Today we took a training in the morning down to Hiroshima to visit the Peace Memorial Museum and the Atomic Bomb Dome. This was quite an overwhelming experience to say the least but amazingingly peaceful now. Later we trained it back to Osaka to visit the Aquarium before catching another train to Kyoto for our tradtional Ryokan experience.

From Tokyo we spent 5days in Kyoto - the ancient capital full of temples and zen gardens which are amazing at first but once you've seen more than 4/5 they become monotonous and dull. Its a definitive place to see in Japan, and well worth visiting but just confirmed to us how weird the Japanese people are. We cooked in the communal kitchen at t...

Up at 5am to get on the road to Hiroshima. Get there early afternoon and spend it around the Atomic Bomb Memorial and Museum. Lets just say that it was pretty sobering to be there and see the effect it had, both short and long term. I had a sense of guilt associated with being there and being an American, but I also understood that I had no dire...

The Japanese make me laugh, when it rains every single one of them without fail carries an umbrella. Im not talking about like at home where most people have them. I get the feeling its almost a capital punishment over here if you dont carry an umbrella and its raining - even just slightly. The funny thing is in the 20 minutes its taken me to wa...

Hello Everybody! I am here in Hiroshima, safe and sound. We arrived last night around 8:45pm Sunday night, Hiroshima time. I believe that would be 2am Sunday morning back home. We were greeted by our preceptor, Kenji Kihara, and several of his students. They seemed all very excited to see us, as we were to see them. They dropped us off at our ho...