The Road Less Traveled

Hiroshima, Day 2: Awkward?

Friday, October 24th, 2008 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized

So it was brought to my attention last night (yeah, it’s morning here) that I still haven’t written anything more about Hiroshima. Sorry about that. So anyway, today I’ll talk about Day 2 of our trip.

After we got to Hiroshima, we stayed in the Miyajima Coral Hotel, right on the coast. I’m pretty sure I mentioned that already, but whatever. I got up on Saturday around 7am. We didn’t have to meet until 9am, but breakfast started at 6:30 and we were told that everything went pretty quickly. Luckily, I got some food, and actually had a rather appetizing breakfast of awesome rolls, onigiri (Japanese rice balls), and like seven croissants. Yeah, they were that good. Anyway, then I sat around until it was time to meet up.

We left the hotel around 9am and went to the nearby streetcar station. We got on the first car (train?) of the day and started heading toward Peace Park. Of course, we were at the first stop on the line, and needed to go to the next to last stop, so it was about a 45 minute trip. That cost 270 yen, which isn’t too bad.

We finally got to the stop and began what pretty much everyone agreed was an awkward (for obvious reasons) and yet very interesting tour of the more historically-relevant portions of Hiroshima – the part that wasn’t there anymore after the bomb. The first thing we noticed was the A-bomb Dome. I don’t have very many pictures of this part of the day, but I do have video… which I’ll get around to posting sometime, probably.

After WWII, a huge chunk of Hiroshima near the hypocenter of the blast was made into a memorial park. If you haven’t guessed, that’s the Peace Park I keep talking about, so it’d probably be good to remember it. Around 10:15, Dr. Thompson got a call from Koko, and we went to meet up with her. For anybody who didn’t read what I posted in “Prologue”, Koko is a survivor of the Hiroshima A-bomb explosion. She was 8 months old at the time the bomb went off, and actually babysat for Dr. Thompson when he was a kid growing up in Japan.

Anyway, we met up with Koko and she began giving us a tour around Peace Park, showing us all the various memorials. Like I said, I don’t have many pictures, but I’ll post video eventually. Finally at 11:00am, we went to a room that Koko had reserved in the museum and she told us the story of the bomb and how it affected her life. It was really emotional… pretty much everybody cried at some point, and some more than others. I have a video of most of this, and will post it eventually as well. I don’t have all of it because my video camera’s battery died toward the end, but oh well.

After that we went and ate lunch, which was a bit expensive and not very good, but food’s food, right? Then we went to the museum. The first section of the museum was just general information about the history of the war and the bomb and was a bit bland. Once we got to the second part though, things changed. If you’ve ever been to the Holocaust museum, you’ll know what I’m talking about… it’s depressing and extremely sad, all the stories you here and the things you see, but it’s definitely worth going. I really feel like even though it’s sad (and some people couldn’t really handle it), it’s still something that pretty much everybody should see, so that nothing like that ever happens again.

After the museum, we had parted ways with Koko and had about an hour of free time. Then we all met up and walked EXTREMELY quickly to Hiroshima Castle, which was going to close soon. When we got there, we found out that it wasn’t actually going to close soon, but the internet told us it was. Of course, this is a pretty new castle, since it had to be rebuilt after the war, and has been turned into a museum of sorts, but it was still really neet. I do have some pictures of this part of the day. They’re in this album if you’re interested. (I’m in too much of a rush to post pictures)

Finally after that we ate dinner at a nice Japanese restaurant and basically went back to the hotel. (Well, we went back to the hotel after wandering around the local shopping arcade for a bit, but it wasn’t anything super special honestly. One of these days, I’ll get around to going back to Osu [a local shopping district] and write a post about that.) Stay tuned for Day 3, because I’m going to have to write it so that I can write the post about the Kyoto trip that I’m leaving for in 30 minutes!

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