I then headed to the atomic bomb dome and peace memorial park. It was a sunny and beautiful day. Although I very much wanted to go check out both of these places, I had a sense of dread on the way. First I went to the dome- which is a large building and it is directly under where the a-bomb exploded. Amazingly much of it is still intact, however, it was essentially gutted by the blast. There are crumbled bricks around it and you can see melted metal in it. Its really a weird feeling walking around and lookin
g at this building- not sure how exactly to describe it. It is surrounded by modern buildings and the city here is quite nice so it only gives you a small view into the vast destruction that occurred.I then headed to the Peace park and the Peace museum. It costs less than 50 cents to go into the museum. I opted for the audio tour- there are about 60 audio clips that go with different parts of the museum. I don’t even know where to start. They have lots of before and after things- before and after pictures and models of the city. This really gives you the sense of the amount of destruction that occurred in an instant- essentially it leveled a huge portion of the
city. There are videos of bombs going off and accounts of what happened given by survivors. There is only one photograph of victims- a journalist who survived went to take pictures, however, was only able to take a few because he was so overwhelmed with how horrible it was- people with melted skin that was basically falling and off, etc. In addition to showing what happened there is a lot of information about nuclear weapons and the need to abolish them to avoid another similar or worse thing.At this point I was pretty shocked by the whole thing but I didn’t know what was waiting for me upstairs. I headed to the original part of the museum and there was a recreation- human sized models with destroyed building behind them- the models skin was melting off their hands- it was shocking and hard to look at. Then there were lots of pictures of clothes and other personal items. Each one had a story- a child being burned horribly and their parents finding them still alive, their desperate
attempts to save them, and eventually their death. Each story 
slightly different, but all completely awful. There was even this guy who had his hand out the window and his fingertips were blown off but he had these funky fingernails that grew (kind of round) and they would fall off and bleed a lot- they had the actual nails on display. So you get the idea here. Each story was heart wrenching. I actually got to the point where I just couldn’t listen to each o
ne- I would skip one or two every few minutes cause they were just too awful to hear. There was another room that talked about the bad things that happened to the survivors- cancer, hair falling out, etc. Also very terrible. At the end there are pictures and comments written by all kinds of prominent people who visited it- politicians, etc.I walked out of the museum pretty much shell-shocked. I felt like I had just been beaten up- emotionally that is. That’s about the best way I can put it. I walked around the park and looked at various memorials as well as the origami paper cranes that are on display for the children’s memorial- not sure how many but tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.
I headed back to the hotel in a daze and cleaned up and headed for dinner. There is a great Hiroshima website (http://www.gethiroshima.com/) that includes restaurant information and reviews- in English. A Hiroshima specialty is Hiroshima style Okonomiyaki so I found one that sounded cool on the website and headed to it. The dish is a bit hard to describe- its kind of like a savory pancake- it is composed of cabbage, soba noodles, shrimp, pork and egg. It then has a savory/sweet soy based sauce on it. I have had it before and haven't been that excited about it but I figured I would give it another go. I sat on the floor (again!) at a table that has a built in grill where they put the food on after it is cooked- it keeps it hot. It was sort of a fun hole in the wall place so I liked that. Clearly the quality of the food was great but I just can't get into this dish- I don't not like it- I am pretty much neutral on it.
1 comment:
Wow what an account of the A-bomb. We grow up learning about the atrocities, but what we don't learn is how we discriminated our own people who survived the bomb. They were thought to emit radiation? Often times they suffered leukimia after and the desease may have kept others away.
K
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