The Shinkansen takes around 3 hours to get from Sendai to Shin-Hakodate.  A car, perhaps 8.5 hours.  Our cruise ship leaves Sendai at 3PM and is expected to arrive in the Port of Hakodate at 7AM, or 16 hours later.  Our ship would need to cruise at 22 MPH.  The Riviera's top speed is 23 MPH. The largest cruise ship today is the Icon of the Seas.  She has a top speed of 28 MPH.  The Titanic could just about reach that speed. The Oceania Riviera was supposed to depart at 3PM, but instead left at 2:50.  So this is the only photo I took. Sendai is a special place for me.  I have stayed at the Sendai Westin at least ten times.  Photo to the left, sunset from the Executive Club.  The room price now is around $350/night.  I remember a few months after the 11March2011 Great Tohoku cataclysm, with the Fukushima damaged nuclear reactors only 50 miles away, I only paid $45/night. 2012 :  In April, 13 months after the Great Tohoku disaster...

We are now in the Port of Onohama.  Not much, except coal piles and, perhaps a mile away, an Aeon Mall. I've never heard of Onohama.  Turns out there is a good reason.  No actual city of Onohama.  The Port of Onohama, where the Oceania Riviera is berthed, and Onohama Beach, somewhere close by, use that name.  Onohama is a tiny town 10 miles south of Iwaki City. We are in the southern region of Tohoku that was devastated by the 11March2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster.  In Iwaki City alone, 60,000 houses were partially or totally destroyed. The primary attraction is something called  Spa Resort Hawaiians : Inaugurated in 1966 as the Joban Hawaiian Center, the resort is now a desirable tourist destination. Most famous for hula performances by the Hula Girls. In the 1960s, Iwaki was a coal mining town facing crisis.  The Hula Girls formed to draw tourists. Since that 2011 tsunami, in addition to their linkage to this resort, the Hula Girl...

 Lunch on Day 11. The Diamond Princess docked across the pier from us. The speaker today was  Adam Tanner , author in residence at Harvard.   He spoke on:  Japanese View of the Pearl Harbor Attack--How Tokyo justified its World War Two aggression. I already provided some background information about this subject in my  24April2025  posting. Having been born in 1940 in Honolulu, I was a little more than one year old when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.  I thus was a U.S. citizen, and being of Japanese descent, lived through my life with a sense of discomfort about what people felt about my loyalties.  Of course, I was American, and schools taught me about that Day of Infamy, and how terrible the Japanese were about starting World War II in the Pacific. Now in my 80's, for the first time I'm beginning to realize that just maybe, Japan was cornered in desperation, and had to become aggressive to survive as a nation. Not shown in the  graphic to ...