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Published: July 10th 2009
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We have a reservation on the Shinkansen (bullet train) at 930 to Hiroshima from Tokyo, first we have to negotiate the subway at rush hour which is fun with big backpacks. We let one train come and go because it is so busy, the second one we just force our way onto, the doors just about close behind us and we're off.
We buy some supplies for the journey - sushi, crazy pastries with hotdogs in and green tea. The Shinkansen have dedicated platforms and it is quite exciting to see them for the first time, they look mint, really long and much wider and spacious inside than our trains. It leaves exactly on time and soon gets up to speed, it took me a while to realise how fast we were going because it is so quiet but as the stations flew by and I realized that we were chewing up the miles at quite a rate I looked at everything flying past and was convinced. As an example, Kyoto to Osaka is 50 miles, the Shinkansen does this in 15 minutes!
There is a direct train to Hiroshima from Tokyo, however the rail pass we bought does
not include this so we had to stop in Osaka for 50 minutes. Even so we arrived in Hiroshima just before 3pm - 900 miles down the road.
We walked 10 minutes from the station to our hostel which was traditional Japanese style with tatami matts and bed on the floor, a bit like a cat box but a very nice cat box with wireless Internet and aircon.
We thought we would save the war stuff for the next day so we hired bikes from the hostel and cycled down to the port. I'll give Hiroshima the benefit of the doubt and say that this isn't it's best side, lots of ugly concrete buildings, looked a bit eastern european (I imagine). The ride back along the river was better and we did a bit of pace, enough to work up the appetite for a curry on the way back. After dinner we got a bit lost but were pointed in the right direction by a nice lady and soon found ourselves on the main strip of Hiroshima amongst all the flashing lights and bing bongs. This was fun to ride through on a bike, we also saw our
friend the bigecho karaoke but resisted temptation this time and rode back to bed as it started to rain.
We woke the next day to heavy rain, we had planned to hire bikes again but instead we picked up a ubiquitous free brolly from the hostel and walked around to the main station to get a city tram (or street car as they say). We bought breakfast from a convinience store which for me consisted of a prepackaged cold hotdog in a bun and another hotdog bun filled with cold noodles, ginger and mayonnaise - yum.
We got off the tram at the peace memorial park which is very close to the hypocentre of the bomb, the first thing you see is the A-bomb dome which retained some of it's structure after the blast and has since been preserved. The setting of this and the park is very pleasant now but it was quite moving to think about how the scene must have looked in August 1945. We walked around the rest of the park looking at and reading the other memorial pieces, we stopped for a while at a memorial for the children who died. There is
a story about a little girl dying from cancer after exposure to radiation, she was attempting to make 1000 origami cranes in the belief that she would survive if she achieved this. She died before reaching her goal but since then the origami crane has become a peace symbol and there are thousands of them displayed around the childrens memorial, made by schools all over Japan and the rest of the world. There was a school trip going on while we were there and we watched as the kids stood around the memorial and sang some kind of peace song as the rain came down. After the song, they added their cranes along with the others.
We the walked down, past the flame which will never be extinguished until all of the nuclear weapons in the world are destroyed, to the peace museum. We watched a short film about the bombings and the after effects, the walked around the exhibits reading about the history leading up the bomb as well as the reasoning behind why it happened, some interesting points about the US having spent a fortune on developing it and justifying the expenditure along with them not wanting
to involve the USSR in declaring war on the Japanese so as to reduce their influence after the war. This was one of the things I was most interested in and it didn't quite deliver for me, particularly I was interested to know why the Japanese were fighting the allies in the first place, it made no reference to this.
The next part was about nuclear weapons and the accumulation and testing of them by the recognised nuclear countries. After every nuclear test the Mayor of Hiroshima writes a strong letter to the head of state asking them to stop. These letters are all displayed, the majority sent to the US, Russia and France but most recently to North Korea on 22nd May. There was a good bit about their strategies for encouraging nuclear countries to get rid of their weapons, I particularly liked their plan to visit over 100 cities in the US to raise awareness of what happened in Hiroshima so that the people can pressure the government.
After this was a section showing clothing, bits of buildings and even human remains affected by the blast. This was pretty strong, there was a stone step which
literally had the shadow burnt into it of a woman who had been sat there.
This bomb wiped out a whole city in seconds, killing 70,000 people instantly and another 80,000 over later time. In comparison to weapons currently developed this was nothing, unbelievable.
We then took the tram back to the hostel, got stuck into the free curry and rice in the kitchen, had a couple of beers and read about our trip to the Koyasan mountain village near Osaka for the next couple of days.
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