Day Thirty: Kanazawa and Toyama

still feeling sick, even after my great experiences with the toilet, i slept til about noon and left marcelos to go on another adventure.

takaoka is located between to larger cities Kanazawa and Toyama, so i walked from his home to the station. it took about an hour. it was only raining a little bit.

i got off at the train stations and walked around parks in the area. looked at trees, streams, and of course the inevitable shrine and castle. it was good to get out and get some fresh air that day.

its good to get out and look for the small things. i have mentioned before about finding meaning in life by the small and often fleeting moments of happiness. we often have to fall back on those things to get us through the most difficult moments of life.

for me, today was a day of looking for beauty in small things. as i have been going along, i realized i have come halfway through my journey and had a lifetime of significant and special experiences. i have been running out of gas as of late and am looking for some time to rest and simply sit back, relax, and enjoy the simple things of this world.

the leaves on the trees, the rain, the wind, the love of a parent for a child and the feeling of love in general.

the animals, the insects, the rocks and the sky.

the japanese are very nature oriented, it comes with the territory of being a japanese person i guess. its rooted in the religions of so many generations past, and even if some dont necessarily follow those beliefs down to the same details, they still live to honor and uphold those same ideals of their ancestors.

many of the names and places of the country are named for things in nature, which i reckon might be the same as people in america. names like brooks or field or stone, we have mel brooks, sally field and stone cold steve austin.

so as much as i would have loved to have a truly adventurous day, this one was less than what i have been able to tell of previously. this was more of a day to refuel and begin the next part of my trip, the final half, which may come as a more difficult ordeal than i had expected.

we never really know.

Day Twenty Nine: Takaoka

A lot of the day was spent with me sleeping.

Marcelo went to work and left me all alone at his house, something that people dont usually do that know me too well. For all he knew, he could have come home and i might have turned everything upside down and created my own backwards world within his home. sometimes when youre sick, things like that have a way of just happening

but i didnt do that

i didnt really do much of anything until he came home from work, aside from sleeping and occasionally eating. i was like being back at byu all over again.

when he came back at about 6 that evening, he was kind enough to drive me around the town for a little bit. i get kinda crazy these days if i stay in one place for too long, so the opportunity to get out and do something was a real gem.

that evening, i saw something that i rarely see, but apparently its catching on in the country, and i dont know why.

you may or may not be familiar with the japanese bidet style toilets.

these are magical toilets that, prior to doing your business on the toilet, send a straight stream of warm water towards your nether-regions, giving a first-timer the most awkward feeling of their life.

now that i have become used to it, its no big deal, but let me give you a quick run down of one of our more basic models.

here is our toilet. its pretty normal, looks mostly like a toilet, not at all like a robot, except it does have an arm and a big pad behind it like you might see on the wall in gym class.

but when you sit on it, you notice something...the seat...its already warm. this cant be right, nobody has sat on this seat for the last three hours!? but its true, first of all, there is an automatic warming feature that keeps the seat at a warm temperature at any hour of the day.

so after you sit down, you notice some buttons on the panel to your right. what do they mean?


well anyone may know that the one on the far left means stop because of the little square and the word "stop" written in not just one but two languages, so it will stop the stream of water in its tracks. the next one over...hmmmm.

it looks like a curvy W with a dotten Y underneath, but that is only to the untrained eye. this image is actually a bottom with a stream of water being sprayed towards its cheeks. press this button with caution.

next button over, now this one is a doozy. it is a picture of a female with a stream of water sprayed towards her bottom, but no, this stream of water is aimed just a little bit further forward. what happens from there is left for you to piece together, but google "bidet" if you must, just dont include an image search.

this may be decent for females to use, but i would strongly not recommend it for males

all of these spray options have the thing underneath to change the amount of pressure exerted.

now the final button, which is the one i dont understand that seems to be catching on, even though it is popular already. it is the button you push that makes the sound of a toilet flushing, complete with a toggle underneath to decrease or increase the volume of the toilet flushing sound. if anyone knows the purpose behind the toilet flishing sound button, please tell me so one of the greatest mysteries and conflicts of my life can see some closure.

the toilet is armed with a sensor so it knows when someone is actually sitting on it, so when you sit down, all of the sudden all these gadgets and gizmos start going and you feel like youre using the toilet of the millenium falcon. unless the sensor is being triggered by someone sitting on the toilet, it wont squirt a single drop. its just smart like that.

now i may not be the most clever person in the whole world, but with my mischievious mind, i realized if you just cover the sensor with your hand...and touch the squirt button...water still comes out...

just please dont do this, expecially in the handicapped bathroom, or the old woman going in the bathroom after you will think you urinated all over the wall in front of the toilet and she will press the bathroom alarm button and have you arrested.


luckily nobody has this problem because of this sign above the toilet explaning how girls and boys have different parts, and therefore should conduct themselves differently when using the toilet.

Day Twenty Eight: Hiro-o

after the things i have felt and seen in the last three days, i was feeling it was time for a break

it’s the morning that I am set to go to the temple in hiro-o, and im really not feeling so hot

maybe its because its 7am and my body doesnt like this? normal brandon wake up time happens normally between when the sun is up and when it is down when i am taking classes at college.

but luckily for me, the sun rises at about 5am in this country

BUT...

that is not why they call it the land of the rising sun.

but back to my original point, i was up and i was feeling under the weather.

as a matter of fact, there hadn’t been a moment of the entire trip when I felt so fatigued. but it really wasn’t so big of a deal, cause I joined Marcelo to the temple in Tokyo anyways.

for any member of the church of jesus Christ of latter day saints, it is a great privilege to be able to go to the temple. for me, it was an even greater privilege not only to be able to go into the temple, but to be able to go into the temple in the center of Tokyo.

the funny thing about the Tokyo temple is that it is located one subway stop down from roppongi, the ward in Tokyo I spoke about before that I found so incredibly disgusting. when I asked Marcelo where his favorite spot in Tokyo was, he said roppongi, but apparently there are actually places that aren’t all that bad.

as a matter of fact, there may even be places there that aren’t that bad at all. after all, when you walk just a while down from the streets of roppongi, you are able to stand not only by the mormon temple, but also at the main offices for the church in japan.

it took u about 3 or 4 hours to make it there by train. it was raining outside so it wasn’t the best day to be riding in a car.

so me and Marcelo hang out at the temple for a while, we do a session there and are on our way out. as were walking back to the station, I remember that this is also the place where my second mission president lives. His name is Gary Stevenson, and for the members of the church out there that were able to watch the last general conference, President Stevenson, now a member of the first quorum of the seventy, spoke on temples during the final session on sunday afternoon.


so me and Marcelo went on a hunt looking for him. we searched far and wide the areas around hiro-o, until we finally tracked him and his wife down at the offices of the church. his receptionist called him down and I was able to have a great talk with him and his wife both about how their lives have been now that he has been given one of the highest callings in the church, and also about my life as a vagabond traveler.


all in all it was a great day. we walked back in the rain towards the train station and got back on the trains for the 4 hour trip back to takaoka. during the trip, Marcelo said I was looking sicker than I had in the morning and that I should take a good respite for the next couple of days and explore the areas of takaoka.

I was feeling sick, very sick, and knew that it might be best to follow his advice.

so when I got back to his home, I passed out on the bed in the guest room.

after the things i have felt and seen in the last four days, i was feeling it was time for a break

Day Twenty Seven: Hiroshima

I was up and out of the internet place sometime around 7am. I asked again where my hat had gone, and nobody knew.

in order to grieve the lost of my beloved fidel castro hat, I walked back to the gembaku dome, the atomic bomb dome. on my way, I walked by a memorial that looked like it had been created for the children victims of Hiroshima. there was a small group of elementary school students who had created a thing made of a thousand cranes to have placed in these plexi-glass cases behind the statue. they reverently sang a song and presented the cranes to a woman working at the memorial.

A word to the 60c60d faithful:

All images on the blog can be blown up with a simple mouse click. I try hard to capture a few minor details in the photographs I decide to post, so if youre interested in the intricate details of these images, theyre only a click away.

I went and sat on a bench that overlooked the river that it sat beside and fell asleep for about three hours.

an old Japanese lady came over and started raking leaves where I was sitting and I woke up and scared her half to death. she said she was sorry for waking me up cause she could tell I was enjoying myself. she was a pretty decent old lady. I asked her if she knew where my hat was and she didn’t.

places like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto and nara are literal gathering places of groups of school kids. at the place where I was sitting, when I woke up, I found I was surrounded by these kids who all gather around this certain marker to have their pictures taken as a group.

I took the opportunity to have fun with the kids, I made balloon animals, showed them up with a rubiks cube, and taught them animal names in English. it was great fun and it was all smiles, but after all this is Hiroshima, and as much as I wanted to smile, the thoughts of what happened at the very spot where I was sitting sometimes made it difficult, especially with all these kids around.

I just sat there and played with the groups of kids as they would pass through, making balloon flowers for the boys to give to their “girlfriends” and all sorts of things.

about noon I walked around some more, took in the sights and sounds of the Hiroshima peace park and then went into the museum.

it was much like the museum at Nagasaki, the first part dedicated to the bombing of the city itself and then the second devoted to the history of the atomic bomb.

the things in the museum were also just as devastating. I found myself crying more and more as I would walk through the corridors, listening to testimonies of survivors of the bombings, looking at old charred or melted artifacts and seeing the remarkable stories of those people who survived the bombing only to die years later from the radiation.

one particularly graphic image was a photograph taken of three people, it looked like a mother and two children, their faces had been burned and their hair sat bushy on their heads. their skin was melting and hanging off of their hands and arms as they walked towards the photographer.

the final story in the museum was the story of sadako sasaki, who had barely survived the bombings at the age of two, but at the age of ten, about seven or eight years after the bombing, was diagnosed with leukemia. she is credited as being the girl who began the paper crane phenomenon. although the legend has been around hundreds of years, she was the girl who spent months while in treatment, meticulously folding cranes hoping that it would heal her. she was only able to make it to a thousand, and continued to make more cranes.

at the age of twelve, she died.

she was buried with her thousand cranes. the final image i saw walking from the museum was this girl shortly before her burial, surrounded in her coffin by heaps of flowers and a thousand cranes.

the memorial that I had seen in the morning where the children were singing was the one that was created to honor her memory and the memory of all the bombings lost children. people now create these weaves made of a thousand cranes hoping for a wish to come true.

I did more walking around the area and recognized that based on the facts and figures, around 140,000 died at Hiroshima and 70,000 died at Nagasaki, bringing the dead of two bombings to 200,000, with hundreds of thousands severely injured.

aside from the thousands killed by these bombs, many more were killed by fire bomb attacks from the allies and some cities were almost completely burned. 500,000 perished being burned to death with millions left homeless in cities all over this country.

these are levels of death and destruction that I still find barely comprehensible. but events like these bombings, the mass slaying of six-million in the holocaust, and many other tragedies remind us of the need for peace in this world.

I left Hiroshima after more balloon animals and another walk around peace park.

for me, hiroshima had a completely different feel from nagasaki. there wasnt the same intensity for me. as opposed to creating a special spot for a marker for the hypocenter of the bomb, they just put a post on the side of a road that said "the first atomic bomb explosion in the history of mankind happened 500 meters above this spot"

it seemed that while the citizens of nagasaki were striving to create almost a spiritual atmosphere, the people of nagasaki almost felt an obligaition to remind people of the bombing rather than a duty.

this of course is probably far from the real intention of the people of hiroshima, but it is what i felt.

I was on shinkansen for about three hours and then a connecting train towards kanazawa and a city called takaoka where I would be staying.

the first treat I had was to be able to meet some missionaries when I got there, and don’t that beat all, they were Nagoya missionaries. my own mission turf.

the man letting me spend the night was named Marcelo arisawa, a guy known for being good with hooking up the missionaries. he has a really nice place and as we talked over dinner. he offered to take me to the mormon temple in Tokyo the next day.

there was an offer I definitely could not turn down.

so I went to bed in the guest room thinking about the next days four hour trip to the temple in Tokyo.

Day Twenty Six: Ioujima Island

I got up that morning and went on a sort of side-trip that was provided for free by the hostel I was staying at. Me and my friend Daniel, a Sri Lankan, raised in France and living in Japan, Roppongi actually, were the only ones to go.

We were with a guy who simply referred to himself as Kazu. He was a great guy and was a father of three. He took us around to some local monuments and shrines and told us a little more about the history of Nagasaki.

After walking around with him for a good thirty minutes or so, he just looked at ther two of us and said, “How would you like to see the dark side of Nagasaki”

i gulped and then was like “heck yeah I do!”

So he took us up the side of a hill which had been turned into a bunker for the Nagasaki elite during the time of the bombings. we were able to walk inside and see the place where government officials and few others were able to hide for the days following the bombing of Hiroshima. The people hiding there had not expected to be bombed though, but they were expecting air raids of firebombs, similar to the ones that burned Tokyo.

the final room we saw was the one where the telegraphs were that sent out the message to Tokyo that Nagasaki had been bombed. The people in the shelter felt a huge rumble and loud boom and then stepped outside to see the mushroom cloud and the city burning.

We thanked Kazu for the great tour and Daniel went out to explore the same things I had seen the day before.

My next thing I went to visit was the site of the martyrdom of the 26 saints of japan. in 1597 following the ban of Christianity in japan, twenty Japanese Christians and six foreign missionaries were crucified in this spot by the Japanese government after being arrested and tried in Tokyo and Osaka.


They were canonized by pope pius IX in the mid 1800’s and now this site stands as a monument and prayer spot to pay tribute to their heroism and bravery in the fight for their faith.

my good friend derek zohner told me years ago on our mission together that martin scorsese was set to direct a movie about these christian missionaries. my dad also sent me a newspaper clipping related to it.

and as it turns out, of course derek and my father were right. martin scorsese will direct the film "silence" starring benicio del toro, and the film will focus on the persecution against christian missionaries in japan during the 17th century.

because there is harldy any of japan left without a karaoke box or a pachinko parlor, the film will be produced in new zealand, like "the last samurai" was.

which...BY THE WAY, was based all on a battle that took place in the same area where i worked as a missionary with derek.


I stood there and did some contemplating, then fell asleep on a bench for about a half hour.

from then, I was back on a boat

I had heard of an island called iwo-jima that was just off the coast of Nagasaki.

Yeah, I know what youre thinking, this must be the iwo jima made famous by clint eastwood and his marvelous films.

but no, youre wrong, this place has nothing to do with clint eastwood.

even though it has the same name as the place where that battle in the pacific too place, this is just a resort that old people and sometimes young people with nothing better to do go to spend lots of money. but since I have no money, I went on a budget.

I got a ticket for 980yen that got me a round trip boat ride ticket and a free trip to the bathhouse on the island. how could I turn down such an offer!?

so I was on a boat heading towards iwo-jima.

during the trip, I noticed there was a beach there where people could probably go swimming, so when I reached the island, I went walking towards the beach. it took me about 45 minutes and when I got there I was sorely disappointed.

regardless of the promotional shots on the boat showing all the people having fun at the beach, there wasn’t a lot of fun there. mostly it was just garbage and dead jellyfish on the shore. there were some just chilling out in the water too. I wasn’t scared of them though, I eat things like them with peanut butter on bread.

I was also the only soul on the entire beach, which made me think it might be slightly dangerous to go swimming or maybe it had just become deserted because of all the gross trash. maybe it had something to do with all them jellyfish? I thought it might be pretty dangerous and that this beach wasn’t very much fun after all.

my other mission friend john logdson is a huge promoter of creating fun in very un-fun situations. his philosophy is "if its not fun, you gotta make it fun!" so shoot, I made it fun.

I stripped down in my shorts and took a dip.

heres one for all the ladies in the room.

then I walked back in my wet shorts to where I had heard there was an onsen, a bath house. I had never been in a bathhouse before, so I was extremely excited after hearing about it for most of my life, seeing movies about it, you know the whole deal.

I got to the place and gave the lady my ticket, she guided me to the men only door and gave me two towels before I walked in. I looked around and saw a locker room full of naked guys.

I figured, when in rome right?

so I joined them in the locker room nudity before entering into the main area of the bath house. let me just tell you folks, bath houses in this country are incredible.

there were tubs in there, and spas, and saunas, and showers, and all kinds of goodies, all containing different kinds of water made out of minerals that are made to heal ailments.

as is customary, first you go to this shower area and totally clean yourself up, nobody wants to be sitting next to another guy in a tub and see all these grodags coming off of his body and floating around. so folks clean off before entering into the baths full of magic juice water.

all of those different tubs full of stuff made me feel like I was in a big naked water park. I tried all the tubs, even the ones that were sitting on balconies outside overlooking the coast, all while shooting the breeze with more totally naked Japanese guys just chillin out all around.

I would highly recommend any foreigner coming to visit look for one of these bath houses and see what its all about. anyone who has seen the movie “spirited away” might get a good idea of a magical bathhouse, but this one was even better. like I said, a naked theme park.

the womens room was on the opposite side and was separated by a big wooden wall. we could still hear all those chicks over there having a grand old time cause it was completely open at the top.

this isn’t the kind of place you take a lot of pictures, so I left the camera in the locker room. but you can read about the spa and even look at pictures here. bonus points for ya if you can read the japanese, and if you cant, there is a cool page in english here to kind of explain this place, just not as many fun pictures.

I spent about an hour in there, and made my way back towards the boat after I dried my socks off with the locker room hair dryer.

I got on the boat, made my way back to Nagasaki and boarded the shinkansen for Hiroshima. I made it there at about midnight and took a stroll through the town, past the atomic bomb dome, and to where I would spend the night at an internet café. the hiroshima lightlife was apparently pretty bouncin.

due to all trains stopping at midnight, aside from the occasional sleeping car, there are almost nothing but taxis on the roads from 12 to 5am.


and sometime between when I arrived at the train station and when I found the internet place, I lost my hat.

and you know what, I really liked that hat