Hiroshima Peace Park

Monday night we hopped a bus to Tsuyama, the town where Jane lives, and crashed there for the night. The next morning we were back on the bus headed to Hiroshima. We got in around noon, checked into our hostel, and headed to the Peace Park.

In case you slept through every history class you've ever taken, Hiroshima is the site of the first atomic bombing August 6, 1945. The city was virtually leveled and thousands of lives were lost. Many whose lives were immediately spared suffered a variety of illnesses and ailments in the future.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was probably the highlight of the trip for me. It was very moving and very informative. Before the bombing, Hiroshima was a thriving military town with a population near 350,000. The museum showed the city before the bombing and immediately afterwards. There were pictures and hundreds of items from the day of the bombing, whether it be clothing or steps of a building with an outline of a person sitting. It was very moving. I'm sure another reason this was so memorable for me was the fact that it was in English so I could actually appreciate the exhibits (unlike most of the temples and castles that only provided information in Japanese). Another thing that moved me was a wall of letters written by the mayors of Hiroshima asking for an end to nuclear weapons testing. A letter has been written in response to each test since the bombings in WWII.

I was a little worried about how we would be perceived in this city since we are American. There were literally hundreds (if not thousands) of school kids at the memorial and we were approached all afternoon as though we were celebrities. They would see us from across the square and come running towards us shouting, "Hello!" One kid asked for my signature and Rick signed some kid's backpack! Some of the children had an assignment to ask us where we were from and why we were visiting. It was funny, they were all given a script and if you deviated from that script they were totally lost. Jane loved to trip them up to test their English.

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around the Peace Park. Sculptures and memorials were all around. If you look through the archway, you can see the only structure that still remains from the day of the bombing, a building named the Atomic Bomb Dome. More pictures on that later.

Above is the Peace Museum

One of the memorials in the park was the Children's Peace Monument, erected by the friends of Sasaki Sadako-san, a young girl exposed to radiation the day of the atomic bombing. Ten years later, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She folded 1,000 paper cranes in hopes of having her dream come true. Her classmates asked for this monument to be erected. Thousands of cranes are placed there by school children from around the world.