As with nearly every building we entered in Japan, we were forced to take off our shoes and provided with slippers. This was a bit strange at first, but I found myself liking it more as time passed, and now my wife and I have brought the custom into our own home.

Sadly, my camera battery died. I was only able to snap a few shots of the castle.

My City Of Ruins

From Himeji we trained down to Hiroshima. It is a vibrant, modern city and I suspect, were you ignorant of history, you would never know the destruction it has seen in our not so distant past. Only making a day stop, we saw but one sight and that was the Peace Memorial Museum. It was full of horrible, shocking things, but remained fairly balanced in its reporting of the events leading up to and after the dropping of the bomb.

The juxtaposition of seeing wall-mounted murals of the city just after the bomb -- completely leveled, nothing but death and rubble stretched out against the horizon -- and such a completely different city outside the window, fresh and full of life, was more than the senses could take.

A short walk from the museum stands what is now known as the A-bomb dome, a medium-sized stone building that somehow managed to survive the blast, not far from ground zero. It is a haunting reminder of the awesome power man can yield, and yet the resilience we have against such destruction.

That's something to think about, no matter what side of the bomb-dropping fence you stand upon.

Fantasy Island

Just off the coast of Hiroshima lays the island of Miajima. It holds an ancient, sacred community and, as the tour-guides continued to tell us, the third most beautiful sight in Japan. Wanting something cheerful after the heart-breaking sadness of Hiroshima, we threw an audible sigh, caught a boat and visited it.

It is fabulously beautiful, though as we would see time and time again, not nearly as magnificent as the pictures taken in springtime when the flowers bloom. They also had deer - tame deer, roaming about the country, and city side. Their horns had been cut off and they seemed tame enough, but they were an exotic and strange thing to see in Japan.

After a rough start we were finding Japan to be full of wonder, culture, and beauty. It was now time to head northward again to the ancient city of Kyoto and then further back to home.Stay tuned to the next (and final) edition of the Japanese version of the Shanghai Diaries. We will visit a few of the thousands of temples and shrines in Kyoto, find indie rock in Osaka, and finally find our way home.