JAPANAUCHOCOLAT: Yasukuni

We made it! It is hot as hell. Here is a post that starts off sort of negatively, but the subject matter captured my imagination so I'm starting with it.

We went to the Yasukuni War museum today and saw a Kaiten torpedo which was really horrible, it is a suicide torpedo which takes a person, a long black death sausage basically. I have just been reading about it and although they managed to blow up about 126 Americans, over a thousand people died in training or on the host submarines that sank while carrying them. So, it was weird being at this place because that idea (that war is senseless) was everywhere, even though it is a museum that sort of glorifies war (and has been accused of revisionism too).

Anyway, the idea of being locked into that awful bomb, underwater and hurtling to your death in the dark has made me look up other Japanese suicide weapons, one of which is called Fukuryu which was a suicide diver, trained to walk for 6 hours weighed down with 9kg of lead at a depth of 23 feet then stick a bamboo pole into the hull of an an enemy ship and explode himself.

So that's nice. But other happier (haha) stuff includes: finding a little garden with bridges and non-Essex koi carp, also seeing and hearing massive Cicadas that sound like chainsaws, the sun going down over the moat of the Imperial Palace and also how no one here seems to want to kill each other like in London. We also saw some turtles who had a fight when we fed them, and didn't get lost once. Shouldn't have worn that pleather skirt though, it felt like my legs were wrapped in cling film all day.