Work has granted me a week off to do whatever may please me with, and I decided to spend the first few days in another of Japan's bigger cities. I hopped on a plane to the western Chugoku Province and found myself in Hiroshima. Have you heard of Hiroshima? It's the first city in human history to have an atomic bomb dropped on it. That happened during World War II. Remember that? Yeah. Well Hiroshima hasn't forgotten about that.
When I was in my uncle's estate in America for a visit, he asked me if Japanese hated Americans for dropping the nukes on them. He was certain they did, and it came to him as a bit of a surprise to know that the average Japanese person actually...doesn't hate the United States of America. At a quick glance, the cultural authorities in Hiroshima are no different. In the last 70 years, Hiroshima has become an advocate of world peace rather than international hatred. That doesn't mean they've set the bombing aside, far from that. You can't walk a hundred meters in Hiroshima without there being a panel saying that this bridge or that bank was blown up and rebuilt after the bomb fell.
Sadly enough, most of Hiroshima's more touristic attractions are centered around this fact. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial, known locally as the Atomic Bomb Dome, is the sole remaining structure within the blast range of the US Army's Little Boy to not have been torn down or completely eradicated in the explosion. It alone stands as a testament to the destructive power of nuclear weapons. All the other structures in the vicinity of the blast were actually wiped off the face of the city, save for their bases. The only reason this one mostly stood was because the blast was detonated almost directly over it, pushing the columns of the structure downwards rather than outwards. Once, it served as a promotion hall for industrial products. It's Hiroshima's most recognized landmark now, sitting at the outer fringe of the Peace Park, also dedicated to the lost lives of men, women and children during and following the bombing.
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| The Cenotaph Tomb |
The Hiroshima Peace Park itself is surely something that can't be missed while visiting the city. It's a beautiful green space speckled with monuments meant to bring hope to humanity. It is, as a whole, a message conveying that, through the sheer tenacity of people working hand in hand, something beautiful can rise from the most desolate ashes of what's been destroyed.
The center piece of the park is the Cenotaph of the victims. One can't tell by looking at it, but the monument is actually a tomb, directly under which is a stone chest. Inside it is a register of the over 220,000 victims of the bomb, either as a result of the initial blast or its radiation. Every year at this site, a speech is given in their memories, and at 8:15 AM on August 6th, a moment's silence is observed.
Also prominently featured is the Children's Memorial, built in memory of the younger victims of the bomb. Featured at its summit is Sadako, the young girl who lost her life to Leukemia caused by radiation exposure.
The story of the girl goes that she firmly believed in the story that whoever folded one thousand paper cranes would have any one wish granted to them. The popular version of the story is that, in her hospital bed, she folded cranes in hopes of reaching one thousand and getting back her health, but ran out of time at the count of 644.
Her friends and family folded the remaining 356 and buried the thousand cranes with her. Today, cranes are still folded and brought to the memorial in her honor, representing the wishes of those who desire to live in a world without the threat of nuclear holocaust. The monument has many duplicates around the world.
Other similar monuments cover the grounds of the park, dedicated to others such as the Korean victims, with various symbolic meanings relating to world peace. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum also sits in the center of the park, for those seeking to draw a deeper knowledge about the facts of the bombing. I'll go into that another day. It's incredibly sobering and fringes on nightmare-inducing.
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| Hiroshima Castle |
Exiting the confines of the park, Hiroshima also has its own Castle not too far away from the city center. The construction itself is mostly wooden. Like almost everything else in this sector of the city, though, the original Hiroshima Castle, too, was atomized by the Little Boy. This reconstructed version was completed over a decade later, complete with its own moat, just as the original structure used to have. From what I hear, you get a pretty good view of the city from its top, but it was well past time for that by the time I got there.
Well, what do you think? Pretty depressing all in all, isn't it? Well the worst is yet to come.
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