I've been meaning to visit Miyajima and its Torii-in-the-Sea for quite some time now, and today I finally did it.
Since Hiroshima is only 90 minutes away, Robert and I decided to sleep in and get a train around 10AM, which we did. When we got to Hiroshima, a leisury lunch was first on the menu, then we took the Local train to Miyajimaguchi, where we hopped onto the JR-ferry to Miyajima.
The main attraction there is a Torii (a temple gate), standing in the water. It sits on the sea bed, held there by its own weight:
Unfortunately, the tide began to rise rapidly and I didn't bring my swimming trunks, or else I would have been standing next to it. ;)
The accompanying temple is nice, but not very spectacular.
After petting some deer (the Imperial Deer that inhabit Nara also live on Miyajima) and seeing a little girl totally freak out because she was surrounded by five of those deer who were trying to figure out whether she had something edible or whether she was edible herself (I really felt sorry for her), we went back to Hiroshima to have some Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki and to photograph the A-Bomb Dome near the Hiroshima Peace Park after sundown.
This is one of the results:
Shot with a Canon Powershot A75, ISO200, F/2,8, .59 shutter time from a tripod. Quite nice, if I do say so myself.
The A-Bomb Dome is an existing building (or what remained of it after the explosion of the first Atomic Bomb over the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945) turned into a monument. It used to be a Industrial Promotion Hall until the bomb went off, and it was the only building still standing (somewhat) after the blast. After Hiroshima started cleaning up the rubble and rebuilding itself, people wanted to have the former Industrial Promotion Hall to be demolished, but it was decided otherwise, and so the ruins remain as a reminder of what happened on that day in August.
I'm not saying the Japanese were saints during the war; far from it, but the bomb did a lot of damage, both to property as to people. In the end, I have to conclude that it was a good thing, as it (and the second bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki three days later) basically ended a war that could have turned out very nasty with heavy losses.
We returned at our apartments around 22:50.
Tomorrow, I'm going to visit Osaka Castle and do some shopping; two things I planned earlier this week, but because of my flu, I didn't got around to yet.
Cheers, K.