Journey to the West: Hiroshima

Pics for this entry are here at photobucket because flickr seems to think that 700+ pictures is too much. Rude.
Please be warned before looking that the Hiroshima Peace Museum is filled with displays and artifacts that unflinchingly show the results of an atomic blast on human beings, and that many are upsetting and/or graphic and/or triggery.

So our Watern Japan trip. It was epic, and fun, and exhausting, and a little ridiculous. We started out running five minutes late, getting separated from the group, and thinking we were going to be left behind in Tokyo forever. >.>



Once we met up with our group, I immediately made friends with some new folks I'd not met before because of my Doctor Who shirt. :) After waiting around for a while and dicussing our personal favorite Doctors and episodes, we boarded a really snazzy coach bus and began the 10-or-so hour drive from Shinjuku Station to Hiroshima.

I slept most of the trip, amazingly, despite the frequent stops we made for bathroom breaks and snacks. When we got to Hiroshima, we piled off the bus and onto a train, which took us right to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome (where the Memorial Peace Park is located). We headed to the museum first, checking our luggage in lockers and freshening up in the bathrooms there before getting our audio guides and heading into the museum proper.

Let it be said at this point that the exhibits in the musuem are not something I want to relive, ever. There were clinically-described dioramas of red spheres hanging over the city to denote where the bomb was dropped, and there were also life-size dioramas of children suffering from horrific radiation burns. The purpose of this museum is to convince people that they should never use atomic bombs for any reason ever again, and let me tell you I was convinced. It was eye-opening and horrible.

(Interesting clinical-sounding historical side note: American children are taught that the bomb was used to force Japan to surrender as an actual invasion of the archipelago would have cost up to 1 million American lives; Japanese children are taught that America dropped the bomb to intimidate Russia.)

After making it out of the museum, and feeling like I was never going to smile again, we split into small groups to tour the actual Peace Park with a bilingual tour guide. We saw a memorial for Korean forced-laborers who were victims of the bomb, as well as the Children's memorial with thousands of origami cranes symbolizing a wish for peace, and the Students' memorial which had a list of all the local schools from whom students had been taken for war-effort work. The huge skeletal building that you can see in the pictures is the former Hiroshima Prefectural Hall. Finally we went to the plaque they've erected at the hypocenter of the blast; it's a little tiny 3'x3' or so stand that just says 'the bomb went off here at this time', wedged between a parking garage and a hospital. I think it was sort of cool in a way, like "Once a terrible thing happened here, and now we've moved on and become better people for it."

We went out for lunch (I had okonomiyaki! :D) and after that we met up with the group again to take the ferry out to Miyajima, where we'd be spending the night.
~to be continued~