Hiroshima to Home

So after all of the Atomic Bomb stuff, we took a long train down to a city called Kure. It is in the Hiroshima area, and it was a vital boatyard during WWII. You may have heard of the battleship Yamato during WWII. This is where it was build. They had a museum to accompany it.

 Also: A submarine. 

 They meant to put it there (I think). It housed the Japan Self Defense Force Maritime Museum. The museum showed all the activities of the JSDF with minesweeping and submarine activities. 

 That little guy is a floater that they troll behind a boat and wait for a mine to blow it up. Many mines are magnetically activated, so the JSDF uses giant wooden boats. Interesting eh? 

 This part of the museum was modeled after the top of a boat.

 Know you boat...or else.

 They had cutaways of what it is like to live in a submarine. It would be terrible. 

 All these switches are just to run the one espresso machine.

 Giant cranes over the harbors. We also got to go inside the submarine. I knocked my head at least 5 times in the 4 minute tour> They let you look through the periscope and check out what was going on outside.

 The Yamato museum had a 1/10 scale of the battleship. It was SUPER cool. The Yamato was the most feared and famous battleship of the entire Japanese Navy during WWII. It was a symbol of the Japanese power in the Pacific.

 The model was huge, but the real ship was (obviously) bigger.

 They had an exhibition of all the different types of torpedoes launched by submarines in WWII. 

 They also had the outlines on the ground showing how big those things were. 

 A smaller submarine.

 Mitsubishi Zero fighter. So awesome! The fighter crashed into a shallow lake during training, but was mostly intact. They restored it and now it is on display.

 These were awesome planes that were especially vicious when launched from aircraft carriers. 

 The kamikazi submarine. They would put a guy in it and launch him toward an enemy boat. Underwater kamikazi.

 A display of the Zero and the motor.

 A small scale cross-section of the Zero. 

 The guns recovered from downed Zeros.

Ammunition and other parts. 

 Another look at the sub.

 A cross section of the inside of one of the small submarines.

An overhead view of the Yamato Model. The Yamato survived the war despite being seriously damaged toward the end. Ultimately, the crew was ordered on a suicide mission to Okinawa. The museum contained letters that the officers and crew wrote to their families before going off to die. The ship was sunk with the crew.

After that, we got on our last bus back to Tokyo. We boarded the bus at 8 pm and rode it until 8:30 the next morning. It was...awful. Luckily the bus wasn't very crowded, so we each got two seats. After we got back to Tokyo, we traveled the 3 hours back to Kofu, and the hour back home. I have rarely been so happy to be home again. Total, it was about a 1,000 mile journey over 4 days. Fun and frantic.