kure-onomichi-tomonoura (part 1)

Over the weekend we travelled to different areas of Hiroshima. This post will cover part of our adventure.

Saturday was a National holiday, "Kenkoku kinen no hi" or Foundations Day. It is the day when the first Emperor, Jinmu took to the throne in Japan. Since Satoshi had the weekend off, we decided to go to three different cities of Hiroshima prefecture.

By Shinkansen (bullet train), it is about an hour to Fukuyama, a city in Hiroshima prefecture. From Fukuyama, we transferred to a local line and rode to Kure.

Kure is a shipbuilding town. The famous battleship, Yamato, which sank off the Nagasaki coastline on a suicide mission to Okinawa during WWII, was just one of the many naval vessels built in Kure. There is a museum called the Yamato Museum dedicated to the battleship and to educate everyone about WWII. There are artifacts, letters and photos of the men of this battleship and of other battleships as well.

Recently, a movie called "Otokotachi no Yamato" or "the men of Yamato" was filmed in areas of Kure and tells the story of the men onboard the battleship before it sank. This is a model of the battleship, it is 1/10 the actual size.

To give you an idea of what 1/4 of the deck was like, this park was made. I've outlined it in green.

Kure was also used in filming a movie and soap opera called "Umizaru" or "Sea Monkey". This was a story about the men of the Japan Coast Guard or "Kaijohoancho".

There is an area where the men trained while wearing their scuba gear, and climbed up a flight of 200 plus stairs...we climbed to the top...boy, was it STEEP! And the step were rather narrow... Going up, wasn't so bad, it was coming back down that was really SCARY!