Easter Holidays

A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks. The school year finished and the 3rd graders graduated. I went to some leaving parties including my own. In the easter holidays I moved to Matsumoto. After I had moved I had some time so I went to visit Kyushu, southern Japan.
To save money I went by bus which took 18 hours. I split up the journey by visiting Nara on the way and I saw the famous Buddha and the many deer which live in the surrounding park. Legend has it if you can crawl the Buddha's nose you will get good luck. You can't crawl through the actual Buddha's nose but there is a wooden hole the same size that is used as a substitute. I managed to crawl through so I hope I get good luck.
I went to Nagasaki afterwards. I saw the atomic bomb museum and peace park. The personal accounts and the small details of what happened really shook me and serve as a reminder of what happened. The recovery the city has made after the atomic bomb makes it hard to imagine it was razed to the ground just over 60 years ago. I also saw the many old Dutch and European buildings from the time when Nagasaki was the only point of contact with the outside world in Japan during the Edo period. The next day I went to Unzen, a very active volcano near to Nagasaki. I had an onsen near the steam filled foothills called 'Jigoku' meaning 'hell' in Japanese. The water was very hot and coloured green by the minerals in the rock. Before I left I also took a boat tour of a place called Battleship Island, a now abandoned island with a strange history. I thought it was so ugly that it went full circle and achieved a stark beauty of its own.
I went onwards to Fukuoka, the largest city in Kyushu. I ate the local Hakata ramen and heartily recommend it. Fukuoka is everything you expect of a Japanese city; clean, safe, runs like clockwork, busy, full of neon and skyscrapers. I liked it. Near to Fukuoka is a place called "Tachirai Peace Memorial Hall". From the title you probably won't guess it is a museum about the Kamikaze pilots who were trained in Tachirai Air Base in World War two. It was all in Japanese but the curator took the time to talk to me (in Japanese) about the all the exhibits. It was very interesting and showed the pilots as ordinary people, ordered by their increasingly desperate commanders towards the end of the war to be suicide bombers. The museum had a British Rolls Royce airplane engine that was used in a Japanese fighter plane. The irony of it amused me.
It was a very interesting trip and a nice break. I'm just starting my third year in Japan and am still finding surprising things about this country.