more Japan projects

2009 was the year I went on a world trip with my family. Japan was one of the many countries we visited. Have you ever been to Japan? These are some of the interesting things I did during my stay. When in Japan I stayed in three different cities. Sagamihara City was the one I stayed in the longest. I also visited Kyoto and Hiroshima.

When in Kyoto we mainly visited temples. We saw three main temples. The golden temple was a large building covered with gold leaf. The silver temple was a wooden building that was supposed to be covered in silver but the politician making it ran out of money and political power before it was covered in silver. The final temple we visited was the wooden temple and was of course made of wood.

In 1945, in World War II, the U.S.A. Army dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Many died. Lots of those who survived died, days, weeks, or even years later from the radiation. Saduko was one of the survivors and lived ten normal years before she became sick and went to the hospital. In the hospital she was diagnosed with leukemia, which she got from the radiation. I’ m a dork. Believing in the old Japanese saying “If a sick person can make 1000 paper cranes that person would be cured” she began making paper cranes as fast as she could. Some days she was too weak to make cranes but others days she made many. Sometimes she made cranes so small she had to fold them with needles. Within each crane she planted a wish to live. She made her 644th and final paper crane and died on October 25, 1955. Each year on “Peace Day,” the Japanese present paper cranes to the statue of her holding a golden crane that was made in memory of her. When we visited Hiroshima we went to a Museum about the bombing and walked through the Peace Gardens.

Japan’s main source of transportation is the train. There are four main types of trains. The Local is a train is the slowest and stops at every stop. The Rapid train goes slightly faster than the Local and stops only at the main stops. The Shinkensen is the fastest and goes as fast as 300 kph. The Shinkensen stops only, at the major stations. The final train is called a Romance train and it speed is between the Rapid and the Shinkensen. Sometimes the trains are busy and other times they are not. You do not want to be on a busy train. They can get so busy that the train conductor has to push people on. You get no room for you elbows when that happens.

The Japanese eat some pretty strange foods. If you have ever been to Japan you would know what I mean. They eat raw fish called sushi. They have rice at every meal including breakfast. They eat cooked seaweed and they also eat squid on a stick. I personally don’t like any of these things but I usually don’t like anything. The Japanese also have different letters and rules of writing. The Japanese characters are, in my opinion, more like art than letters. There is a certain order you have to do the strokes. In the books and notices I saw the letter were written in a vertical order. When reading you would start on the top of the right page (we usually start from the left) and go left reading each column from the top down. That means that the page numbers would go backwards. If I were you I would stick with reading English books.