributed to the atmosphere. The first stop on the tourist agenda there is the hypocenter, with a stone marking where the bomb detonated, a pillar still standing from a church that once stood on the site, and statues and sepulchers representing the tragedies of the aftermath of the atomic explosion. From there, we went to the atomic bomb museum. While there are all sorts of anti-Japanese arguments that can be made based on that -- they gloss over the part where they were the aggressors, Pearl Harbor isn't mentioned anywhere, they portray themselves as advocates of peace -- the Americans are not portrayed strongly as villains in the museum. It focuses instead on the tragedy. Interestingly, it starts with the remains of the church that had just been constructed and whose pillar I think is still standing at the hypocenter. Probably an attempt to appeal to westerners, but a sad story nonetheless. The next room contained all sorts of artifacts, including scorched outfits, walls with humans' silhouettes burnt into them, and a glass bottle fused by the heat to the bones of the human hand that had been holding it. The final room, however, was the most powerful. One wall was covered with stories from survivors of the explosion, and after reading one, by a girl whose mother had died rescuing her other daughter from underneath a fallen beam, I and I think a few other members of the group had to leave. In the US, there seems to be a knee-jerk response, whenever the bombings are mentioned, to leap to the defense of the bombers and object to Japanese reactions like this museum as villainizing the Americans. While I do agree that the bombing was necessary, it's still worth waiting a little and listening to the stories. Not because the Japanese were right, but just as another argument against war. To that end, the trip through the museum ended with a short movie about disarmament and the movement against nuclear testing, and the next stop was the peace park. There, a variety of statues from all over the world, no doubt full of cryptic symbolism, stand advocating peace. By this point, even those of us who hadn't started the day hung over were feeling a bit sluggish.

The afternoon, though, was much lighter. We took a ferry from Dejima harbor to the resort island of Ioujima. Despite this being a holiday week, the place was deserted. We all rented bikes and rode to a beach nearby, where we enjoyed playing in the water until we discovered jellyfish (the easy way, from a distance), then stuck to the sand. There were more jumping pictures and some rather impressive gymnastics. After Kyle, Jen, and Chris took off and Melinda and I discovered that sand stuck on wet legs in cool patterns, we decided to bury me in sand completely. Being buried in sand in full clothing was maybe not the best idea of my life, but it was fun. After I'd shaken most of the sand out of my pants, shirt, and hair, we got back on our bikes to do a little exploration. Unfortunately, before we'd gotten very far the road sloped upwards pretty sharply, and we decided not to try our one-speed bikes on the hill. Since our ferry tickets had come with onsen (hot springs/public bath) passes, we went for our first onsen experience. It was fun, though somewhat hot even without trying the hottest baths or the sauna. We ended up finishing just in time to make it back to the return ferry. Forgot to mention before -- the boat was incredibly fun. Returning after the onsen, I was a little too cold to go out on the deck, but on the way over we were all out there enjoying the wind, the water, and the view of Nagasaki retreating. Same boat, different ride going back. A few people went out, but most of us sat inside, preparing ourselves for the 2.5 hour all-you-can-eat sushi that John had helped us set up for that evening.

From the boat, we hurried to the restaurant to keep our 7:30 reservation. We were all hungry, since we'd mostly skipped lunch, and got straight to the ordering. There were all sorts of tasty things, and whiel I'm not a very good judge of sushi, I suspect that they were just as good as sushi in a Japanese port city should be. There were, of course, something things that they "gave" us without our ordering them, mostly we think to fill us up and prevent us from ordering more expensive things. We ended up using a particularly unappetizing soup as a receptacle for other things that we didn't want to finish, so that we wouldn't be charged for them (shhh), and took full advantage. It was a fairly expensive dinner, but between the sushi and the drinks we definitely got our money's worth and our stomachs full. Afterwards, we headed back to the hotel. While no one could so much as look at food, most were still willing to drink, so we played another round of Kings before most people went off to sleep and I went back to my problem set. Not surprisingly, working on a problem that I had already been stuck on after that evening, I didn't get very far, so I decided to take a late day and ask for help when I could get it. Still didn't get much sleep, but better than none.

With that, our time in Nagasaki was up. As I've suggested, this was one of the points when the group shrunk. Kyle, Jen, and Chris took off for Tokyo, while Harrison, Melinda, Janet, CJ, Lawrence, and I headed way off south, back again through Kumamoto, to Kagoshima.