Field Trip to Japan

My recent field trip to Japan was very enjoyable, even though I had 30 students and 3 fellow teachers along for the experience.  Japan was extremely beautiful: lush and green, and except for our first day, blue skies and pleasant temperatures.  The first day was a little overcast but that was okay.  The students were relatively well-behaved (we didn't catch any of them drinking as has occurred on some other trips, apparently) but they were their usual rowdy selves and didn't seem particularly interested in the museums, monuments, or temples we visited, leading to some inappropriate behavior (roughhousing and running around shouting) at inappropriate places (Nagasaki atomic bomb memorial, Shinto shrine, in the hotel at night, etc...).  I don't know if my perception is accurate but it seems to me this particular set of students is particularly self-absorbed.  They seem to have no awareness that there is a world outside their little group.  They go around in a little pack, like a writhing ball of snakes, literally hanging onto each other.  They don't seem to have any individual existence apart from the group.  Is that normal for 8th graders?  Have I never noticed it somehow?  Certainly I've seen it to some degree in other classes but I'm not sure if I've ever seen it like this.  I don't know if it has something to do with the small size of the school (only 31 in all of 8th grade) or Korea's negative population growth so that many of them are only-children and quite narcissistic and self-absorbed.  Who knows, maybe I was exactly the same way at their age.

Day 1: We flew to Fukuoka (a port city on the southern-most of the main chain of Japanese islands).  It was only 1 hour in the air from Seoul, 1 hr 20 min gate to gate.  We early at the Incheon airport (6:30 am) and arrived in Fukuoka about 10:30 am.  From there we rode the bus about 1.5 hrs south to Nagasaki where we toured a museum and a memorial dedicated to the atomic bomb blast there.  After that we got on the bus again and rode almost all the way back to where we'd started to our hotel for the night and had dinner and used the spa and went to bed.  At night we collected the student's phones in an attempt to get them to go to sleep but some of them had brought multiple phones so they could give us one and still have one to do their social-media and games on.

I'm going to be relatively restrained with my pictures for this trip since most of them are of the students.

On the bus with 30 8th-graders

First view of Japan from bus.  I liked the more rural feel (at least in this area) than what I've been used to in Korea.  Gone were the monotonous huge skyscraper apartments and dreary industrial areas.  Many more single-family residences here.  Someone pointed out that this is because tall buildings are dangerous in earthquake country.  But the architecture is much more interesting here, we teachers agreed, as well.  More elaborate roofs and earth tone color schemes.  Korean stuff looks very unnatural, both in shape and colors.  It's the kind of thing you don't notice until you see something else that's not like that.

Much of our trip was along coastal areas.

At the Nagasaki atomic bomb museum: a wall clock smashed when the bomb exploded, stopped at 11:02 am.

An elaborate display which showed, using animated colored lights, the various phases of destruction caused by various aspects of the bomb such as the initial blast wave, gamma radiation, other radiations and alpha/beta particles, heat, etc... as they spread out in turn from the epicenter in downtown Nagasaki which is in a valley surrounded on three sides by mountains as you can see in the center of the display above.

Ground zero.  There is a monolith in the center of this picture which is hard to see here because it blends in with the foliage behind it which marks ground zero.  The bomb exploded 500 meters above this point.

Our group making our way up the steps to a peace memorial.

At the top of the steps, looking back at part of the city.  It's pretty amazing to contemplate how much this area has changed in 70 years.

There were many other school groups on the prowl during our trip as well.  We often encountered them at points of interest, hotels, and restaurants.  They were always better behaved than our kids (sigh).

Some famous sculpture for future peace.

A small stream running past ground zero.  This is where many of the bomb victims came to get relief from their burns and thirst, and eventually died.

This is a preserved portion of the ground at ground zero as it was after the blast showing many fragments of things and burned/melted stuff.

I reckon this tree is less than 70 years old.

Heading back north to our first night hotel in Saga.

First night's dinner.  At lunch they had served us the Japanese version of Chinese food, which was sort of disappointing, as I didn't feel like we'd come all this way to eat lousy Chinese food.

But dinner was traditional Japanese and very good.  Lots of sashimi on this whole trip, along with miso soup, udon noodles, tempura, and other good stuff I didn't know the name of.

Day 2: After buffet breakfast (very nice) we were off by bus (about an hour ride) to the Yoshinogari Historical Park, which is an archaeological site with displays and reconstructions of artifacts and buildings found from the area's first settlers starting from about 2300 years ago and lasting about 700 years, if I recall correctly.  After that we went to a complex in Kyushu which combined shopping, restaurants, some temples, and a national museum.  We partook of all of the above.  Then it was off to our new hotel where we spent the remainder of our three nights in the country.  For some reason the trip to the hotel had us returning through Fukuoka where we'd originally landed, which seems a little out of the way in retrospect.  It must have been because we had dinner there (though I don't seem to have any pictures to jog my memory about that).  This was a package tour run by the Lotte company and though we'd had a chance to negotiate with them about aspects for several weeks prior to our departure there still ended up being a lot of time riding on the bus inefficiently, it seemed, just to get to certain restaurants where I imagine they had a special deal worked out.

A view from our first hotel in Saga, the morning we woke up there.

Breakfast

Approach to Yoshinogari Historical Park

At the historical park the kids did an activity where they created beads by shaping them by rubbing a soft kind of stone, kind of chalk-like, on a rough volcanic kind of stone, as the area's original inhabitants had done.

Most of the park was wide open, but it was a beautiful day.

Reconstructions of some of the residential buildings built by the original inhabitants.

I think this was the king's place.

More of the King's compound, which was a walled area within the larger walled area of the settlement.

They buried people inside these huge pots.  Two pots fitted together to form a casket.

A beautiful day, as I mentioned.

Except for all these creepy tombs behind me!  They look like something from outer space!

They didn't bother me much at the time but they definitely look creepy in these pictures.

Let's get away from those and go on a walk in the "ancient forest" which they are attempting to restore to the condition it was in before the humans arrived and started changing it by cutting down certain trees for wood and building or to create land for crops and encouraging other species for food.  To restore it they're doing something called "whole tree transplanting" which brings the whole living tree complete with soil and microbes and bugs related to the tree so the entire community is transplanted.  This is right up my environmental sciences alley.

Residences, storehouses, and workspaces for the common folk.

Now we've arrived in Kyushu for lunch and other things afterwards.  Note the many other tour buses in the background.

Approaching the temple area after running the gauntlet of all the commercial shops.

Andy and Grant

Walking to the restaurant for lunch.

Still walking to the restaurant for lunch.  Not sure what all we're passing but it's very picturesque!

I especially liked this tree.  I like trees.

Lunch at last!  Poor Jitesh (in the orange) doesn't like fish!  We were happy to help him out.

Now we walk back all the way we'd come to the restaurant and past that and a little further to the entrance to the national museum.

The national museum was a pretty cool building.

In the lobby.  Funny story about those escalators you see in the back of the picture, which you have to take to get up to the exhibition room we were going to: There are ascending parts and then there are flat parts like in airports.  (There's a series of these to get to the space where we were going).  And they've got attendants at each phase to yell at you if you're doing something wrong.  For instance, after standing as we ascended the first set, we stood on the first horizontal section but were yelled at (in Japanese) to keep moving.  So on the way back I knew to keep moving on the horizontal part and was smiling inwardly at the confusion of the people coming toward me on their way in getting yelled at by the attendant to keep moving (these people were also Korean.  There were a lot of Korean tourists in Japan.  And it turns out to be easy to distinguish between Koreans and Japanese by appearance.  The Koreans can do it, as you would expect, but I was surprised to find I could also do it.  Maybe because I'm so used to how Koreans look by now).  I was thinking, "yeah, I'm so knowledgeable, I know the protocol, I know you have to keep moving on the walkway" and feeling all superior and then I came to the downward section and was walking down that so I wouldn't get yelled at and I got yelled at to stand still!  (Apparently, because the yelling stopped when I stood still).  So now I know: You have to stand still on the escalator part and you have to keep walking on the moving walkway part.  It's obvious, isn't it?  They didn't allow photography in the museum so mercifully I have no more pictures from this place.

We teachers bought a mug from this guy on the commercial section of the approach/departure corridor as a thanky-you gift to our middle school secretary, Jihae, who did a lot of work helping organize the trip.

Dinner the second night.

Wait, this looks familiar.  We're back in Fukuoka, where we ate dinner.  But that's the wrong direction from Kyushu to where our hotel is that night.  Inefficient and more time on the bus for us but apparently more profit for the tour company.  At least it was a nice sunset, which none of the students witnessed as they were all buried in their phones (as they were whenever we were on the bus).

As I mentioned, Fukuoka is a major port city, as we will see more evidence of in this very area on our final day.  There is a plane getting ready to land at the airport, which is pretty small.  I guess these high-rises in the background were the exceptions which proved the rule about the difference between Korean and Japanese architecture which we observed.

By the time we got to our new hotel it was already dark.  We had dinner and went to bed.  I accidentally left my phone on the bus so didn't get any pictures of dinner.  But it was nice.  This new hotel was really luxurious, especially compared to the first night's hotel.

Day 3:  We wake up in our new luxurious hotel in Kitakyushu, a city at the northernmost tip of the southernmost island of the main Japanese chain of islands where we've been.  The islands are connected by a bridge and a tunnel and also a pedestrian tunnel, as you'll see.  I love the water so I really enjoyed the views around here.  After another fabulous buffet breakfast we head off to the Tagawa City Coal Mining museum, about an hour south of here (of course!).  Tagawa is in the middle of one of the largest coal mining regions of Japan, though today Japan no longer mines its own coal and imports 100% of it for energy and steel production and chemistry uses.  But for about 100 years (the latter part of the 19th century through most of the 20th century) this was a major coal-mining region with hundreds of small mines which gradually consolidated into larger mines as the mining became mechanized.  After touring the coal mining museum we rode another hour back to where we'd started, Kitakyushu, where our new hotel is, at the northern tip of this island, and we walk across to the other island through an undersea pedestrian tunnel.  On the other side we are in Shimonoseki where we see the site of the signing of a treaty between Japan and China granting the independence of Korea in 1890-something (Japan wanted to keep the Chinese out of there during some internal struggle amongst the Koreans according to Adam Drews, our Social Studies teacher and the prime chaperone on our trip, and so they (the Japanese) could annex Korea just a couple years later.  Then we visited a shrine (which, apparently, is some distinction from a temple in that a temple has to do with a religion where a shrine has to do with the Japanese Emporer, who is a deity in the Shinto religion, which isn't, somehow, like other religions?  I don't know, I honestly didn't understand that part very well.  Can you tell?  Our kids were so rowdy at the shrine that we had to leave and go down to the edge of the straight separating us from the southern island and hang out until it was time to go to dinner.  At this point we could see our hotel across the straight.  I would have liked to go back to the hotel and relax, as would most of the kids, I know, but we didn't get to.  We had to go to dinner first, which was off in another direction, of course, and only after that did we get to go to the hotel, where we managed to get all the kids in their room and collect their phones and then I had a vodka martini at the bar just before it closed at 11:30.

The view from our new hotel.  This was taken with my tablet since I had left my phone on the bus the night before.  The area with the blue trim just across the water is a shopping area.

Another view from the hotel.  I think someone said this area was distinctive for having lots of western architecture.

And yet another view from the hotel, this one to the north.  You can see the bridge connecting this island to the main Japanese island, and you can see the boardwalk area on the far side where we'll be later in the day.

A gantry at the coal mining museum, still standing in its original location.

You can see the gantry in the photo above on the left in this model of the working mine.  The museum building we're in is about in the middle of the mining complex modeled here.

Some mining equipment.

These are reconstructions of the miner's quarters, showing how they evolved in different periods.

Many Koreans were conscripted to work in these mines at different times and many died in them.  This monument was built by the remaining Koreans in the area in honor of their ancestors.

Another day another delicious Japanese box lunch!

The straights connecting the southernmost main island with "the mainland".

All 34 of us rode down to the pedestrian tunnel on the same elevator.

Walking through the pedestrian tunnel

On the far side, looking back from where we'd come.

Of course all the kids care about is the vending machines, as they did wherever we went, loading up on snacks and energy drinks.

The shrine, I think, with our tour guide, Jinee.  Jinee is Korean and came with us from Korea and spoke to our bus driver and restaurant and hotel people in Japanese and told the students many things in Korean on the bus sound system (which blared in my ear) as we approached each new venue, but I couldn't understand any of it.  Japanese... Korean... it's all Greek to me.

With lots of unseemly yelling  in the shrine we managed to assemble the kids for a brief instant of time which I managed to record in a photograph before we got the heck out of there amid all the glares from the staff.

So peaceful with no students!

I'm the last one out.

Adam Drews, who was our point man on organizing this tour.

Killing time on the boardwalk down by the water with a game called "Ninja" (is that racist?) where you try to slap your opponents' hands, but then have to freeze in whatever position you end up in until someone tries to slap your hand.  Our hotel is on the far shore just out of the frame to the right in this picture.  I don't know if I should bother putting in the picture where you can actually see it.

Oh well, just because I can.  There's our hotel: the red brick building in the middle of the far shore.

Dinner this night was an all-you-can eat meat Korean bbq buffet.  I was so stuffed from all the eating we'd been doing (and cleaning up some of the leftovers from other teachers/students) that I wasn't really hungry here since, as you can imagine at an all-you-can-eat place, the quality was lower than other places we'd been.  So good timing on my part.  But the kids were bouncing off the walls and it took forever to get them out of there, especially after they found the "make your own crepe" and cotton candy stations.

Our bus with our driver and tour guide.  Hey, I (used to) have a Subaru, too, but not quite like this.

Sunset from our hotel window.

And looking back across the straits where we'd just been.

Another great view with an Elmore Leonard book on my Kindle app.

This is the same picture I started this day with (taken the following morning) but this one was taken with my phone rather than my tablet.  I wanted to compare picture quality.  I think this one is better.

Final Day!  (Day 4, at last!):  After yet another hearty breakfast buffet (and I usually don't eat breakfast except on the weekends, at which point it's more like brunch and I usually end up skipping lunch, so let's just say my belt was getting pretty tight by the end of this trip) we head back to Fukuoka once again for a relatively light day.  We were scheduled to visit a robot museum then go up in the Fukuoka tower ("highest seaside tower in Japan") then spend some time at the beach before we went to the airport for our return flight but at the last moment our tour guide told us we were going to substitute another tower instead because it was free and the Fukuoka tower cost money.  Well that was weird because the robot museum and the beach were right at the Fukuoka tower, which was 324 meters tall compared to the free tower which was only 100 meters tall and it seems like we'd already paid for the Fukuoka tower because we'd already billed parents and paid for all the admissions to all the sights we went to on the trip so it seemed like this was yet another case of someone pocketing some extra money at the expense of getting us a shorter tower and necessitating an additional bus ride there and back.  Oh well, the substitute tower was nice too, and the entire day was a nice relaxing change and no one got hurt or lost and we all arrived back at the Incheon airport in the end safe and sound and no one got sued or fired so in the end it all worked out fine.

The robot museum wasn't much, really.  Just a bunch of toy robots in one room in a shopping center.

The most impressive thing to me, though, was this pair of robots which had multiple functions.  One function was to guess your age.  Not speaking or reading Japanese I couldn't really follow all the directions but nonetheless the thing looked me up and down and finally displayed "55" on its screen.  Wow, it got me spot on!  Wasn't quite so accurate for some of the other teachers and students though.

Views from the Hakata Port Tower, somewhat north of the Fukuoka Tower where we were supposed to be (which you can just see in this picture as a little spire on the horizon on the right sticking out of the top of a rectangular building in front of it)

Now we're at the beach, our final stop before the airport.  There's the Fukuoka tower! (on the left).

Most of us went swimming.  The water was warm enough if not particularly clean.  We played Frisbee and generally had a good time.

did I mention we were supposed to go up on the Fukuoka tower, which was more than three times as tall as the tower we got to up?  But am I bitter?

I didn't go down in this area.  I don't know why, come to think of it.  But at one point a wedding party came out from there to take pictures on the beach.

I noticed some of our students trying to take an action shot of some others jumping so I offered to take one of all of them.  I took several and this came out the best, I think.

The sun was going down as we left for the airport.  The rest of the trip was uneventful except one student left his cellphone on the airplane which he didn't realize until we were already through immigration and he turned back after the rest of us were through customs so we had to wait around for about an hour with his mother waiting for him to come out after talking to authorities who said they'd get his phone at some point and hold it at the airport for him to pick up sometime the following week or something.  We finally left the airport a little after 11:00 pm and I was home by about midnight.

I'll leave you with this final observation: Japanese toilets are weird: they're either super low-tech (squatters) or super high-tech.  See below for the latter.  This was from our first hotel.  And actually the second hotel which was much nicer had an even nicer toilet.  I personally did not care for the heated seat and didn't want any of the other functions either.  It just seemed like more to maintain and go wrong to me.  All I wanted it to do was flush and since they hid the flush lever behind the raised seat it took me forever (and a little mishap) to find that.  My bottom line (so to speak) is "less is more" (once you've moved beyond the squatter).  Who wants a toilet you have to plug in?

Next up: a cool biking/hiking trip on a nearby island and then I get a horrible head cold I'm still trying to recover from.  Hi to all and I hope you're well.  Best, Chris.