Reflecting on Hiroshima
I've been back in the UK for a week now so I thought it was time to start jotting down some of my thoughts on my most recent Japan trip before I start to forget too many of the details. Today I'd like to talk a bit about Hiroshima.
Like a lot of Japanese cities I've seen Hiroshima isn't very pretty. It's functional and modern but it's a bit inelegant. This doesn't relate to what you might think in this case, it's just that there's relatively little attachment to old buildings so they get torn down and replaced frequently. Unusually for Japan, Hiroshima has an extensive tram network, run by the cutely named Hiroden. The name being a shortened version of Hiroshima plus the Japanese word for an electric train, densha). As one of the few places in the archipelago to still use trams, Hiroshima is somewhat famed as being a bit of a working tram museum. You see a mixture of ancient and brand new trams running along side each other down the broad streets. As a means of getting around it's easy enough with a flat ¥150 (£1.20) fare, but it's very slow and stop-starting all the time gets tedious quickly.
Continuing on the transport theme, my hotel (the Hana Hostel Hybrid Inn) was located about a 3 minute walk from the main JR station. As a result I quickly became used to hearing the metal on metal screech of the long freight trains that passed through every 30 minutes or so as I tried to get to sleep at night and the faint binging of the nearby level crossing that went right in front of the station and thus was constantly in action. As is usual in Japan a department store is connected to the train station and a floor full of restaurants gave plenty of choices for no-hassle cheap grub. I had a wonderful Hiroshima style okonomiyaki prepared for me there one evening which was pretty memorable. A mountain of noodles and shredded cabbage in the oknomiyaki mixture with some slices of pork and all slathered with sauce and a bit of Kewpie mayo. Cost about a fiver.
Hiroshima's residents seem pretty proud of their baseball team, the Carps. You've barely gotten off the shinkansen before you're being confronted with merchandise for them. Even the manhole covers in the streets bare the team's emblem. I'd pass a baseball themed ramen shop by the train tracks going to and from the hotel every day that would always be playing some baseball anthem.
The city is carved up by rivers flowing into the Inland Sea. On the bank of one of the many forks of the Ota river are the ruins of the former Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, better known as the A-Bomb dome. Surrounded by the modernity and normality of the rest of present-day Hiroshima, its an odd sight and it's a bit hard to describe what it's like to see it in person and to think about what it represents. Imagine if there were still ruins left more or less untouched in central London from World War 2 and how weird it would be to see them today in 2011.
Across the river from the A-Bomb Dome is the Peace Park and Peace Memorial Museum. There are various shrines and things dotted about, notably all with a few bottles of water. The burnt, dying victims of the bomb are reported to have pleaded for water. The centograph is the main feature of the park and is designed to frame the A-Bomb dome in the distance. Further behind that is the museum.
The museum is a little hard to talk about. It's frankly kind of disturbing and it gets very graphic. It starts off in the sort of detached museumy kind of way with a large model of central Hiroshima showing how things used to look before the bomb. Then there's another, showing how it looked afterwards. I think about six buildings were left standing, including the Industrial Promotion Hall. There's a wall of letters sent by successive majors of Hiroshima over the decades to leaders of the various nuclear powers asking them to ban the bomb.
*** If you're easily upset you may not want to read further ***
It's after you head down a fairly dark corridor themed to look like a ruined building that things start to get unpleasant and the real human cost is painfully rammed home. In the ruins a number of dying victims are portrayed with their burned skin hanging from their limbs in tatters. Photos of the burned victims dot the walls. Many of the items on display are accompanied by stories to fill in the gruesome details. There are quite a few items of bloodied and burnt clothing and you learn about the wearer and how long they survived. There are the clothes of kids whose parents could only recognise them by their voices because they were so burnt and swollen up. There are bits of hair and skin and nails that fell off the victims which were kept as grim keepsakes by grieving parents. A preserved step from the former bank building shows a shadow where someone was sitting when they were hit by the heat ray, the exposed stone bleached by the heat. A large piece of concrete wall is on display peppered with pieces of glass embedded into it from the force of the shockwave. Another section shows staining from the black rain that fell shortly after the bombing. There are rows of glass bottles from shop windows which were fused together and deformed by the intensity of the heat, and roof tiles are presented for you to touch to see where the surface has melted and bubbled. It all paints the picture of a hell on Earth, of a brief moment of fiery death that wiped out everything in sight and which left those who survived its initial fury to die agonising deaths over the coming days. With it being a nuclear weapon that's only half the story of course, the surviving residents of Hiroshima then had to cope with the radiation and inevitable cancers and diseases that caused. More stories, photos and artefacts are presented including the tongue of a soldier showing symptoms of acute radiation poisoning, just in case you were hoping you'd seen enough bits of dead people at that point.
Not much else to say really. It's one of those things that isn't very nice but which is worth confronting as it sort of feels like we all have some small degree of shared responsibility for these things.
Like a lot of Japanese cities I've seen Hiroshima isn't very pretty. It's functional and modern but it's a bit inelegant. This doesn't relate to what you might think in this case, it's just that there's relatively little attachment to old buildings so they get torn down and replaced frequently. Unusually for Japan, Hiroshima has an extensive tram network, run by the cutely named Hiroden. The name being a shortened version of Hiroshima plus the Japanese word for an electric train, densha). As one of the few places in the archipelago to still use trams, Hiroshima is somewhat famed as being a bit of a working tram museum. You see a mixture of ancient and brand new trams running along side each other down the broad streets. As a means of getting around it's easy enough with a flat ¥150 (£1.20) fare, but it's very slow and stop-starting all the time gets tedious quickly.
Continuing on the transport theme, my hotel (the Hana Hostel Hybrid Inn) was located about a 3 minute walk from the main JR station. As a result I quickly became used to hearing the metal on metal screech of the long freight trains that passed through every 30 minutes or so as I tried to get to sleep at night and the faint binging of the nearby level crossing that went right in front of the station and thus was constantly in action. As is usual in Japan a department store is connected to the train station and a floor full of restaurants gave plenty of choices for no-hassle cheap grub. I had a wonderful Hiroshima style okonomiyaki prepared for me there one evening which was pretty memorable. A mountain of noodles and shredded cabbage in the oknomiyaki mixture with some slices of pork and all slathered with sauce and a bit of Kewpie mayo. Cost about a fiver.
Hiroshima's residents seem pretty proud of their baseball team, the Carps. You've barely gotten off the shinkansen before you're being confronted with merchandise for them. Even the manhole covers in the streets bare the team's emblem. I'd pass a baseball themed ramen shop by the train tracks going to and from the hotel every day that would always be playing some baseball anthem.
The city is carved up by rivers flowing into the Inland Sea. On the bank of one of the many forks of the Ota river are the ruins of the former Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, better known as the A-Bomb dome. Surrounded by the modernity and normality of the rest of present-day Hiroshima, its an odd sight and it's a bit hard to describe what it's like to see it in person and to think about what it represents. Imagine if there were still ruins left more or less untouched in central London from World War 2 and how weird it would be to see them today in 2011.
Across the river from the A-Bomb Dome is the Peace Park and Peace Memorial Museum. There are various shrines and things dotted about, notably all with a few bottles of water. The burnt, dying victims of the bomb are reported to have pleaded for water. The centograph is the main feature of the park and is designed to frame the A-Bomb dome in the distance. Further behind that is the museum.
The museum is a little hard to talk about. It's frankly kind of disturbing and it gets very graphic. It starts off in the sort of detached museumy kind of way with a large model of central Hiroshima showing how things used to look before the bomb. Then there's another, showing how it looked afterwards. I think about six buildings were left standing, including the Industrial Promotion Hall. There's a wall of letters sent by successive majors of Hiroshima over the decades to leaders of the various nuclear powers asking them to ban the bomb.
*** If you're easily upset you may not want to read further ***
It's after you head down a fairly dark corridor themed to look like a ruined building that things start to get unpleasant and the real human cost is painfully rammed home. In the ruins a number of dying victims are portrayed with their burned skin hanging from their limbs in tatters. Photos of the burned victims dot the walls. Many of the items on display are accompanied by stories to fill in the gruesome details. There are quite a few items of bloodied and burnt clothing and you learn about the wearer and how long they survived. There are the clothes of kids whose parents could only recognise them by their voices because they were so burnt and swollen up. There are bits of hair and skin and nails that fell off the victims which were kept as grim keepsakes by grieving parents. A preserved step from the former bank building shows a shadow where someone was sitting when they were hit by the heat ray, the exposed stone bleached by the heat. A large piece of concrete wall is on display peppered with pieces of glass embedded into it from the force of the shockwave. Another section shows staining from the black rain that fell shortly after the bombing. There are rows of glass bottles from shop windows which were fused together and deformed by the intensity of the heat, and roof tiles are presented for you to touch to see where the surface has melted and bubbled. It all paints the picture of a hell on Earth, of a brief moment of fiery death that wiped out everything in sight and which left those who survived its initial fury to die agonising deaths over the coming days. With it being a nuclear weapon that's only half the story of course, the surviving residents of Hiroshima then had to cope with the radiation and inevitable cancers and diseases that caused. More stories, photos and artefacts are presented including the tongue of a soldier showing symptoms of acute radiation poisoning, just in case you were hoping you'd seen enough bits of dead people at that point.
Not much else to say really. It's one of those things that isn't very nice but which is worth confronting as it sort of feels like we all have some small degree of shared responsibility for these things.