Hiroshima

I met up with my mom’s friend Satomi Murao in Hiroshima during the long weekend we have in late March. Murao-san lives in NJ but comes back to Japan to visit her family every year, and she always takes her mother traveling. They were headed to Kyushu and were planning to stop at Hiroshima, which is only about two hours away from me, so we met up at the station and went sightseeing together. Murao-san and I had both been there before, but her mother had not, so we started off by heading right to the Peace Memorial Park.

The park is very beautiful now, since most of it is on an island between two of the many rivers in Hiroshima City, but it’s located directly where the atom bomb was dropped (the hypocenter). It’s a little hard to reconcile the fact that this gorgeous park, overflowing with tourists, was a scene of nuclear aftermath only 60 years ago. Until you see the Genbaku Dome, the Atom Bomb Dome, which is the only building that was preserved as a reminder of what happened. Being very close to the hypocenter, everyone in that building when the bomb was dropped at 8:15am was immediately eviscerated.



Our next stop was the Hiroshima Museum, and once you see pictures of burn victims and wax figures of people with their skin melting off, and read about children dying slowly and in pain from leukemia and other radiation-related diseases, you realize that those who died instantly were incredibly lucky. No matter how you feel about the decision to use the atom bomb or about nuclear war in general, it’s important to see what the consequences really are. Children and grandchildren of hibakusha (atom bomb victims) still suffer from many illnesses directly related to radiation exposure, although Hiroshima itself is now perfectly safe to visit and live in. Murao-san’s mother, who was 8 or 9 at the time, lived in a rural area far from Hiroshima during the war, but she told me about the scarcity of food and lack of school supplies then. Below is the children's monument in the Peace Memorial Park: the strings of origami cranes are sent in by school children from all over Japan and all over the world.



Then we took a taxi, train, and ferry to get to Miyajima, an island off of Hiroshima which is an essential part of any trip to the city. It’s well known for its red shrine gate out in the water, which really is incredibly beautiful. I had been there before, but I had never stayed in a Japanese inn, a ryokan, and rarely eaten kaiseki ryori, which is a lovely smorgasbord of local specialities and delicious fish. We had a leisurely dinner in our room before watching the ryokan’s taiko performance.





Then we headed out to look at the shrine gate at night, and since the tide was particularly low, we were able to walk all the way out to the gate and say hi! It really is huge and awesome, and it’s got some friendly barnacles near the bottom, where it’s usually covered in water. We were really lucky to be able to do that.





On Monday, we walked around the main part of the island, went through the actual shrine that goes with the gate, Itsukushima Shrine, and patted a few sacred deer, which roam around looking for food or sit and relax in the sun. Murao-san and I braved a lot of stone steps to see Daishoin, a temple up a little towards the mountains and covered with Buddha statues. My favorites included a set of happy Buddhas with the animals of the Chinese zodiac, a circle of the eight Dao gods in the water (not really Buddhist, but that’s no problem in Japan!) and tons of adorable statues of Jizo, a bodhisattva who looks after animals and children, all over the place.










We grabbed lunch at a place specializing in oyster cuisine, since oysters are one of Hiroshima’s famous foods. Then we headed back to Hiroshima station so they could continue their trip, and I was very sad to part with them! They were so kind to include me in their adventure and give me a taste of Japanese-style travel.