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Southern Sojourns: Day 2 – Hiroshima

Photos: Part 1
Photos: Part 2

The next day, we headed yet-farther south, and arrived in Hiroshima in the early afternoon. The abundance of lion-related signs we discovered immediately outside of the station made it so that Ryan couldn't really move 10 metres without me snapping yet another one of these pictures. It was like a sick joke. What joviality I felt in the first half of the day, however, didn't survive into the afternoon, when faced with the weight of a city whose past is still so painfully present.


We began by dragging our suitcases through the sweltering summer heat, and finally arrived at the Hotel Hiroshima Intelligent some 20 minutes later. Naturally, this was the wrong hotel, and we soon found ourselves backtracking 20 minutes to the other side of the city. As it turns out, our actual hotel was the Hiroshima Grand Intelligent Hotel. I'm not even kidding. Granted, this did allow me to see a wider range of Hiroshima's manhole covers (ever major city in Japan has its own line, and here was no exception), but still it left me wondering: who the fuck names their hotel the "Intelligent" anything, let alone has two of them within walking distance of each other?!

The hotel's décor was all kinds of interesting (some of it having evidently come straight from the set of Never Ending Story), but our rooms (of which we had 2 this time) were perfectly nice, if slightly downmarket from the accidental opulence of the one in Tokyo. After ditching our suitcases, we headed out to the colourfully-titled お好み物語 (Okonomi Monogatari, or "The Tale of Okonomiyaki") to try one of Hiroshima's 3 most famous foods: 広島風お好み焼き (Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki).



You can't really tell from this picture, but the entire floor of this building was an endless maze of okonomiyaki stands. We decided not to go with the lady who screamed "My face is beautiful, I think so, too!!!" at us and went, instead, for the place that was handing out random objects to customers to hold onto until a space opened up for them. We got a glass rabbit with a pen-lid for an ear.





Evidently it was pretty popular since we had something of a wait ahead of us. It was, however, entirely worth it just for these. Hiroshima-fū okonomiyaki is different from Osaka-fū in that it's layered, made with noodles and has four times as much cabbage. I still prefer the latter, but these certainly didn't detract from my addiction to okonomiyaki as a whole. Ryan also jumped the gun and trying Hiroshima's next most famous food: namely, kaki (or oysters), which were a tad briny, but not unappetizing.

Afterwards, we went exploring – stumbling across a Wara Wara along the way. It was like we'd never left Akita. Heading east of the okonomiyaki place, we were wandering the river bank when an old Japanese lady coming from the opposite direction told us that we were heading towards a dead end - a fact she'd just discovered for herself. As it happened, she was on her way to an art museum that was en route to the place we were headed, and so she joined us in a merry jaunt round the side-streets of Hiroshima. She and Ryan got talking after she revealed her fascination with the politics of English vs. French-speaking Canada, and so I lagged behind and took pictures of creepy crying statues.



(Actually this turned out to be a statue of Sadako Sasaki, which just made it kind of tragic.)

As we passed the art museum, our paths parted ways, and Ryan and I continued onwards to...



...Hiroshima-jō!

This particular castle was a little more sombre than the others I've visited, with every site being accompanied by a picture of what it looked like before the bomb. It was still terribly pretty though, and did provide some comedy relief with the absurdity of these two photos. (It's actually funnier if you just go to the Facebook album and flick back and forth between pictures 39 and 40). Also: Ryan inadvertently using the most obscenely open-plan public toilet I've ever encountered. He didn't realise the extent of this until I pointed it out to him, though that wasn't before several tour groups had already gone by. Somewhat less amusingly, this t-shirt was a little on the nose...



The most wooden castle I ever did see.

Paying heed to the Engrish welcome mat, we entered the castle to discover that its interior is actually a museum to pre-WWII Hiroshima. This ostensible timescale did not, however, stop it from having an abundance of those ever-prevalent aftermath shots. To think that this pile of rubble was once Hiroshima Castle, though, is pretty horrendous. Further up the tower was the topmost balcony, where we took in the Hiroshima skyline before descending back the way we came. This was fraught with more danger than seemed possible from going downstairs, after I just about killed someone by dropping my lens cap from the very top of the tower. All I could do was watch in horror as it tumbled several storeys into the stairwell beneath me, missing someone's head by a few short inches when it finally came to a clattering stop. There were, thank god, no casualties; though the knowledge that you can kill someone by dropping a penny from the top of a very high place was in the forefront of my mind.







Fleeing the scene of my crime, we quickly made our way out of the castle grounds. We stopped at a temple along the way so that I could buy my obligatory ema, then discovered that the area south of the castle was replete with live Japanese reggae bands and the Promenade of Bunka. To the west of these grounds, though, was something that would signal the shift of our entire day into a decidedly more solemn event.



This is the 原爆ドーム – the Genbaku, or "A-Bomb", Dome. It was the closest structure to withstand the explosion of Little Boy: the first nuclear bomb in history to be used against humankind. It now stands in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park as a monument to nuclear horror and a call for the abolition of all nuclear weaponry.





Its burnt-out shell has been preserved to look exactly as it did following the bombing. The original target was Hiroshima's T-shaped Aioi Bridge, but – due to crosswind – it drifted some 800 feet in the air and detonated directly over a surgical clinic. The Genbaku Dome was one of the only things in the area left standing.



I wanted to record the fact that I'd been there, though I was a little distressed by the number of people taking shiny-happy-smiling shots with this as a backdrop. Really not the place, people...



Prior to its current state, the building was used as the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. I knew before coming here that it was on the UNESCO World Heritage List (as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial), though I didn't know that this was over the objections of the U.S. and China.



It was the most haunting thing to see it in real life.



Farther downriver was the 原爆の子の像 (Genbaku no Ko no Zō), or Children's Peace Monument. It stands in memory of the thousands of child victims of the atomic bomb. A bronze crane hangs below the structure and can be used to ring the peace bell suspended above it. When I rang the bell, the chain sprang back and hit me in the face. I tried not to take it as an ill omen.







If ever there was a take-home message from this day...





To this day, people around the world still fold paper cranes and send them to Hiroshima to be placed beside this statue. It's said in Japan that a person who folds a thousand of them will be granted one wish. This has perhaps gained its greatest public awareness through the story of Sadako Sasaki: the girl at the top of this monument.



She was only 2 years old when the bomb dropped, but 10 years later, she was diagnosed with leukaemia from the radiation. In 1955, she was hospitalised and given, at most, a year to live. Her best friend, Chizuko, visited her in the hospital one day and folded a golden piece of paper into a paper crane. At first Sadako didn't understand why, but Chizuko reminded her of the old story, and inspired Sadako to start folding them herself.

She believed that if she could fold a thousand paper cranes, she would be cured. Her greatest obstacle was finding the paper to continue making them, but Chizuko would bring paper from school for her to use and Sadako would find medical wrappers and even went to other patients' rooms to ask to use the wrapping paper from their get-well presents.

She died on October 25th, just 8 months after she was admitted to the hospital.



The only greater tragedy I saw that day was this woman's outfit. When your skin starts to resemble a Louis Vuitton handbag, your days of backless shirts are over.

But seriously: peace, people.



This is the Cenotaph for the A-Bomb Victims, through which you can see the Peace Flame and the Genbaku Dome. The arch shape represents a shelter for the souls of victims, and the epitaph reads, "Repose ye in Peace, for the error shall not be repeated."

Next, we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where we stopped by the giant, Korea-donated turtle drum momentarily to take a breather from the onslaught of sheer human tragedy. We then braced ourselves, and entered the interior of the museum. It begins with the history of Hiroshima up to the events of August 6th, 1945, then follows the aftermath of the bombing in pretty horrific detail.



Before.



And after.

That a single bomb could cause this much destruction is just unfathomable to me.



The perimeter of the room follows the chronology of Hiroshima's history and the development of nuclear weaponry. One of the most shocking things I saw, however, was the collection of protest telegrams that are continuing to this very day. Successive mayors of Hiroshima have sent telegrams protesting every nuclear weapons test since 1968. The telegrams are sent to the countries responsible for each test, and each expresses the fervent hope that it will be the last such telegram. And yet there were just walls and walls of them, addressed to almost every major world leader you can name.





Likewise, this (inexplicably upside-down) globe showed the number of nuclear weapons currently held by every country in the world. I was a more than a little surprised to see our number (at the very top there) was quite so high.



The final section illustrated the full horror of the human casualties of the bombing, and was – without a doubt – the hardest one to take.







Making matters inexpressibly worse was the fact that I had to teach "A Mother's Lullaby" to every one of my 3-nensei classes just one week after I'd seen all this. Let me assure you that reading the lines, "Many people lost their lives, and many others were injured. They had burns all over their bodies" whilst having these visuals fresh in your mind is no mean task. I'm amazed I didn't break down in tears every time I went class.



Few people, myself included, know that the bomb actually detonated about 600m in the air. The surrounding mountains produced a focusing effect that stopped the blast from spreading any farther, but utterly decimated everything within a mile of the hypocenter. There was a replica of it in this room that I found, if anything, more bewildering than anything else. To think that something this small killed 140,000 people in an instant is hard to even imagine.





Following the bombing, a report was broadcast from Radio Tokyo describing the destruction in Hiroshima. The announcers noted that "Practically all living things, human and animal, were literally seared to death."

Ryan and I tried to get through the museum as quickly as possible as it was due to close a short while after we entered. This proved not to have been the best idea, since it basically meant that we were taking in more human misery than we could possibly process in half the time one is meant to see it in. From the human shadow etched in stone from the blast, to the tricycle with a child's fingers soldered to the handlebars (which I couldn't even bring myself to take a picture of), there was just a feeling of absolute bereavement to everything we saw. As we were leaving, we stopped to watch one of the survivor's testaments, who described how he was walking to school when it happened and how he later tried to drag his friend to a hospital after the soles of the boys feet were completely burned off.



Back outside, we took a quiet stroll through the other monuments in the park. This is the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound, a grass-cover knoll that contains the ashes of 70,000 unidentified victims of the bomb.



The Peace Clock Tower. Every day, it rings at 8:15 in the morning.



The Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the A-Bomb. Some 10% of the total victims of the bombing were Korean, but they were given no funerals or memorial services at the time of the attack. This monument was finally built in 1970, and the epitaph reads: "Souls of the dead ride to heaven on the backs of turtles."



The Children's Peace Monument at night.





And the Genbaku Dome over the river. I sat there for a while, and tried to process everything I'd seen that day.



Hiroshima: City of Peace. This photo was taken on the Aioi Bridge: the failed original target of the bombing.



Ryan navigating the intricacies of the tram system on our way back.

We went out for dinner at night, where I tried to drown my sorrows in the arms of a fast-food chain mascot. As Halle Berry once (twice, and several thousand more times) said: "Can you make me feel good? I wanna feel guuuuuuuuuuuhhhd!" The view of the station from our restaurant was also rather impressive (even if the pope-shaped building across the way was a little disconcerting), and their tuna steak was amazing. Even the sight of another of ライオン先生's myriad guises couldn't shake the feeling of despondency that the rest of the day had garnered, though, and finally we just called it a night.

And so ended one of the most emotionally draining days of my life.