OK so here's a few more pictures for all of you.  The first one is
Himeji castle.  I have about ten or more pictures of the castle from
various angles, but I like this one.  It's tough to tell in this shot,
how big it is, but it is huge, like 6 or 7 stories if not more,
because they are tall.  The second shot is the Temple in Nara that
houses the big buddha.  My cell phone doesn't have a flash, so I
couldn"t take any pictures inside the temple, but the buddha is really
big.  For a comparison, the third picture is of a buddha in Kyoto.
This buddha is close to the same size, but the Nara buddha is much
more ornate.  The buddha in Kyoto is actually a war memorial to all
the unknown soldiers, so on one side they have a file catalog with all
the names of the allied troops that died on Japanese soil.  It"s
pretty interesting, because there are many countries listed in pretty
big numbers, but of course America takes up the largest section.  On a
side note about that, I found out that America actually controlled
Okinawa fully until the sixties and even then the US dollar and Yen
were the acceptable currency in Okinawa until around 1970.  And on
another side note, many Japanese people refer to Hawaii separately
from America.  They always say I've never been to the US, but I've
been to Hawaii or I've been to Hawaii and the US.  It's a little
strange.  Thats it for now, more pictures and more about the epic that
is Dan in Japan to come.

Dan