Asian countries, it is less polluted and less densely built, although not exactly offering wide open pristine urban spaces.
For now we're at the Hilton Hotel at the airport waiting for our return flight this evening. Free high speed wifi in the lobby is a great treat after the satellite connection on the ship.
The grounds of the Peace Museum in Hiroshima do exhibit wide open spaces, the same large square spaces and sequenced foci as the palace complexes in Vietnam and Korea, with echoes of the Forbidden City. In Hiroshima, the ultimate focus is not a temple or a throne room, but the iconic dome of the building that survived the blast.
We saw two of the most famous tourist scenes, the golden temple in Kyoto and the "floating" tori gate at Miyajima Island, which appears to float on water at high tide. Originally, Shinto priests arrived by boat at high tide and entered the shrine complex through that gate. Still another iconic scene was a Shinto priest blessing a couple's new car near a different shrine.
In the electronically minded countries of Korea and Japan, the group was fascinated with he control buttons on the side of some toilet seats, one with English labels illustrated here. The first one encountered only had instructions in Korean. One experimental soul among us pressed all the buttons simultaneously. Uncontrolled giggles emerged from the stall.
At the other end of the lavatory spectrum, many restaurants, temples and shrines offered low-tech "squatters."
Interesting factoid: there is one vending machine for every ten Japanese. Second interesting factoid: despite traditional ethnocentrism in Japan, ten percent of the children in Tokyo are multi-racial, so clearly there is some significant interaction with Chinese, Korean and even Afro-Americans occurring. This factoid was offered by our Afro-American guide, born in Japan himself, who has two half Japanese children.
