Our place in Ibaraki, Japan, was dark, cluttered, cheap—and three blocks away from the Sōjiji Temple. There are 80,000 Buddhist Temples in Japan. Sojiji must be the prettiest, kindest, most sanguine, and 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. It was founded in 886 to honor a life-saving turtle. Over the month, more and more turtle images made of rocks came alive to our eyes: shell, head, and four stubby feet.
There were places to burn incense for healing, huts made of burnt wood where the spirit of Buddha sits, places to leave flowers, oranges, and water, and bells and gongs to ring, 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 April 18, a special day for us, we noticed a crowd standing outside the main hut of the Temple. Inside, a group of dignitaries sat in suits. Three priests in purple, green, and orange robes performed Yamakage-ryu, an annual ceremony. After an hour of ritual dance with knives, a fish was cut so sharply that its head and tail flipped 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 bikes as if they owned the road. Little ones sat like 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.
Free Palestine Marches in Kyoto
Sojiji is a village in the center of urbanity, walking distance to Takatsuki and Ibaraki, and a short subway ride to Osaka or 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. 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 or cheering.
Contemplating Exotic: the Lake, the Castle, the Art Museum, The Expo.
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. Exotic is an ever-changing thing.
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. To be in this vast public park, once home to a 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 taught classes about the political importance of historical World’s Fairs. When I was six, I went to the 1964 Expo in New York City, The theme that year was “Peace Through Understanding. I remember viewing the largest piece of cheese in the world from an exotic place called Wisconsin. I did not know I would graduate from high school in that exotic cheese state. We did not go to the 2025 Expo because the theme, Fantastic Architecture, sounded like a side-step in a world of pandemics, genocide, climate crises, and growing inequality.
Hiroshima
We took a bullet train to Hiroshima. It was fast, comfortable, and expensive, so this would be our only venture out of the Kobe to Kyoto local train corridor.
Peace through understanding is what the Hiroshima Peace Park and Museum were all about. Like Auschwitz, it is a place to remind all humanity never forget, never repeat. Like the Peace Park on Jeju Island in South Korea, its size connoted importance. There were so many places to pause, learn, pray, confer, contemplate, and protest.
The main museum had 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 streetcars, 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 said they thought it would take 70 years for plants to come back. She did not expect to see green again.
3. A young boy 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 for his classmates who had died.
4. A boy 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 — remembered the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, when thousands of Koreans were rounded up and killed, blamed for an atrocity that people could not understand. After Hiroshima, he feared it would happen again.
The Victims Memorial had 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 was reminded of 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 the Gross Rosen Concentration Camp 42 years ago, but the process was the same.
A City Hall Underground Exhibit included 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?'”
Three visits were not enough time to absorb it all. What were we absorbing? Feelings. Trying to understand. I remembered arguments I heard as a child: 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 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 made it clear: 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.
Sister Cities
On our way out of Hiroshima, we stopped by the Hiroshima 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. The Japanese did not drop nuclear bombs on China. What they did do that was analogous to Hiroshima was to 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.
There are thousands of sister cities. Ibaraki, and Minneapolis 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.
“Do Japanese people hate tourists?”
Friends had heard rumors and wanted to know: Do the Japanese hate tourists? 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 us with something he could not. His grace was typical. Angels in the train stations redirected us multiple times, sometimes walking us to the right stairwell or gate. Granted, we did not spend much time in tourist areas, so we were more of a novelty.
During our stay, 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. 2. At the Osaka World Expo, a tourist made a worker prostrate himself. That offending tourist was Japanese. The first rule of any trip, whether at your local festival or the other side of the world, is to be respectful of working people. Second rule: 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. Fourth: Start with a respectful attitude, be willing to learn. If your language skills are nil, learn I’m sorry, and thank you. Finally, remind yourself and everyone you talk to —especially if you come from the United States and expect grace from others—that repressive governments do not represent the hearts of regular people.
This essay about a visit to Japan in April/May 2025 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse, David, and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.
