Japan Day 5: Hiroshima

We hit the road early on Wednesday to make the 2 hour train ride to Hiroshima. First stop when we got there was a visit to Miyajima which is about 30 minutes from Hiroshima's train station. It took us a bit longer to make our way to Miyajima since it took several rounds of charades with multiple employees at the station to figure out which train we were supposed to take to get to the ferry. The upside is that our rail pass covered both the local train to the ferry and the ferry itself.

If you get there when the tide is up, the shrine at Miyajima appears to be floating in the water. Glad the water was up when we got there, otherwise it'd just look like a shrine in the mud.

Next stop was Hiroshima Peace Park. Steve and I grabbed some goodies at a bakery and had lunch outside. After a quick visit to the restroom, I came out to find Steve surrounded by a group of students. I guess they spotted him as a visitor and wanted to ask him various questions to practice their English. One of the girls was their designated spokesperson and asked all the tough questions: "What is your name?", "Where are you from?", "Do you like Hiroshima?" Steve was a little iffy on how to answer the last question since all he could think of was the atom bomb and told them it was his first time to Hiroshima. The whole interaction was very cute.

On our way to the museum we passed a group of 100 or so students and many of them excitedly waved and gleefully shouted, "Hello!" A few actually said, "Herro!" which made me giggle but to be fair, it's far better than any Japanese words that I tried to say.

Even though it was the end of winter, it wasn't obvious in the Peace Park. The memorials were simple. The A-dome building which survived the bomb seemed out of place with the growth and activity around the park. It wasn't until we went into the museum that we were reminded of what happened here. Some of the artifacts and pictures from the museum were hard to look at: burned clothes pulled off a middle schooler, the charred remains of a tricycle that a 3-year old was riding, pictures of civilians who survived but were burned to the point where they were unrecognizeable. Heart-wrenching stuff that makes you reconsider that whole "eye for an eye" philosophy.