More Adventures with Mom and Dad

This entry is getting back to my sight-seeing trip with my parents. After spending a day in Shikoku, we headed back to Honshu and got off the train in a city called Okayama. This city is famous for the origin of the legend of Momotaro, the baby who was born in a peach and grew up to be a great fighter who conquered demons and monsters. Even though it was raining the entire day we spent in Okayama, after walking through a beautiful park and getting completely soaked because amongst the three of us there was not a single umbrella, I made Mom and Dad walk down to the edge of this peninsula just to see a small statue of Momotaro. But before we walked to the statue's location we did buy some umbrellas at a small roadside stand. That's a good thing about Japan, they sell umbrellas almost anywhere, including in convenience stores.

After two days of straight rain, it finally became dry and sunny after our tour of Okayama, and we headed far west to a small town called Iwakuni outside the suburban area of Hiroshima. Iwakuni is famous for a five-part bridge called the Kintaikyou. After walking across the bridge, you enter an area full of former samurai residences and art museums. We took a cable car up the side of the surrounding mountain in order to see Iwakuni Castle at the mountain summit. This castle was reconstructed, the original having been built in the 1600s. We learned that it was reconstructed because a past shogun of Japan, in order to keep his subjects from becoming too powerful, did not let more than one castle be built within a single prefecture, and I guess Iwakuni Castle was the second castle built in its prefecture at the time, so it was destroyed soon after it was erected, despite taking all those years to build it in the first place.