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Published: October 5th 2013
Friday was a late start because I was heading to Tokushima, which is much closer to my base in Takamatsu. The train ride was just under an hour. I was a bit concerned when a group of school kids (I think they were a table tennis team actually) sat near me because I was expecting a rowdy trip. Not so, it turns out, because they were deaf kids. And besides, Japanese kids are pretty well behaved anyway.
I arrived in Tokushima and my first stop was the castle. Or what’s left of it. I had the impression there was more left than there actually is, though. Turns out there is not really much at all. But there is the Tokushima Castle Museum, which had some interesting displays of items that belonged to the rulers of the Tokushima clan who governed the area during the Edo period. The highlight was definitely the Senzan Maru – a boat used by the Lord of the day to travel to Edo, as all lords had to do every 2 years. One thing that was slightly odd to see was swastikas on most of the items. Of course, the swastika is a much
older symbol than the Nazis, and it turns out that it was used as the symbol for the Tokushima clan.
Next to the museum was a reconstruction of the palace garden. Like the other gardens I’ve visited in Japan, it was a lovely place to walk around and I got some nice photos.
After visiting the museum and the garden, I still had plenty of the afternoon left. I looked through the tourist brochure I had picked up and the only thing that was of much interest was the cable car ride up to the top of Mount Bizan, the mountain overlooking the city. Apparently it gets its name because it looks like an eyebrow. The cable car ride only takes 6 minutes to get to the top, but the view was great. Apparently, on a clear day you can see the Kii peninsula (the nearest part of Honshu), but unfortunately it wasn’t a clear day. With that done, I opted not to go see the local dance performance (Awa Odori) because it’s not really my thing, and I headed back to Takamatsu for an easy night.
Saturday brought with it
the first bit of rain I’ve had this trip. It rained all day but fortunately it wasn’t very heavy. I was heading back to Honshu, this time to visit the city of Hiroshima. The train trip took about two hours all up and I arrived in a very busy city that was also quite wet. My plan was to head over to the Peace Memorial Park to check out the various atom bomb related sites, then walk up to the reconstructed castle before heading back to the train station via the Shukkeien garden. But I didn’t quite get all of that in.
I took the tram to the stop near the Park. The first thing I saw was the “A-Bomb Dome” – a building designed by a Czech architect before the war and one of the few structures near the hypocentre (the point where the bomb exploded) to remain standing. Apparently this was partly because of the dome roof, and partly because the shockwave hit the concrete walls from above instead of from the side. Anyway, it has been left as it was after the bomb as a memorial. It is a poignant sight to begin what
was to be a very solemn day.
My next stop was to the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. The Hall is based around a circular Hall of Remembrance which you reach via a sloping walkway around the Hall. On the walkway was some facts and history about the bombing. The Hall itself was a large circular room surrounded by tiles depicting the view from Shima Hospital, directly below the hypocentre. Below the picture each of the neighbourhoods of Hiroshima is listed, positioned by location and distance from the hypocentre. In the centre was a monument depicting the time of the bombing – 8:15. Heading outside of the hall, there was an area where you could look up the names of all the victims. Upstairs was a series of short videos containing the words of some survivors and their experiences in the aftermath. Outside, and above the hall, there is another monument that depicts the time of the bombing.
I then headed to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum after a brief stop in the visitors lounge for a drink and a sit-down. The Museum was quite busy so
it got difficult to read some of the displays at times, but it was impossible to skip any. The Museum is very extensive, covering the history of Hiroshima as a military staging point for the Japanese, through to the planning and selection of Hiroshima as a target and then onto the aftermath. A constant theme throughout was the need to use the lessons learned to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The last section of the museum contained many items from the bombing, and it was the most emotional part because many of the items were clothing, toys, and so forth, belonging to children who died in the blast or over the following days. It’s easy to read the numbers in history books and classify it as yet another tragedy in mankind’s past. But to see these items, and read the stories of the children they belonged to, really brings home that each of the 140,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of others affected were real people. Each of them was just going about their lives, doing their bit to survive in the world, when a manmade horror changed those lives in an instant.
Feeling emotionally drained as I left the museum, I discovered it was now half-past four. I’m not sure exactly when I went into the museum, but I think I must have been there for nearly three and a half hours. I walked back to the tram stop via the parts of the park I hadn’t yet seen. It was then a simple tram and two trains back to the hotel in Takamatsu.
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