So today I bought shinkansen tickets to Hiroshima for tomorrow. I know I’ve only
been in Kyoto a few days, but frankly I’ve seen everything I wanted to see and it’s Time to Move On. After Hiroshima, I was thinking about taking the ferry to Shikoku island for a day or so. We will see.

Anyway, today I caught the Kyoto Line express all the way to Kobe. Kobe, of course, is sadly infamous for the 1995 earthquake, which caused total devastation and killed forty-six thousand people four thousand six hundred people — which, to put it in perspective, is one in thirty people dead, or a third of the population of Norwich is still a lot.

Still, you wouldn’t know the city’s dark past if you visited today. It’s a lovely place: nice warm weather, the gentle lapping of the Inland Sea, a city big enough to be interesting but small enough to be manageable.

I walked ‘long the seafront.

I came to the Kobe Maritime Museum, and having a spare 500 yen I went in. It was pretty interesting, with a whole bunch of model ships and displays. I briefly considered becoming a sailor: the open waters, a woolen jumper, just me and the sea. But in reality I’d just get bored after a while and you have to hang out with a bunch of bearded weirdos.

Also, there was a console with a controllable, pointable, zoomable CCTV camera:

Which was awesome. I crossed over into the Kawasaki museum, a museum for Kawasaki. I had a sudden urge to buy a motorbike.

There was a hall obviously intended for the kids, with a bunch of hands-on displays. Obviously I’m too mature for all th - whoa a bullet train!

Wheeeeeee!

(I should note that I was sharing the display hall with what seemed like several classes of Japanese elementary schoolchildren, and as such I didn’t get a go on the free Densha de Go arcade cabinet. Pssh. Also, they kept daring each other to run up to me and say “Harrow!” I replied with “Konnichi wa!” and probably scarred them for life. Bless. Kids. Will Ferguson, in his seminal “Hokkaido Highway Blues”, kept mentioning how schoolkids, entranced by the sight of a mystical gaijin, would keep coming up to him and saying “Harrow!” [his spelling] and “This is a pen!” This never happened to me until today, when I was outside walking past literally hundreds of schoolkids pouring out of a dozen coaches, and a few of them shyly said “harrow” as they passed. Presumably as you get further from Tokyo your oddness becomes more pronounced.)

I met Kawasaki’s amazing Rubix-cube solving robot.

Which does a little dance when it solves one.

Unfortunately it didn’t proceed to yell “CRUSH KILL DESTROY”, smash its way out of the cabinet, and set about attempting to solve the world’s problems like a giant Rubix cube except it doesn’t understand that you can’t solve every problem by twisting and it would fall in love with a beautiful woman but she wouldn’t love him back so he would attack New York and they would have to blow him up even though in its heart it was a good robot programmed for solving problems and a local man would say “It was beauty and an obsessive love for ordering coloured squares that killed the beast”. Unfortunately.

So I went upstairs where they had some stuff about Kobe’s history as a port for foreigners. It must have been fascinating in those days, the whole mystery of a totally unknown country, when spelling was inconsistent and the cities were called “Osaca” and “Corbe” and “Jeddo”.

Anyway, I headed back to the station and caught the Kyoto (or was it Tokaido?) line even further along to Himeji, home of Japan’s biggest castle (which isn’t a reconstruction). In a land of earthquakes, typhoons, marauding shogun armies, and the ever-present threat of fire (when you build your castles out of wood), keeping a building up for a mere twenty years is an achievement.

It was a looong way back to Kyoto…