Hiroshima Trip

Last Saturday I went to Hiroshima! It was a school-sponsored trip, school-sponsored in that it was organized by a professor as a field trip for his class but was also open to anyone else in the Asian Studies Program who wanted to come along, not school-sponsored in that we had to pay for ourselves. (But it wasn't that expensive.) On the whole I enjoyed the trip a lot, and although all of the atom bomb related stuff was very sad and difficult to hear/look at, it was also a really nice day and it ended up being a lot of fun, really.

I had to get up at 6 in the morning (ugh) before the trip, and I ended up convening with most of the other people on the trip at the Hirakata City train station at 7:33 as arranged by the organizing professor. We took a series of trains to Shin-Osaka where we caught the Shinkansen to Hiroshima. The Shinkansen is Japan's famous bullet train, and indeed it went really fast--the distance that turned out to take around 6.5 hours by bus took only 1.5 hours by train--and they even had a lady come through with a cart of snacks and drinks and toys like on the Hogwarts Express. Almost everyone who was going on the trip (I think there were around 80 people) went on that Shinkansen, although I believe a few people went early by themselves.



Out the window of the Shinkansen

We arrived at Hiroshima at a little past 10, and from then we were free until 1, when we were supposed to meet in a lecture hall to hear a talk. From the station you could opt either to take a trolley to the Peace Park, the location of most of the atomic bomb memorial items such as statues, buildings, and the museum, or take a (supposedly) 20-minute walk. I decided to walk with my friends Alex, Emily, and Ryan (more to come about them in a future post, and they are the same people I'm going to Tokyo with next week), and we ended up getting a little lost along the way, meaning that instead of 20 minutes it took us about 45 minutes...no worry though, it was just the scenic route, and because of it we got to walk along the "Promenade of Peace," which was a road lined with various kinds of trees donated from foreign countries after all the trees were wiped out from the bomb in the 40's. We were supposed to visit the atomic bomb museum before the lecture, but we ended up not having time. Nonetheless, we did visit most of the other monuments around the park, and most notably we got to see the Genbaku-Domu (Atomic Bomb Dome), one of the few buildings that survived the blast. It is pretty scary to imagine being in the building at the time of the explosion, as it is so wrecked now. The government decided to maintain it as a symbol of the destruction of the bomb, and it is pretty famous. (i.e., we read about it in Genki (the widespread elementary Japanese textbook).)



The Genbaku Domu

We also got to see a new smaller museum-like thing that was built sometime in the past few years, and it was very moving. The central part of it was a huge circular room which you enter by walking down a ramp that encircles it, and at every few feet along the walk was a little plaque that had information about the bomb and the situation leading up to it. (All of the information had translations into English, Chinese, and Korean.) I thought they did a really nice job of presenting the information impartially--it was all matter-of-fact, did not put blame on any one country, but was still very engrossing. The central room itself was quite thought-provoking; it was mostly empty space, but the walls were covered in 100,000+ tiles representing each person who died because of the bomb, and together they depicted Hiroshima shortly after the bomb was dropped. There was also a fountain in the middle, and benches where you could sit and contemplate. At the exit were computers that had a database of every person who died because of the bomb, and you could search by name for the profile of every person, which included their name, photo, their age in 1945, and some basic personal information such as their occupation. Very hard-hitting. As Stalin said (am I really quoting Stalin on my blog?), "the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic." I thought that that database really helped to bring the focus back to individuals so visitors could truly appreciate how much had been lost.

I thought one of the highlights of the trip was the lecture we got to hear from a woman who survived the explosion. She is in her 80's now, and she spoke in Japanese and was translated by the professor organizing the trip. She was apparently a schoolgirl at the time, and the whole thing sounded pretty horrific. I won't go into details since they are pretty gory and unsettling, but actually what I found most interesting was her life afterward. Apparently Japanese people avoided marrying people who were exposed to the bomb since the radiation would cause birth defects in their children, something I never thought about. That must have been really difficult for them. She said that she felt a lot of anger and resentment throughout her life toward Americans for ruining her childhood and taking her father, but when she was older she was asked to tell her story to foreign students like us, she saw American students crying and asking for her forgiveness, and only then did her anger finally evaporate. I found that really touching.

After that we went to the atomic bomb museum, which was of course depressing...I don't have too much to say about it, besides that it, like parts of the lecture, was often gory and unsettling. I had visited it once before when I came to Japan when I was 11, but all I remembered were the gory parts that burned themselves into my mind when I first saw them. Yeah...I think it's important for people to see though. Certainly no one who sees all of that could possibly support the use of nuclear weaponry.



The Peace Park--you can see the flame that will be extinguished once the world is free of nuclear weapons, and behind it the Genbaku Domu

One famous element of the Peace Park is the incredible number of paper cranes. A girl named Sadako was exposed to nuclear radiation from the blast, and because of it she developed leukemia as a young girl. Going by the old saying that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, one wish will come true, she began folding them in hope of saving her life. Sadly she died while she was still really young, but now people from around the world fold millions of paper cranes and place them around the park in a wish for world peace. Again, moving. There is a Children's Monument on a side of the park that specifically commemorates Sadako's efforts, and that is the location of the greatest concentration of paper cranes, but they were visible everywhere in Hiroshima. Some people had crazy talents with making and arranging paper cranes, and Alex's host family made a lot (I don't know if there were 1,000, but quite possibly there were...) for him to bring.



So many paper cranes from Alex's family


The Children's Monument


Alex and me with the cranes

After that, Alex, Emily, Ryan, and I went out to lunch/dinner (what do you call a meal at 3:45 pm?), and then Emily and Ryan left, and Alex and I stayed around Hiroshima for awhile. We still had a lot of time to kill so we went to their shopping area, which turned out to be really happening. Most exciting for me was a food shop that we went into that carried foods from around the world, most of all America. I got myself some Quaker instant oatmeal and Baby Bell cheese--yes! Also I bought ingredients for oatmeal chocolate chunk cookies which I made a couple of days ago. (I'll have to write more about that later--what a mess. But they came out well in the end.)



A cool umbrella shop. I wish I had bought one

Alex and I took the night bus back to Osaka. The night buses in Japan are run by several different companies, but they go pretty much anywhere, usually leaving at 10 or 11 pm, and arrive at their destination pretty early in the morning, and they're much cheaper than the Shinkansen. Our bus left at 10:45, by which time most shops were closed, so we ended up sitting in McDonald's for awhile while we waited. (I think the fries I got there were the first thing I'd eaten from McDonald's in at least 3 years.) The bus was pretty empty, and besides a few other people who were on the same field trip as us, there were only 2 or 3 Japanese people. It was very quiet, and we arrived in Osaka at 5 am. Then I went home and crashed.


That's about it for now...I need to go home now or else maybe I would write more. Anyway, I am now done with midterms, and I'm on spring break! Yeah! I don't feel like it's spring break already. Crazy. On Monday I'm taking the Shinkansen to Tokyo with the abovementioned friends, so I'll post from there. Happy weekend!