We are staying at the oddly-named Hotel En, it’s that pinkish building kind of in the middle
Today’s excursion is gonna be a really fun trip, I have wanted to see Kure for a while. But first, we have to figure out the trains from Hiroshima
You can spot Robert & Matthew up there fighting the ticket machines, I guess I’m back here holding down the train beers or something 😀This is our train!We enjoyed a very scenic forty-five minute train ride down the coast. Thus far on the Japan 2026 trip we’ve had amazing luck with the weather, but today the clouds & drizzle seem to be settling down on us for a while
Kure is still an important shipyard but it was a critical one during WWII (that’s World War TWO, not World War ELEVEN :-D). The allies conducted something like fourteen different air raids on this port. The Battleship Yamato was launched from Kure just eight days after Pearl Harbor (wow they work really fast!) Two of the other aircraft carriers destroyed at Midway were also built here.
Our plan today is to check our the big naval museum (with its amazing 30-to-1 scale model of the Yamato) first, then get lunch somewhere, and then go visit the submarine!
There’s the sub! It’s relatively modern, retired maybe twenty-five years ago or so, but it’s still pretty cool to visitThe giant shipyards of KureCheck out all those cranes!There she is, the exact 30-1 replica of the largest battleship ever builtThe eighteen-inch guns could hurl a shell about the weight of a small car twenty-six miles…. not sure how accurate it was at that range, but I guess if you are trying to pound a coastal city it doesn’t much matterRobert wondering how much NAND this thing must use!!The museum also has an actual Zero on displayThis disturbing vehicle is a two-man submarine… let’s put it this way, I don’t think they bothered putting on a door handle. Think of it as a person-guided torpedo, the hard wayAll kinds of WWII hardware hereKeep a firm grip on your phone!!The Yamato as the pilots at Midway must have seen herWe found an “Italian” lunch place lol well I guess they were an actual Axis power 😀My uni pasta was delicious!Don’t quite remember what this was lolNow we’re in the other museum, the submarine one. Robert is sailing under different colors suddenlyLuckily we all easily recognized World War II mines from having watched Gilligan’s Island!!Now we’re actually onboard the submarineThese are actual crewmen’s bunks, Matt and I tried them out for size 😀 (don’t worry, there were huge signs suggesting that you try them)The submarine is full of dangers!Here’s where you “drive” the sub, purely by instruments since there’s not exactly a windshield to look through 😀Down below are torpedo bays!There’s where we are, the other dots indicate different maritime museums in JapanBack in the Kure train stationThat was a pigeon in the station who might have been glued to the cement, he really didn’t care if people were close to him or not, you had to practically step on him before he’d grudgingly sidle over maybe a single step
And we’re back to the hotel, where we had the amusement of watching a group of Germans attempting to check in. Apparently some rooms were not ready yet, and the Germans were not satisfied to hear “we’ll let you know as soon as they are ready!” “Well how long will that be?” The poor hotel employee spread his hands saying “just as soon as housekeeping lets me know!” “But when exactly? How long?!? Two minutes? Seven minutes? Eighteen minutes?!?” This kept up as the Germans suggested every number they knew in English… we unfortunately had to leave this hilarious lobby scene to get to our rooms to prep for dinner.
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