There’s a limitation to the JR rail pass. It covers most of Japan, and you can get to most places with it, but not all Shinkansen routes are covered, contrary to what their publicity would lead you to believe. With your rail pass, you get all but the Nozomi trains. Nozomi (which translates to "Wish") is the fastest and most frequent train, running every 10 minutes between Fukuoka in the south and Tokyo in the north. On the same line, you’ll find the Hikari (“Light”) and Kodoma (“Echo”) that run every hour or so and will make more stops. Together, they cover the same line as the Nozomi, but each only a subset.
Why am I talking about train restrictions and schedules, you might ask? Our plan called for visiting Hiroshima's Peace Museum today. As we’re not the early-riser type when we’re on vacation, our options for getting from Kyoto to Hiroshima in time are limited to a single train with a connection in Osaka. When we went to get our tickets using our rail pass, we learned that there’s only one reserved seat available on the Osaka-Hiroshima portion of the trip, and one of us will have to use unreserved seating and hope for the best. We’re at the end of our journey with limited options to rearrange our schedule. That’s when we decide to explore options that are outside of the rail pass.
The Nozomi is not cheap. Kyoto-Hiroshima is about 150$ per head in the green car (Pierre-Luc will fit in that seat class). That’s twice what the Tourism Japan app said it would cost. It, however, required only 10 minutes and got us to our destination in a little over an hour and a half.
Morale of this story: the rail pass is an excellent deal if you plan on moving a lot across Japan during your stay, but its unwritten price is time as the most convenient rides are not included in it.
There’s nothing old in Hiroshima, and it’s easy to understand why. What you learn is that the street map is very similar to the 1940 version, even considering that anything that could be considered the city of Hiroshima was destroyed by the A-Bomb in 1945.
The Peace Museum would be better named: bombs kill innocent people too museum. It takes about an hour to go through, and the narrative is about the impact of the A-Bomb from the day of the explosion all the way to years after. The pictures of the people burned and dying from radiation poisoning are hard and a stark reminder that war comes at a price well beyond the death of military men and women. They, however, push the envelope a little bit too much by focusing on school children and teachers who were on demolition duty that day, regardless of how connected it is to the horror of the bomb. The exposition is scripted to create a strong emotional reaction and a sense of horror at the impact of dropping atomic bombs on populated areas. It does a good job of it, but sometimes forgets to maintain a strong connection to the story. For example, the tricycle and helmet you see in many pictures didn’t actually witness the bomb. They were buried with a child victim of the bomb and exhumed 40 years later. Still, it is a duty to visit this place if you come to Japan, and it should not be missed.
Tomorrow is the last day of the actual vacation. We’re going hiking on Itsukushima. The following days will be a progressive return to reality.