Japan Day 21: Heavy History.

-

We started the day with the tough stuff: a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, dedicated to preserving the memory of those affected by the atom bomb blast, and working to build a better future.

The museum was full, with a queue to get in before the doors were even open. The exhibitions did not hide the horror and brutality of the blast and its aftermath. The museum, jam packed with people, was silent. The only sound was that of hundreds of feet shuffling on carpet as we worked our way through the exhibits.

There are no words, really. I didn't take many pictures either.

Walls stained by black radioactive rain.

Panorama: the area in which the Museum now stands, along with the Peace Park.

After 3 hours we emerged back into the busy hubbub of modern downtown Hiroshima.  The sky was blue, the sun bright, the wind bitterly cold. Trees in full blossom lined the river, and families picnicked under falling blossoms. I went for a walk through the Peace Park, memorials at every turn.

Contrast.

Blossoms.

Monument to South Korean victims of the bomb blast.

Beneath this mound lie the ashes of tens of thousands of people.

Cenotaph, lined up with the Peace flame and the A-bomb dome.

Later in the day Roger and I came back to ground zero, a couple of hundred metres beyond the A-bomb dome. We walked again through Peace Park, finding more memorials.
The Children's Peace Monument, which is surrounded by cabinets of paper cranes. For the significance of paper cranes you need to look here for the story of Sadako Sasaki.

Ground zero. Just a plaque on a wall, a couple of hundred metres from the Dome.

From the park we walked back toward home through suburban streets and shopping centres while commuters zipped past us on bicycles. Along the way we found Okinimimura, a five story building full of nothing but okinimiyaki restaurants and there we had our dinner. It was very nice, if you could ignore being up several flights of stairs without a visible fire escape, squashed in with everyone while someone cooked your dinner on a BBQ plate in front of you and all around were squeezey little restaurants doing the same thing. One of us worried about being burned alive should fires break out. The other one worried about whether her chopstick skills were up to the challenge*.

The progression of ominimiyaki. 


No fires happened, we survived, and the ominimiyaki was very nice although personally I prefer Osaka's ominimiyaki. I'm not game to say that out loud in Hiroshima however, for fear of getting lynched.

Full of ominimiyaki, we bailed on 25th floor pudding. Maybe tomorrow.



*They were. Yay! No bib needed.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Minor Adventures on Quiet Days

-
Image
 Roger took himself off on the train to South Australia for a week, so BD and I decided to have some adventures of our own, albeit not as exciting as riding the interstate train to Adelaide and getting to have an up-close stickybeak at the flooded Murray River. We took ourselves off to the Ormond Lookout to watch the sun set instead. As did rather more people than what we had anticipated. Mobs, in fact. We found a patch of dirt grass and settled in.  "I'm gonna come back here!" declared BD.  She wriggled around a bit: our patch of grass was on quite a slope and she kept sliding out of her shorts.  "With a chair," she added. In between admiring other people's dogs and taking observational lessons in 101 Ways To Take A Selfie, we watched the sun trundle slowly toward the horizon. No sunset is complete without a picnic. There she goes. Further down the beach, a container ship puttered across the horizon under the gaze of a lone beach-sitter.  And us, of course...
Read more

Quiet Life with Cat

-
Image
 After all the excitement of hospital stays, Emergency Department visits, and trying to balance the cost-benefit ratio of hospital cafeteria food, life became a little more settled.  After a week of blessedly boring drug levels BD was given a reprieve from daily blood tests and we, therefore, were released from daily drives to the nearest Melbourne Pathology lab.  We did some laundry and did some cleaning and I hopped on my bicycle and went for a ride or two.  Not that the weather was very conducive to enjoyable and relaxing bike riding, but I went anyway. All was fine at Albert Park, where the swans put on a good show, playing happy families all across the playing fields.  But that didn't last for long. Back at home the new cat let his crazy out to play.  He zoomed up and down the hallway in the middle of the night; scared the bejeebers out of us by jumping on the sound bar and blasting us with high volume TV; hid under chairs and batted at our ankles as w...
Read more

23/12/21 The Dinosaurs of Newtown

-
Image
Some time in the months before Christmas, somewhere near Newtown, a shop had a sale of inflatable Christmas dinosaurs. Lots of people thought that a large inflatable dinosaur was just what they needed for their 2021 outdoor festive decor, so they bought the dinosaurs and then discovered that, once inflated, they were very big. Not as big as a real dinosaur would have been, obviously, but certainly big enough to be inconvenient if you happen to live in a trendy little terrace house with a handkerchief of front lawn and second story verandah almost the size of half a vegemite sandwich.   Dinosaur #1: taking up all the available verandah space I imagine that at this stage the dinosaur purchasers may have considered the size of the dinosaur (inflated or otherwise) in relation to their rubbish bin, but were likely prevented from this course of action by children who, enamoured of dinosaurs, had welcomed the creature into the Christmas fold and called it something festive like Rudolph, o...
Read more