Above: Hiroshima at dusk, as seen from my room in the Rihga Royal Hotel

I recently spent a long weekend in Hiroshima prefecture, which is less than two hours by bullet train southwest of Kyoto. As I mentioned in my last post, I stayed for a night on the stunning island of Miyajima. I also stayed one night in Hiroshima city, the modern, bustling-but-not-too-crowded capital of Hiroshima prefecture.

After checking into our hotel around noon, my friend and I got right to the point, which was to eat lunch. We ate Hiroshima-yaki in Okonomi-mura, a collection of three floors of Hiroshima-yaki restaurants in the city center.

Hiroshima-yaki is Hiroshima's version of okonomiyaki, a kind of cross between a pancake and a crepe. The kind of okonomiyaki that I usually eat is Osaka-style okonomiyaki,—a mixture of an egg-and-flour-batter, with lettuce and other ingredients mixed in by preference (such as shrimp, mochi, and fatty slices of pork), poured onto a table-top grill and cooked into a thick, savory pancake. After it’s grilled, you add toppings to it, including okonomiyaki sauce (a tangy, savory, clearish-brown sauce), bonito flakes (smoked fish shavings), and seaweed powder.

Hiroshima-yaki contains a generous batch of noodles (with a little bit of batter), with seafood or other ingredients added by preference. Unlike Osaka-style okonomiyaki, the ingredients for Hiroshima-yaki are piled on top of each other instead of mixed together.

The kind we tried had egg noodles, sliced cabbage, and bean sprouts, with a thin wafer of fried dough on top, and strips of fatty pork, egg, and fresh shrimp mixed in. Hiroshima-yaki is typically cooked for you (instead of you cooking it at your own table-top grill, as is often the case with Osaka-style okonomiyaki).

The Hiroshima-yaki was very filling and tasted quite good, but was more greasy than Osaka-style okonomiyaki, which I decided I prefer more. I like the chewy richness of the Osaka-style okonomiyaki, while the Hiroshima-yaki tasted more oily and was also harder to eat—since the ingredients were just piled on top of each other, each slice of okonomiyaki kept falling apart while I was trying to eat it.

After lunch, we walked over to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which is traversed by a series of bridges and the river.

It really does feel peaceful there, and the most surprising thing to me was how much the design of the park reminded me of Paris. The curve of the river, the curve of the bridges, the walking paths that paralleled the river, even the overcast sky that day—they all reminded me of walking along the Seine in autumn or winter.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the designers of the Peace Memorial Park deliberately imitated Paris in their design—Japan seems to be quite a nation of Francophiles, judging by the many French-inspired bakeries and French-inspired knickknacks they sell in stores around here.

The famous Atomic Dome building is also in the Peace Memorial Park. It has been left as is since the 1945 atomic bombing, and is a UNESCO world heritage site.

At the Peace Memorial Park, we visited the Children’s Peace Monument, which displays paper cranes made by schoolchildren around Japan. The monument is dedicated to the memory of Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who developed leukemia after the bombing of Hiroshima.

After her diagnosis, she decided to fold 1,000 paper cranes, which, according to Japanese tradition, can grant you one wish. Although she reached her goal of 1,000 cranes, young Sadako died at the age of twelve. Today, schoolchildren from around the world fold paper cranes and send them to Hiroshima to display at the memorial. The cranes are housed in display cases behind the monument.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is located at the southern end of the park. It contains displays about not just the Hiroshima bombing, but Japan’s involvement in wars leading up to World War II. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far in the museum, because shortly after I went there, my stomach decided it wasn’t very happy with the Hiroshima-yaki, and I spent most of my time for the rest of my visit in the very peaceful restroom of the museum.

But with every stumble springs hope. After I got my stomach in order, we headed over to Hiroshima-jo, Hiroshima’s very own castle.

The castle itself wasn’t particularly impressive—it’s mostly an open-air structure that was partly rebuilt in 1958 after the bombing (with other parts left as they were, showing the ruins to the castle’s original foundation).

At the castle, though, was the first sign of spring—cherry blossoms!

It’s a shrine, and it floats!

I recently visited Hiroshima prefecture and stayed overnight on Miyajima, a small island northwest of Hiroshima Bay.

Miyajima (which is officially known as "Itsukushima," but is popularly known as "Miyajima") is a must-see site for any visitor to Hiroshima. The island is known for Itsukushima-jinja, a Shinto shrine with a torii, or gate, that appears to float in the water when it’s high tide. The floating torii (pronounced "to-ree"—rhymes with “story”) is ranked as one of Japan's top three sites.

Although it’s most famous for its torii, Miyajima is also known for a few more things, including: oysters, rice paddles, and leaf-shaped pastries.

When my friend and I first got to Miyajima, we tried out the oysters first. We ate at a restaurant near the bay, each of us ordering oyster donburi—a bowl of oysters, eggs, and onions over rice.

Oysters are famous throughout Hiroshima prefecture, and these did not disappoint—they were fresh, tender, and juicy (not unlike the excellent oysters I’ve eaten in the San Francisco Bay Area, I might add). Yum.

After lunch, it was almost high tide, and we walked over to see the torii. According to Wikipedia, the torii was built in the 12th century, although the current one dates back to the 19th century. It was built so that commoners—who weren’t allowed to set foot on the holy island of Miyajima—would have to sail through the gate at high tide.

I had seen pictures of the torii before in guidebooks and on websites. In person, the torii looks serene and eloquent, surrounded by mountains and the sea. It’s a bright orange-red, a shade that reminded me of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Giving a unique contrast to the eloquent torii are the scruffy-looking deer that roam around Miyajima. Similar to Nara, Miyajima is known for its free-roaming deer, which like to amble around, trying to nab food from sympathetic tourists.

Miyajima is also known for its wooden rice paddles, a phenomenon which baffled me while I was there. Miyajima’s small, quaint streets are filled with shop after adorable shop, most of which have a generous assortment of rice paddles on display. The rice paddles have writing on them that, according to one of my co-workers, have lucky messages, such as “do well at school,” and the like.

 
It turns out that Miyajima claims to be the spot where a monk named Seishin invented the wooden rice paddle in the 18th century. I’m a bit skeptical about this, with all due respect to Miyajima. Isn’t the 18th century a bit recent for a tool as rudimentary as a wooden rice paddle to be invented? After all, weren’t humans already using spoons in Cro-Magnon days?

Regardless, you can find rice paddles of all sizes in Miyajima. You can even get your face painted on a rice paddle. (I resisted, although I am totally going to get my baby’s face painted on one, if/whenever I have a kid).

And the best part—Miyajima is home to the world’s largest rice paddle. Weighing 2.5 tons and measuring 7.7 meters long, this is one big rice paddle.

Miyajima is also a famous leaf-peeping spot in the fall, and it’s known for selling leaf-shaped pastries year-round. The pastries are called momiji manju and are stuffed with sweet fillings such as red bean paste or chocolate cream. A number of shops make the manju on-site, using machines that reminded me of the Krispy Kreme doughnut machines.

On Miyajima, we stayed at the adorable Guest House Kikugawa, a casual, 8-room inn that features both western-style and Japanese-style rooms. My friend and I stayed in a Japanese-style room.

The room came with complimentary green tea and rice-paddle-shaped cookies.

For an added fee, the friendly owners of the Guest House Kikugawa cook a traditional Japanese dinner (and a Western-style breakfast, for that matter) for their guests. Dinner that night was amazing. An eight-course traditional Japanese meal of local delicacies (for less than 4000 yen!).

Highlights included grilled fish and shrimp:

Oysters cooked Western-style, with cheese on top. Very fresh and delicious:

White fish sashimi that was not for the faint of heart, but was quite delicious for a sashimi-lover like yours truly:

Some sort of mashed root vegetable (it tasted a bit like taro) with salmon roe on top (apologies--I asked the nice elderly owner what most of these dishes are, but unfortunately, I didn’t recognize the Japanese words she used):

A salted fish that was cooked in a similar style to what I’ve eaten when I went leaf-peeping in Takao and hiking in Tsumago, but this one was by far the most delicious. It was tender and not too salty—just right.

To finish things off, dessert! Very delicious green tea ice cream, with an even more delicious sesame-ish mousse-ish confection, plus a strawberry.

Note: At this point, I would like to give a shout-out to the adorable Australian at the table next to mine, who was also taking pictures of every dish he ate, also with a Canon digital SLR. William, if you’re ever in the Kyoto area again, talk to me. (And this is the closest I’ll ever come to putting a winking emoticon in my blog.)

After dinner, we walked over to see the torii again, which is lit up by floodlights at night. Most tourists only visit Miyajima during the daytime, so the streets were very quiet by the time we headed out.

There were a few tourists taking pictures of the torii, which was actually lit up a bit too brightly for my taste. Although my camera tried valiantly, the torii didn’t show up well in my shots. (Special thanks to William for taking some pics of the torii from his camera with my SD card.)

The most unique part of seeing the torii at night was that it was low tide, and we could walk out to the torii. Close up, you can see the whole logs they used to build the torii, and the gentle, natural curves of those logs.

Being so close to the torii, at night, with fewer tourists, made the experience feel much more personal than it had during the daytime. It made the torii feel more mystical. It’s only when you walk up to the torii that you can see the many coins scattered around its base by past visitors. Pretty cool.

The next day, we took the Miyajima Ropeway gondola up Mount Misen, the tallest mountain on the island.

The view from the top of the mountain was gorgeous—you can see south to Shikoku island. The mountains in the distance are layered behind each other—the view reminded me of Byron Bay, Australia. So lovely.

Similar to the Iwatayama Monkey Park in Arashiyama, Mount Misen also features a lot of wild monkeys, along with the obligatory monkey warning signs.

And before we left beautiful Miyajima, we had one more meal. For lunch, I ate udon with a side of anago-meshi, broiled sea eel over rice. Anago is another dish that Miyajima is famous for. It was pretty good, but not spectacular--your standard tasty eel, although the dish I had tasted reheated, alas.

Overall, though, Miyajima was peaceful, scenic, and delicious. Just the way I like it.

Next post: Hiroshima!