My spouse and I have been living on the road for eighteen months, as perpetual strangers, in a different country every month. I have been writing an essay about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, contemplating how societies deal with complex histories and wondering if/how memory can liberate the present.
In April/May 2025, we were in Japan. Here I contemplate the exotic and the familiar, the unique and universal, and memorials whose focus is our collective survival, and the possibility of sisterhood among strangers.
Sojiji Temple
Our place in Ibaraki was dark, drab, flimsy, cluttered, and ergonomically bad for our bodies. But it was cheap, and three blocks away from the Sōjiji Temple.
There are 80,000 Buddhist Temples in Japan. I submit, without evidence, that Sojiji is the prettiest, kindest, most sanguine, and most welcoming. We made it ours, coming every morning to meditate on two ceramic stools, with a tiny table between us, facing a pool with bonsai trees, koi fish, turtles, low stone bridges, and an ever-changing array of flowers in bloom. Founded in 886, to honor a life-saving turtle, rocks situated to resemble a shell with feet and head are hidden in every corner.
There were places to burn incense, believed to have healing powers, huts made of burnt wood where the spirit of Buddha sits, places to leave flowers, oranges, and water, and bells and gongs to ring, a way to greet the deity. We learned to bow before crossing the sanmon gate.
After our meditation, we would head to the Temple cafe, where the lunch special was an ever-changing array of delicate, tiny bites, served with an origami flower. On our last day, I used Google Translate to thank the cafe staff for welcoming us and taking good care of us. She responded through the app: thank you for coming every day.
On April 18, a special day for us, we noticed a crowd standing outside the main hut of Sojiji Temple. Inside, a group of dignitaries sat in suits. TV cameras recorded three priests in purple, green, and orange robes performing Yamakage-ryu –an annual ceremony. After an hour of ritual dance with knives, a fish is cut so sharply that its head and tail flip up, appearing alive and swimming. It was an honor to witness.
Despite the auspicious Sojiji Temple, our neighborhood was not a tourist destination. It had small winding roads, small to medium-sized homes, a few low-rise apartment buildings like ours, and many schools. Kids wearing matching sunhats and uniforms rode their bikes like they owned the road. Little ones sat like little royalty on the back of their parents’ bicycles.
Bikes were as common as in the Netherlands. People rode slowly, carrying shopping and children. Like in the Netherlands, they didn’t wear helmets. Bike parking lots at shopping malls, grocery stores, and subway stations were large and full.
Sojiji was a village in the center of urbanity, walking distance to Takatsuki and Ibaraki, and short subway rides to Osaka or Kyoto
Free Palestine Marches in Kyoto
We took the subway to Kyoto on Saturdays to join a protest against Israel’s genocidal siege of Palestine. Since October 2023, activists have gathered weekly at the Kyoto City Hall. They want Japan to join South Africa in providing international leadership to censor Israel. Their march route crossed the busiest intersections of downtown Kyoto, protected by traffic cops who cleared the roads. Marchers held Palestinian flags and placards that said Stop Genocide. Stop Killing Children. and Boycott, Divest, Sanction. Most signs were in both Japanese and English. Chants alternated between the two languages. Shoppers and tourists lined the sidewalks as we marched, occasionally joining, cheering. One European-looking guy, came toward us with his middle finger raised, but most responses were positive. An Arab-looking family had tears in their eyes as we passed.
Contemplating Exotic: the Lake, the Castle, the Art Museum, The Expo.
Exotic is an ever-changing thing.
On one Saturday, before the Palestine rally, we visited the Kyoto Art Museum. They had a special exhibit of Monet’s last works — a series of paintings all titled Japanese Bridge, featuring the span in his flower garden that is exotic in France. The painter was becoming blind. Flowers and trees were progressively less clear in each painting, but the bridge in his garden was always defined. I’ve seen this series before, but I saw it differently with a Japanese audience, in a country where garden bridges are as common as Buddhist Temples.
We visited the southern point of Lake Biwa and walked the coast. It reminded me of many a lake in Minnesota. We also visited the Osaka Castle when the cherry blossoms were starting to wane, but the plum blossoms were in full bloom. Where I come from, crab apple trees are gorgeous in May. But Minneapolis is not a flower destination.
People come from all over the world to see Japan bloom. It is worth it. To be in this vast public park that once belonged to one feudal lord, with hundreds of people taking close-ups of flowers and posing with trees, made me feel positive about humanity.
We did not go to the World Expo in Osaka. We debated it. I wanted to go because I taught classes about the importance of the World’s Fairs as political enterprises, and because I went to the 1964 Expo in New York City. As a six-year-old, I remember viewing the largest piece of cheese in the world from an exotic place called Wisconsin. Neither I nor my parents had ever been to the Midwest. It was surely a strange place to contemplate. Fifty years later, my mom, Brooklyn born and bred, told her caregivers in Massachusetts that she is from Wisconsin. Most of them did not know where that was. Any place, once exotic, can become home.
We did not go to the World Expo for several reasons. 1. Reports of snafus with transportation did not sound fun. 2. The theme, fantastic architecture, sounded a bit irrelevant in a world of pandemics, genocide, climate crises, and growing inequality.
The theme of the 1964 Fair was “Peace Through Understanding.” To get more of that, we went to Hiroshima.
Hiroshima
The Hiroshima Peace Park and Museum is up there with Auschwitz as a place created to remind all humanity don’t forget, don’t repeat. Like the Peace Park on Jeju Island in South Korea, its size indicates importance: many places to pause, learn, pray, confer, contemplate, and protest. And space for future additions.
The main museum has a low entrance fee and audio headphones in eight languages. We went there three times. The first time, I was too absorbed to notice the crowds around me. Going again, I was struck by how quiet and reverent the crowd was, all ages, so many nationalities, moving slowly and silently from panel to panel. I have never seen such disciplined and respectful tourists.
The museum begins with a panoramic photo of Hiroshima in 1938. You see children, families, commerce, infrastructure, a community nestled in a valley where tributaries of the Ota River meet, a vast valley surrounded by mountains, close to the sea. It looked modern, with street cars, Model Ts, bicycles, boats on the river, children playing in the street, and a thriving downtown. A panel shows school children in bathing suits, lined up by a pool, getting ready to compete.
In the next room was another panorama photo taken by the US Marine Corps a few weeks after August 6, 1945, a survey of the damage they did to the city with their bomb. The dead bodies have been cremated, the blood and gore removed. No children are piled up, without clothes, hair, or limbs. The photo shows a destroyed city.
The strength of the rest of the exhibit is the testimony, told through objects left behind—a metal lunch box filled with the ashes of an uneaten meal—and the words of those who lived for days and those who survived for decades. Stories that hit me:
1. A child whose father was a Buddhist priest, so she knew how hell looked. Hell came to Earth. The only colors left were black, red, and brown.
2. A woman who remembered that they thought it would take 70 years for plants to come back. She did not expect to ever see green again.
3. A young boy who was given the job of pulling maggots off his grandfather’s burnt face, for the days that he was still alive.
3. The diary entries of a young man who survived for one year before succumbing to radiation illnesses. He had a strong desire to live a long life, achieve his dreams, and live for his classmates who had died. In his last entry, he describes how tired he is.
4. A boy who carried loved ones to a designated pile of bodies to be cremated. As a man, recounting, he said: I don’t think I can ever really go back to that time in my mind. We did unthinkable things.
5. A Korean survivor (10% of those who died were Korean), who said that in the aftermath, he thought about what happened to Koreans in Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake. Thousands were rounded up and killed, blamed for an atrocity that people could not understand. He feared it would happen again.
We also visited four other exhibits, all free. The Victims Memorial has a place to pray for lost souls in a room with 140,000 tiles, a wall of photos of known victims, and a library and archive where people can research and add to the data on survivors. I thought about 1983, going with my father to a concentration camp to look for the names of his childhood friends. This was more reverent and technically sophisticated than Gross Rosen 42 years ago, but the process was the same.
A City Hall underground exhibit includes the testimony of the deputy mayor, who survived because he was far away on August 6th. He came to work a day later. The Mayor had died, and he was in charge. He said: “I spent the previous years of my life racking up experiences in business and government. I thought I was accomplished. All I could do that day was say, “What do we do, what do we do?'”
We went to the museum three times and the memorial twice. And I still don’t think that is enough time to absorb it all. What were we absorbing? Feelings. Trying to understand. I remembered arguments I heard as a child in the United States: This was the bomb to end the war. A peace bomb! It saved lives, especially the lives of US soldiers. Never mind that there were US prisoners of war who all died in this most heinous way at the hands of the United States. Never mind that Japan was militarily weak and ready for the war to end. Never mind that the sticking point at the peace negotiations in July 1945 was Japan’s desire to keep its Emperor system. Never mind that after the bomb killed 140,000 people, and traumatized a community, after the United States occupation (mostly) ended in 1952, the Emperor system was part of the San Francisco Pact of April 28.
The exhibit makes it clear that dropping the bomb was never about emperors or saving lives. It was about testing the bomb. It was about keeping the Soviets and Chinese out of Japan. It was about securing US hegemony in the post-war world.
On our way out of Hiroshima, we stopped by the Art Museum. We did not have time to go inside, so we walked the outside grounds. We came upon a garden, gifted to Hiroshima by Chongqing, a city in southwestern China devastated by Japanese bombs in 1938. Since the 1980s, the two cities have exchanged not just gardens of remembrance, but also economic and cultural exchanges and a commitment to working together to end war.
There are thousands of sister cities across the world. Ibaraki, where we stayed in Japan, and Minneapolis, where we are from, are sisters! That is a nice thing. But the sorority between Chongqing and Hiroshima is on another plane, all the more important today, as Japan and China spar over territory in the South China Sea.
The Japanese did not drop nuclear bombs on China. What they did do that was analogous to Hiroshima, is bomb to annihilate a whole community, using punishing force rather than diplomacy to end a war.
The Hiroshima museum exhibit is explicit in its message that abolishing nuclear weapons is not the only Never Again lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Never Again, they argue, should anyone use massive force to wipe out a whole community. And that is why people in Japan, and all over the world, are demanding an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the West Bank. If you are burned to death, it matters not what kind of bomb is used.
“Do Japanese people hate tourists?”
We got that question repeatedly, from friends who had heard rumors. I can only tell you that we were treated like treasured guests everywhere we went. A pharmacist walked us to another pharmacy to see if they could help with something he could not. His grace was typical. Granted, we did not spend much time in tourist areas, so we were a novelty.
During our stay in Japan, two outrageous events occurred involving tourists: 1. A foreign student studying in Japan had to be rescued on Mount Fuji twice, climbing illegally, out of season. The second time, he had returned to find his phone. 2. At the Expo, a tourist reportedly made a worker prostrate himself because he could not tell the man where his parking lot was. That offending tourist was Japanese.
The first rule of any trip, whether to your local festival or the other side of the world, is to be respectful to working people. Second rule: don’t break laws for a joyride. Be more cautious than at home, so that if you get hurt, you do not incur the justified wrath of locals. Third: If you hear a place is over-toured, avoid it.
It’s easy to make mistakes. Start with a respectful attitude, be willing to learn, and if your language skills are nil, just acquire, I’m sorry, and thank you. They will get you a long way.
Spread the good you see in places, and tell people again and again—especially if you come from the United States and expect grace from others—that repressive government policies do not represent the hearts of regular people.
Hiroshima at sunset
