Okunoshima, aka BUNNY ISLAND + vlog

Okunoshima, a tiny island home to thousands of bunnies, was one of my highlights of Japan* despite the fact it was an absolute schlep to get to. I’ve always loved rabbits for being adorable, but their behaviour is defined by being prey animals. They spend all of their waking hours analysing where their next predator is, essentially living in a constant state of stress. Rabbits have been known to become paralysed and even die from panic at the sound of an approaching predator. On top of that they’re highly susceptible to diseases, have low intelligence, can’t vomit and have terrible defence mechanisms so the poor things often have a tough time in the wild.

Enter the bunnies at Okunoshima! The island is populated by rabbits ONLY, which means these animals are psychologically different to other rabbits. There’s no native diseases, no other species to share resources with, and without predators, they aren’t prey. I’m no animal behaviour specialist but this basically means they’re like the lions of their own little jungle. The Okunoshima rabbits are very outgoing animals with dusty fur, muddy, leathery feet and (in the elders), a bit of ear missing or a blinded eye. Pirate rabbits! The babies were the only ones with super-soft fur.

The island itself was a poison gas military base during WWII and has quite a bleak history. It’s far from a tourist spot with few signs and maps and certainly no guides or gift shops. It was kind of creepy wandering around between old ruins with blown out windows and through deserted look-out spots… or at least, creepy until you rustle your food bag and twenty eager bunnies appear. I’m not sure I would describe them as “tame” because they’re still wild and not submissive or trained. But they’re hugely confident, and will do anything to get food; they reminded me (behaviour-wise) of the seagulls in Brighton or the monkeys in Kenya who will chance anything to get a bite of your snack. Although I’ll take an adventurous rabbit over a bolshie seagull any day!

It’s very hard to describe so I’ve made a video! If you have 2 minutes to spare please watch because it does a far better job at capturing Okunoshima than my words and pictures ever could. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZW1b_QEOkU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZW1b_QEOkU

*I neglected to post about this back in April!

Souvenirs from Japan

Back in London and bought a pretty significant amount of Japan home with me 

A photo posted by Laila Layla (@lailapictures) on Apr 4, 2015 at 2:29pm PDT

//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js

I’d wanted to visit Japan for a very long time and knew I would want souvenirs; for months before going I was avoiding buying things I need so I could instead shop in Japan.You may have seen this snap on my instagram – one of my most liked images – today I’ll show you what I got! I have to say I felt very hypocritical as I’m just not the “haul” kind of girl. I don’t go crazy with my purchases; I shop rarely and I hate buying replacements or items similar to things I already own. I‘m also very conscious of where my stuff comes from and goes back too (as you may have guessed from my ethical and vegan lifestyle choices). That being said; I absolutely planned to buy a lot in Japan and purposefully took more money than I thought I’d need to live (first time I’ve ever done that for a holiday…!). 

Tokyo DisneySea

I went to Tokyo DisneySea right after I went to Tokyo Disneyland. I dearly wanted to see both, and I think the main positive of visiting places by yourself (as I did with Disneyland and Sanrio Puroland) is that you can just run around visiting the things you’re most interested in with complete disregard to everything else (in my case, anything with a 2 hour queue).

Disneyland Tokyo

I spent my last day in Tokyo at Disneyland. Tokyo Disneyland features the same spoke and hub design of the other Disneylands, and roughly the same lands (Tokyo Disneyland is slightly bigger than the one in Paris and smaller than California). Critter Country and Toontown were the two I’d not seen before, and I especially loved Toontown – ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ is one of my favourites, and the buildings perfectly captured the zany, bonkers feel that the place has in the film.

Sanrio Puroland + VLOG

I first heard about Sanrio Puroland at a ’Tokyo Life’ event in London when I was 8 years old – now I’ve finally been! Sanrio are the Japanese company behind various cute characters such as My Melody, Little Twin Stars, Chococat, Keroppi and of course, Hello Kitty, and as you might expect the theme park is one of the most kawaii places I’ve ever visited. I actually videoed my time there and am very proud to present the below video diary, which features the show, the parade, the rides, me completely losing it on the boat ride and the shop.

Pictures speak louder than words, and moving pictures speak louder than non-moving pictures.. so I hope you’ll watch the video! It’s not too long, and please bear in mind I’m not a seasoned pro with this vlogging stuff – this is the first time I’ve made a video for this purpose. Let me know what you think as I’ve got a few more on the way! I’ve also included some tips and directions at the bottom in case you’re planning a trip to Sanrio Puroland anytime soon. Enjoy! x

TIPS:

– The park is fairly small, so you’re unlikely to need a whole day unless you want to watch all the shows. Arrive early to do so as most of the shows are done by about 4.30pm (save for the main arena show).

– Tickets are very reasonable – but bring money as there is merchandise EVERYWHERE and much of it is exclusive to the park. I found it to be very fairly priced compared to the internet/Hello Kitty section in Hamleys. In my experience theme parks and tourist destinations tend to inflate their prices a lot but the opposite seemed to be true at Sanrio Puroland. (I’ve got a big Japan “haul” post coming soon if you want to see what I’ve got, and a giveaway if you want in on the action!).

– I went alone, and was seemingly the only person above the age of 16 who wasn’t accompanying a child and the only non-Japanese person – but I didn’t care! The staff were all incredibly friendly and there are enough signs in English to get you around if, like me, your Japanese is a little lacking.

– I’d recommend going on all the rides – there’s no big thrills (mostly dark rides) but they’re all very cute and the level of detail is impressive.

– I forgot to video or photograph my food – but it was all shaped like various characters, so do stop by the restaurants!
HOW TO GET THERE:

– You will need to get the Keio line from Chofu, Tokyo to Keio Tama Centre – this was one of my only non-JR journeys and cost the equivalent of £3, so I decided I could live with it. You can also take the monorail back but it’s a much longer journey!

– From the station it is an incredibly simple walk – straight, turn left when you reach a massive arch with Hello Kitty on and can see the centre. If you do decide to get lost there are adorable maps everywhere with Sanrio characters to guide the way – so cute I took a picture!

Bloglovin / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram

Kyoto

These photos are from our brief time in Kyoto, and mostly from Tenryu-ji, a Buddhist temple founded in 1339. The original botanical garden is still largely intact today. Isn’t that incredible? My mind supplied visions of priests sowing the seeds and raking the ground into the landscape I saw in front of me, as though I were watching a historical montage. I tried to imagine creating something that people would experience in 600 years time and it is mind-boggling!

We travelled to Saga-Arashiyama in Kyoto primarily to visit the Sagano bamboo groves (pictured in the above two photos) only learning about Tenryu-ji when we arrived in Kyoto. The groves were a really beautiful site – very still and calm. Arashiyama itself was a pleasant suburban town – it was a nice change of pace from the bustle of Tokyo and I would have liked to have spent longer there. (I also would have liked to have spent longer in the kimono shop… those beautiful garments aren’t going to wear themselves!).

The walk through the bamboo groves and the quaint village felt very Studio Ghibli – I know I sound like a western fangirl but there was something so surreal and whimsical, particularly when we stumbled across a tiny train crossing in the middle of this epic walk between the bamboos. I always find areas with a rich history to be very comforting – picturing all the thousands of people who have walked the same steps, admired the same groves, the same sakura, the same rolling Kyoto mountains in the distance.

Hiroshima, Sadako and the Peace Museum

I was unsure of whether to post about my brief time in Hiroshima, because obviously the events that occurred there were so devastating and so upsetting. In many ways, there’s nothing further to observe. But I left feeling like my time in Hiroshima (and Japan) was so important to me, so I’ve decided to share a few of my pictures and my thoughts. I hope you find it interesting and if not – I’ll be back to pretty dresses and sakura in the next post.

We spent most of our morning at the Peace Museum, which contains artefacts left by the bomb (of which there were very, very few) and informative displays about the science of the atomic bomb, the events leading up to and after, the medical, biological and political effects of the bomb, and lastly, an opportunity to sign an international treaty calling to an end for nuclear weapons.

*Highlight to read – some of the stories in the next paragraph you may find distressing* Some of the exhibits that have stuck in my memory particularly include the burnt school-dress of a 13 year old victim – she had sewn the dress herself, and her embroidery was still visible on the collar; a metal lunchbox found by a mother with her dead child’s uneaten lunch still intact; and a cap belonging to a boy which had some of his hair fused into the fabric from the heat of the bomb. His mother kept the cap to show his father, who was away at the time fighting in the war. There was a set of cups fused together by the intense heat – found by a man who returned home to find his entire village destroyed. The nearest he could find to a personal belonging was a set of fused cups he recognised as belonging to a cafe nearby. And there was a heartbreaking story of a wife who found her husbands skeleton, completely stripped bare, sat at his desk and holding a pen.

Due to the unprecedented nature of the atomic bomb, nobody knew what the long-term effects were. Many children who were seemingly unharmed by the bomb in neighbouring villages grew up to have fertility problems, seemingly random cancers and tumours, or degenerative diseases. Medical anomalies continued to appear for the hibakusha up to 65 years after the bomb dropped. I can’t think of any other disaster that has caused repercussions for that length of time – it is insane. As the museum explained, people were forced to live their lives in fear from the moment the bomb dropped, not knowing when or what might affect them. How can you rebuild your life under a shadow like that?

The story of Sadako Sasaki was highlighted. Sadako was a healthy 2 year old who survived the bomb in a nearby village, developed an aggressive cancer aged 12 and tried to fight it by folding a thousand paper cranes (an ancient Japanese legend that if you fold 1000 cranes your wish will come true). The museum had some of her cranes on display, and heartbreakingly, some of the squares she had folded but not completed into cranes by the time she died.

Sadako became an international symbol for the innocent children whose lives were affected by the bomb and to this day people fold cranes and bring them to the peace museum. A statue of Sadako features in the Peace Garden, surrounded by boxed displays- it was incredibly moving to see large pictures that had been created from thousands of tiny folded cranes.

I left feeling completely desolate – I wish I could console myself but the fact is there are so many countries with fighting and tragedy on a similar scale every day, and it’s hard to know how to fix it. Upon reflection, I think what struck me most at Hiroshima, beyond the sheer horror and tragedy, was the total and complete decimation of the city and everything in it. It was impossible to rebuild when there was literally nothing left – any history, culture or stories attached to the town were wiped out in a nano-second. The Hiroshima we saw (outside of the central Peace Garden) could have been anywhere. It was like an eerie cut and paste city – pleasant and functionable enough, but devoid of history, of culture. Everything was completely standard. I can’t really explain but I’ve never been somewhere that felt so utterly far from history. And I think that to me is the huge tragedy that colours all of the personal ones – the irretrievable loss of an entire community.

Schoolgirl

As a child I wished I could be going to a Japanese school alongside Serena Tsukino or Sakura Kinomoto, catching up with my friends at the arcade after class or meeting my brother and his friends to go to a festival at the shrine. I spent hours reading manga and daydreaming about my alternate life – it was an escape from my life as a loser at school. I don’t think I realised how much of the clothes and fashion present in anime and manga infiltrated my young brain until this trip – so much of my personal style was identical to the young girls we saw daily in Japan.

This seifuku outfit was completely serendipitous (blouse, skater skirt and trainers is my daily uniform at home) but the minute I emerged Sam exlaimed “you look like you’re going to school!”. So of course when we visited Keio University we had to take these “going to school” photos! My own school uniform was pretty boring – I would have preferred cute sailor collars and pleated skirts! We headed to Kinchi Park afterwards, a beautiful little playground filled with teenagers and kids. 

The Keio Univeristy campus itself was so regal – I’m sure it was partly due to the combination of sakura bloom and intense sunshine (notice me squinting in every photo…) but the buildings seemed steeped in wisdom, authority and knowledge. It wasn’t too hard to slip back into my childhood daydreams and imagine myself chatting with friends on the walk to lectures or studying under the sakura during summer exams. I always like visiting universities when I go somewhere new – my own university meant so much to me and I suppose I’m curious about where everybody else spends their student years!

Bloglovin / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Pinterest

Blouse – £4, charity shop. Cardigan – £3.50, Topshop via eBay. Cat ears – gift. Shoes – £25, Rocketdog. Skirt – £10, Urban Outfitters (sale). Socks – £2.50, Topshop (sale).