Day 57 in Japan - Hiroshima Peace Park

Got up and headed straight to the Peace Park (after free coffee and hostel chats, of course), with a stop along the way for a conbini (convenience store) breakfast. It was a lovely, sunny day, and we stopped for a few photos before delving into the air-conditioned horrors of the Hiroshima Peace Museum.

Cranes folded and left at the Hiroshima Peace Park

There's not too much to say about the Hiroshima Peace Museum. It's completely sad and tragic, and I cried when I read the stories from mothers whose children had survived the initial blast only to come home and die in their arms. And then I kept crying for most of the rest of the exhibitions of the belongings found in the wreckage, or donated by families of those who died over radiation poisoning over the few months after August 6, 1945. No one around me was crying and I felt like a complete idiot, but I couldn't stop myself. I'm just going to put a bunch of photos up so you can see a small number of the things that were in the museum. It seemed slightly disrespectful to be in there snapping away, so I really didn't take too many photos - just a few to remind myself of the things I saw.

Hiroshima a few weeks after the blast. Everything
within about a 1-2 km radius of the epicentre was completely
flattened, except for a few building which survived the ball of fire.

The museum was pretty crowded because it was a long weekend.

The clothes that a mother had to cut off her daughter after
the 13 year old managed to walk home through the fires and
chaos of Hiroshima. She died an hour or so after getting home.
These clothes were melted to her skin in most places. 

The epicentre of the blast was actually up in the air,
shown by the red ball here. 

One of the saddest things about the stories of the blast was... well, everything. But something particularly tragic was that there were so many children outside working right near the epicentre of the blast. They had been conscripted by the government to demolish a bunch of houses in the centre of the city to create firebreaks in case the city got bombed. There were many hundreds people outside in the blast radius at the time, and thousands and thousands of people died from it, but seeing the tiny uniforms and lunch boxes and caps was particularly heartbreaking.

This is the picture of Sadako Sasaki - the girl who folded
one thousand cranes to try to wish away her radiation-related leukemia.
This is on top of the Children's Memorial in the Peace Park, where
millions of cranes are left by visitors each year.

The A-Bomb Dome - if you look at the picture of Hiroshima after the
blast above, you can see this building is one of the few things
that remained near the epicentre. It's the only building
still standing today, and is an eerie reminder of the past.

After the sadness of the Museum, we walked around the Peace Park taking photos and making a bit of small talk. We went down into the cool darkness of the Hall of Remembrance, and looked at the 170,000 tiles that make up a panorama of the city just after the bombing - approximately one tile for every person who died as a result of the bombing. We read stories and looked at drawings made by survivors. We looked through pictures of people who died in the blast. Bells were rung, time passed and we all started to feel a little bit less depressed as the day wore on, but it was definitely a sombre day for us all. 

Dan, Wendy, Katie and Traci and I all went up to Shukkei-en Gardens in the afternoon for a bit of tranquility and to watch the sun set over the beautiful traditional Japanese garden. We saw turtles, fish jumping high up in the air, bamboo forests, crab battles, a pagoda, traditional tatami rooms for tea ceremony and a dude whose fantastic garden-watering seems to have made it into almost every photo I took. 

Shukkei-en Gardens in Hiroshima

When we all met up again (in a park with a free jazz performance and some interesting smelling drains), we went for dinner - more Hiroshimayaki! This time we went to the main drag and ate at a place with about 50 Hiroshimayaki restaurants packed into a few buildings next to each other. There were 3-4 floors of restaurants, and no empty chairs anywhere! We finally managed to squeeze ourselves into two restaurants, and feasted on the delicious, noodley, eggy, cabbagey pancakey delight (with cheese for Sam and I). With beer.

Itadakimasu! Dan, Wendy, Katie, Christine, Miriam, Traci, Sam and I.

Of course, no night out with gaijin in Japan is complete without a little bit of drinking, so we wandered the streets to find somewhere that would be able to hold all 8 of us. We ended up in a fantastic little cocktail bar, where I got to drink Tanqueray gin and tonics! It was fantastic. After a little while, a small group of us headed to another izakaya, for a few beers, some karaage and edamame. We ended up being really late home, because we stopped on the bridge to watch the huge fish jumping (can't figure out what they were), and talk about politics, people and the owrld in general. Quite an appropriate ending to the day, really. 

Low light, bottles behind bar, old business man with
suspiciously good-looking girlfriend *cough*hostess*cough*
 - yep, musy be a cocktail bar.

Food Highlight of the Day: Hiroshimayaki - the local Hiroshima version of Okonomiyaki (Japanese pancakes) are absolutely delicious. Two pancakes studffed with fried noodles and cabbage and a bit of pork, smothered in a worsterchise/BBQ sauce, and then topped with spring onions and mayonnaise. Drooling in memory right now.