Jonah's Journey across Japan

 On our morning in Ishinomaki we had to walk up some massive hills to get to our destinations. From our hostel we had to go up a mountain then back down to get to our first place to visit, the site of the Kadonowaki Elementary school. On March 11, 2011 a huge earthquake created a massive tsunami wave reaching heights of 40 meters in some areas which tore through the eastern coast of Japan, taking the lives of over 10,000 people. The site of Kadonowaki Elementary school serves as a haunting reminder of the event, as well as an opportunity to learn from the tsunami.      The damage done to the school was a terrible combination of the elements, as the first floor was flooded and destroyed by the debris the wave pushed along, but the second and third floors were burned to a crisp after power lines were taken down and set the dry parts ablaze. Luckily every student survived, as they evacuated to the top of the nearby mountain, but they had to watch in horror as this giant...

 We woke up early this morning with the intent of making it all the way to a small town called Shima Onsen to stay in the oldest hot spring inn in Japan called Sekizenkan Kashoutei. Hayao Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away used this inn as inspiration. We had planned to ride a shinkansen (bullet train) for the first time, but of course we were just a little bit late and had to find a different way to our destination. We ended up taking local trains most of the way, but rode a shinkansen for about a half hour, and it was incredibly fast. It accelerates and gets faster and faster and when you think it's done it keeps getting faster. After our roundabout way of getting to Nakanojo station we were around two hours behind schedule, it wasn't a big deal because we could still catch a bus to Shima Onsen early enough to check in for the dinner they provide. The dinner they made for us was a traditional Japanese meal of many different small dishes, comprised mostly of pickled veggi...

 On this third day I had planned to go see Mt. Fuji, but it's been overcast and rainy every single day of our stay in Tokyo, so there's a good chance we wouldn't even be able to see it from the neighborhood I wanted to visit. This was only the first disappointment of the day, I don't want to give the impression that I'm having a bad time here, some things just didn't work out on this day, I'll explain later.     So, skipping Mt. Fuji gave us a lot of extra time so we went to some places my dad was interested in. We checked out the Tokyo National Diet Building, which sounds like an odd name, but it's called that because it's where the Japanese parliament meets. Diet is the Prussian term for parliament, and Japan adopted the term during the Meiji restoration, which was a period when Japan had just reopened it's borders and made a great effort to take in ideas from other countries leading in their fields and use them to improve Japanese society. Pru...

 On our second full day in Tokyo we started our day by making our way to Ueno park, which holds the Tokyo National Museum as well as Ueno Zoo. My plan was to eat omurice (a breakfast dish that consists of a plate of rice with a slightly liquidy omelet sat on top that is cut in the center so that the omelet drapes over the rice) but all of the restaurants nearby that serve omurice were not open yet, so we went to a 7-11 for an easy konbini meal. By the time we were done eating the Tokyo National Museum was about to open so we walked to Ueno park and explored the exhibits. The outside was beautiful, but we weren't allowed to take pictures inside.     It was a very interesting experience inside the museum, I can't believe how many ancient artifacts there were that were thousands of years old or more. The special exhibit that was in this rotation was about Honen, a Buddhist master who brought the concept of Pure Land Buddhism to Japan. One aspect of this revolution of Buddhis...

 After arriving at Narita airport we got on the train and headed for Shinjuku, where our hostel is located. We are staying at the Yamate Rest House for four nights for an amazingly low price of about $30 per night. Its not an amazing hotel but we won't be spending very time awake there anyways. Here is the amazing view from our room.     We also met the neighborhood cat, who has since acted as a rooster alarm clock meowing in the morning, here he is chilling under a car getting away from the rain.      After dropping off our stuff we ventured into the rainy night in search of three things; the Shinjuku Godzilla head, food, and a late night batting cage. After some searching we found the godzilla head, it was difficult to navigate because cell service with t-mobile is not very fast here. Baseball is pretty huge in Japan, so there are a lot of batting cages open very late. We found one close by and wacked some balls, or at least tried to. It's been a long tim...