The arrival to Hiroshima station was fairly uneventful, only made interesting by the signs directing us to the “streetcar”, a designation I had last encountered in the Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando classic “A Streetcar Named Desire”, with most other places in the World sticking to the word “tram”. A few stops on the relatively crowded carriage and we were at the epicentre of the explosion that, on August 6th 1945, irreparably changed the face of the city, and indirectly the history of the World.
The A-bomb memorial, which consists of the ruins of the Hiroshima Prefectural Exhibition Hall that stood despite being right underneath the epicentre of the detonation, is an eerie and strangely peaceful place despite the large body of visitors that we had for company. A little further along the Memorial Park, the Children’s Peace Monument is inspired by Sadako Sasaki, who survived the blast as a two-year old but later contracted leukaemia as a result of radiation exposure. While in hospital, her roommate told her of the Japanese legend that if you fold one thousand paper cranes you are granted one wish, so she set upon meeting that goal. She died aged twelve after folding 644 cranes, so her classmates folded one thousand more and buried these with her, turning Sadako into a symbol of the innocent victims of the atomic bomb.
The museum is a brutal and deflating experience, as it paints an extremely vivid picture of what can only be described as hell on Earth. The pictures, testimonies and artefacts supplied by survivors leave one wondering how human beings can inflict such pain and suffering onto others like us. The bit that left me with a twist in my stomach was the realisation that the very scientists who developed the technology that made the nuclear strike a possibility urged the US administration to demonstrate their weapon in a deserted location rather than in a populated area. Ultimately, it was the need to justify to the American public the expenditure of two billion dollars in its research and development led to the deployment of nuclear weapons on innocent civilians and, whatever way you look at it, I cannot think of any angle that makes that reasoning even remotely excusable.
A walk into town served to partly recover our spirits before tasting some Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki (my favourite Japanese dish) and then heading back to the train station. On the way, Pete correctly pointed out that it did not feel like we were in the place where nuclear weapons were first used in anger, mostly due to the fact that the city looks so normal to the untrained eye. To me, it is the rare building that survived the strikes that makes the difference, as they are so few and far between they stand out amongst the huge skyscrapers built after the War.
After another swift bullet train trip we made it to Osaka for the night, without much time to do anything than grab a great dinner at a Yakitori nor far from our hostel, where the host entertained us with a few robot-dances and a round of bingo while we washed down delicious grilled delicacies with sufficient quantities of Japanese beer. Although we will have more time to check the city out when we get back from our Kumano-Kodo hike (which we are a bit nervous about since there is a typhoon warning exactly on the days we are planning on doing it…), it seems like Osaka will live up to our expectations as a lively and bustling metropolis, aiming to rival Tokyo as Japan’s most electric city.
Cheers,
J-Wowww
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