Hiroshima

After a very pleasant free breakfast of toast and apricot (maybe) jam we headed out to the Peace Gardens to begin our educational experience learning, and appreciating, all about the events of August 6th 1945. The gardens, and museum, are literally on our doorstep which is perfect so we got there around 10, which begun with a short 15 minute film outlining the experiences of a few people of the day and the after effects. Incredibly difficult to watch, Amelia obviously cried. Great to see though because then we could really appreciate certain aspects of what we saw when we walked around the museum. Such as a pair of twins, aged 9 and 11, who were exposed to the radiation who lost all their hair in the aftermath, seemed to recover fine, but one suddenly died a few months later while the other grew up, got married, then suddenly contracted cancer and died at the age of 19. There were loads of stories such as this but I won’t go into detail here, it’s too harrowing and would take far too long to write/read. The museum is amazing, definitely spend the extra money to get an audio tour because you get so much more information. We read that you should leave yourselves an hour and a half to fully explore it, but we ended up taking 4 hours there, it’s so worth it. To summarise, the first, and most extensive/important part depicts people’s experiences, the immediate effects and the aftermath of what happened on 6th August 1945. It displays belongings, left by the victims, photos and other materials to convey the horror of the event and describing the stories behind the items. The embodiment of grief and pain in these artefacts was incredibly well portrayed, in a setting that allowed people to shed a tear without being put in the spotlight (it was very dark). Absolutely amazing and horrifying at the same time.

The next part describes the correspondence between, sadly, the UK and US in the run up to first creating the A-Bomb, then the series of events which led up to its tragic use. What we weren’t taught at school was how one of the overriding factors of its actual use was to mitigate the $2 billion dollars of US taxpayers money spent on the Manhattan Project. It didn’t need to be used at all as the war was effectively over and Japan already on its knees. They also identified targets in ‘metropolitan areas, with topography to amplify the effect of the blast’, basically to murder as many civilians as possible. Fortunately at Nagasaki this actually worked against the bomb so only 74,000 innocent people were killed, whereas at Hiroshima it was over 140,000 by Christmas, and hundreds of thousands more killed by radiation effects, let alone the other life changing defects caused by radiation, on both the victims and those who flooded into the decimated area to help the recovery of as many lives as possible.

I would love to write a lot more on the subject but I think we would all get pretty bored by that eventually, but in summary the museum was incredible, and even more astounding that they make it seem almost like a natural disaster and not something that other human beings had chosen to do. I still find it incredible that the decision was made to actually use such a device on other people, especially given the 4 other options the US had conceived as bringing about the end of the Pacific War. It brings into sharper focus the current maniacs running our nations who want keep and potentially use such devices in the future. The final section of the museum is about how the efforts of numerous groups from Hiroshima are leading the way in the reduction, and prevention of a nuclear bomb ever being used, or tested again (on that point the entire of the US apart from a bit of Texas has heightened radiation levels due to the testing done in the Cold War era, crazy). 

Moving on from here, with significant mental trauma and fatigue we headed over to the Shukkeien Gardens for some light relief. On the way over we stopped at a food hall to pick up some lunch which we took into the gardens to eat (rice chicken sandwich [literally a piece of fried chicken in sticky rice wrapped in seaweed] and a sushi box for me, peanut butter sandwich and pastry for Amelia...she still isn’t getting on well with the food). The gardens are beautiful, with loads of people in Kimonos getting photos all over the place, I don’t know if it’s a special day for it or it’s just a good photo op but there was probably ten different sets of people around the grounds doing this. 

Leaving here we went back towards the peace gardens and caught the A-Bomb dome just as the sun was setting, although it is very difficult to photograph well as there are two large trees right next to it and you can’t get high enough, very frustrating. This is the only building which was left partially standing pretty much in a 2 kilometre radius and has been retained as a memorial of the event. We looked around the rest of the park as it was getting darker, which has numerous memorials and artefacts commemorating the people who lost their lives. The cenotaph lines up with a ‘peace flame’ which will keep burning until the last nuclear device is destroyed (an amazing sentiment), which also lines up with the a-bomb dome, perfectly framing it, a lovely expression of such destruction. While we were there many passing locals would bow their heads in a quick prayer as the walked past, something that clearly is still felt in the communities of today. Another random fact is that there’s a sit-in held at the peace dome every time a nuclear test is done. 

After we had finished taking photos and reading all of the memorials we headed back to the hostel for a bit of recuperation (definitely required) before wandering into the town centre for some Okonomiyaki. It’s nicknamed the ‘japanese pizza’ as you can have loads of different ‘toppings’ on it. It basically consists of a pancake base, with noodles, bean sprouts, cabbage and an omelette, with sauce and spring onions as a garnish on top, we had cheese and a sticky rice cake added inside. We ate this at a place called Okonomimura which is essentially a 5 storey building with about 6 vendors per floor selling the exact same thing. The equivalent of if we had a 5 storey building with 6 pizza places on every floor, literally all selling variations on the exact same thing. A bit crazy but very cool, we were sat at the counter where they were made so got to watch the entire process. Unfortunately they must have included a fishy seasoning because Amelia didn’t fully enjoy it, but she ate most of it so I guess that’s a win. We just headed back to bed after that, both full and mentally drained from a harrowing experience, one that I definitely won’t forget anytime soon.