I am going to forego any sort of fancy email thing with pictures for this one, considering that I am writing (starting) it two weeks to the day after I actually returned from Hiroshima. "Slacker" is my name, it appears. I think for the moment I will just start off with the time we spent with things related to the A-Bomb and add anything else later, if I end up doing that at all.
I arrived in Hiroshima on Friday at around 1130am after getting up at 6am to catch the 650 ferry over to Sasebo to start my journey on the train. My friend Alice had been there for an hour and was waiting for me at the station. I met Alice in college, in Japanese class actually, and we had always talked about the JET Program. Last year she made that dream a reality (graduating on time, who does that?) and now so have I, so it was really nice to finally get to see her after more than a year.
She took me to the hostel on the street car so that I could drop off my stuff, and then we headed off to the Peace Memorial Park.
The stop for Peace Memorial Park on the trolley car line is the only one that features English. It actually started to get pretty funny, riding back and forth on the trolley and always hearing the warning that the "next stop is for the Peace Memorial Park... please get off at the next stop if you are going to Peace Memorial Park".
We did get off there, and the first thing we saw was the Atomic Bomb dome. The dome was almost directly underneath the hypocenter of the bomb when it exploded, just under 500 feet (150 m) away. Miraculously, much of the structure survived the blast and it has been preserved in its current form since that day. I have pictures of this, and most of the other things I will talk about, but I will have to put them up later and let you know.
The building was certainly impressive to see, but set in amongst the beautiful park on a wonderful day it was hard to really get the full effect of it. We were in high spirits, enjoying the weather, the reunion, and the park, and it would be hard to bring us down.
After we passed the dome a group of elementary school students ran out to meet us. They started to tell us that they were there on their school trip, how far away they lived... it was cute. They also asked us if we knew okonomiyaki, which Hiroshima is famous for, and momiji manju. Okonomiyaki is a crazy mixture based around a sort of pancake batter but with all sorts of delightful things on / in it and momiji (maple tree) manju is a pastry shaped like a maple leaf with Japanese red bean paste (or other things) inside. Later we ran into another group and their script was almost exactly the same. Ha, it was cute. I am sure they practiced a lot to get it right.
The next stop in the park was the Children's Peace Monument, dedicated to the memory of Sadako Sasaki, a girl who died from leukemia caused by the bomb's radiation. There is a legend in Japan that if you fold one thousand cranes and fill each crane with your heart's desire then your wish will come true. Sadako believed this and kept folding paper cranes long after she had made her thousandth. After her death her friends got support to build a monument for her and all the other children that died. Thousands of cranes arrive almost every day from around the world and are placed near the statue in display cases. Millions of cranes on are display there, strung together or assembled into collages with peaceful imagery.
The sun was still shining brightly in the sky and there were school children milling about when we passed by the Memorial Cenotaph on the way to the Peace Memorial Museum. The Cenotaph is a sort of symbolic tomb for all the (Japanese) people that died in the attack. It is on a straight line with the Museum, the Bomb Dome, and the Peace Flame, which will stay lit until all of the nuclear weapons on the planet are destroyed and the world is free from the threat of nuclear annihilation.
The Museum was an incredibly sobering experience. There is a defined path through the museum and it leads visitors through the events and historical context preceding the attack, the attack and its immediate aftermath, as well as the long term effects. There was too much to be able to really be able to write about it all, but one of the most arresting things in the beginning was a pair of huge circular models of the city, one before and one after. There were also lots of fotos of the destruction, taken by the Army Air Corps before and after the fact. All of the cities that were considered as targets for the atomic bomb were not bombed at all so as to be able to assess the destructive capabilities in the most accurate fashion.
What I originally mistook for the end of the tour turned out to be a pathway into the next section of the museum, detailing the human effects of the bombing. It was horrible to think of what happened to the people that were there. One of the first things in this new section was a life size scene with models of a mother and two children trying to escape to safety. Their clothes were in tatters and seared to their skin, which was dripping off in some places, everything covered in blood. Behind them everything burned.
There were pictures of people with their whole bodies covered in burns; articles of clothing and other personal affects with the story of their owner; descriptions of the effects of the radiation over the months and years for the people who survived the initial blast. They detailed cases where babies still in the women were born with mental disabilities, requiring lifelong care from their parents, with video included.
The museum ended with some thoughts and images of peace in the shop. It was an incredibly moving experience. I walked out of there feeling like if everyone in the world were somehow to go through and experience everything in that museum that the world would know peace, but I know that even that is not realistic, nothing more than a wisp of a dream. I guess that's no reason to stop people from trying though.
There were other things in Hiroshima obviously, but this is more than enough for now. More will come, either in handy email format or as words attached to pictures.
wordy but necessary future love,
-greg.
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