Wrapping up Hiroshima

After the museum, I walked the grounds outside the museum, basking in the gorgeous weather. There are several exhibits around the park: a mound containing the ashen remains of 70,000 unidentified victims, the Peace Bell, and the Children's Peace Monument.


I took all this in, then headed toward the A-Bomb Dome (the rechristened Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall that survived the bombing). As I circled the building, I noticed among the horde of tourists a woman walking a dog. The dog turned out to be a Yorkie, a breed I don't often see in Japan.

I noticed a few high school students walking around holding clipboards, and soon one walked up to me. She explained that her class was asking for signatures for a petition supporting the peace memorial. She did all of this in beautiful English. I sort of stammered for a moment, unsure whether to reflexively answer in Japanese or switch over to English. After I complimented her on her English and signed the petition, she asked where I'm from. When I told her I live in Tsushima, a few other students came up and started talking to me--entirely in English. Is this normal for students in big cities?

I spent the rest of the afternoon just strolling around Hiroshima, enjoying the sights and the weather. For lunch, I stopped at an okonomiyaki restaurant. Hiroshima is well-known for its style of okonomiyaki, layering rather than mixing the ingredients. I was seated at a bar in front of the grill, so I got to watch the chef in action.

The menu included westernized ingredients and toppings, like cheese and bacon, in addition to the more standard octopus, shrimp, cabbage, and mayonnaise. I went with the standard type, but added some cheese. It was heavenly.

For dinner that night, Google showed me where a Mexican restaurant was, and I gorged myself on nachos and tortillas while reading On the Road and The Selfish Gene.

Afterwards, I found an arcade. Despite my love of videogames, I don't play most of the kinds I find in Japanese arcades. Not even Mario Kart Arcade sucks me in the way it ought to. About the only games that grab me are the Taiko drum game and coin-operated ports of games like Super Mario World or the original Super Mario Bros.

This time, however, I discovered a different game. A group of middle school boys were clustered around a setup that looked like an emulation of Mario. When I got closer, though, I saw the sign above the casing and read The House of the Dead, a zombie-shooter series that's been around for twelve years. I was confused, though, because the boys weren't holding up ray guns to shoot the zombies.

The game they were playing was called The Typing of the Dead. (The sign said Typing, but I had seen of the Dead and assumed it began with House.) Two QWERTY keyboards are in place of the original guns, and when confronted by an enemy in the game, you must type a string of characters (usually words or phrases, but sometimes single letters or numbers) within a few seconds to kill them. It's brilliant.

The game was intended to be educational--since it builds typing skills--and as an English typing game in Japan, it was even more so. After the boys beat the game, I sat down to have a go. All the normal enemies are killed by typing words, and tiny enemies (like bats or leeches) require single letters or numbers. The bosses, however, require you to answer trivia. The question is in Japanese, and three to four answer choices are given. You type your answer, and if you're right, the boss takes damage; if you're wrong, you take damage. This is all timed, in the interest of fast-paced gameplay, which meant all I could do was read the first two words of the question, pick an answer at random, and type it as fast as I could.

I didn't get very far.

On my way out of the arcade, I found a putting game. It looks pretty straightforward in a picture, but the putting surface would tilt and move around during your stroke. Craziness.

Monday, I took a taxi to Hiroshima Station. The driver complimented me on my Japanese, and during our conversation, I found out he's from Hokkaidō, the northernmost island of Japan. I tried to find out why on earth he moved to Hiroshima, but I couldn't quite understand the explanation.

I caught my train for Fukuoka and plane for Tsushima without incident. I came away from this thoroughly satisfied: I made a leisurely trip to one of my main to-dos in Japan, without using any of my vacation time.