Hiroshima, Japan

Travelogue Japan 3: Hiroshima

HIROSHIMA

09 January 2015

When we’d first started planning the trip to Japan, we’d debated spending a night in Hiroshima, thinking it to be such a noteworthy city in world history that it would be unmissable. Very watery reviews from a good proportion of travellers + Lix and RoRo’s lack of motivation to go there + an already decided-upon unlimited travel Japan Rail pass made the decision that much easier: Christian, Michele and I would daytrip it from Kyoto.

This turned out to be really easy as our house’s local subway station was 2 stops from Kyoto main station, from where we would catch a Shinkansen bullet train to Hiroshima. We didn’t have to pre-book anything, just up and out by 7.30, through the morning peak hour subway chaos and into the supreme calm that is the big and beautiful Kyoto Station.

The building is all stone and metal inside and even though it’s all grey, it’s neither cold physically nor perceptually. It’s only 4 floors, but the central hall is quadruple volume and each upper level is reached by a set of escalators, which run almost end-to-end up to an open-air roof garden terrace so look a bit like a metallic waterfall climbing upwards to the heavens when viewed from the bottom.

Our tickets required a train change in Osaka, but the lady at the ticket office had told us which platforms we needed for each departure and arrival so it was easy-peasy getting to the right train. It’s all such a well-oiled process and the trains are so clean and comfortable (seats similarly sized to aeroplanes, but with triple the legroom) that all 3 of us slept…

… through…

… and miraculously woke each other up in time for our arrival in Hiroshima.

The station was a bit smaller and a lot easier to navigate than the previous had been – and the tourist office was very proactive in guiding us to all the freebies that were included in our Japan Rail passes, including the hop-on-hop-off sightseeing bus and the ferry to Miyajima Island, home to Torii Shrine just off the mainland.

The tourist bus was a great place to start, so we hitched a ride in it to Hiroshima Castle.

Established in 1589, the castle tower was destroyed in the atomic bombing and rebuilt in 1958. Inside the tower is a museum of Samurai culture. We were relieved to discover all of this after we thought we’d failed epically after having to remove shoes and don house slippers to view 2 very average exhibitions. Fortunately these were just the entry compound and there was more beyond when we entered the Castle complex beyond.

There still wasn’t much of interest to us so, after a wander past the shrine and tower, we walked through the gardens to the castle complex rear exit.

The most effective walking tour route fortuitously meant we had to tackle an early lunch as next item on the agenda. An easy call since we already knew we had to have the local speciality in the area which had made its name.

We walked through Hondori Street (a long shopping arcade) to reach Okonomu-mura village for our okonomiyaki (described in the guide as “flat cake of unsweetened batter fried with various ingredients”).

We were very pleased that there was an okonomiyaka restaurant directly under the “Welcome to Okonomu-mura” sign. Done.

We were ushered into the restaurant and chose a booth opposite the now-standard counter alongside the kitchen which, in this case, was a wall-to-wall flatbed silver fry counter.

There were 3 guys manning the kitchen, working from the far end to our side: First guy stacks raw cabbage, onion and pork onto a pancake. Next guy flips it over to cook the pork, while he has noodles and specified ingredients frying on the side. Then he pops the ingredients onto the noodles and flips the pancake et al on top of the noodle pile. Then he cracks 2 eggs onto the flatbed grill, loosely scrambles them and shifts the noodle pile on top. The whole pile then sits for a minute while the egg cooks, he flips it to reheat the pancake and deftly chops the pancake-noodle-stirfry-omelette into 6 edible portions using cross-swipes of the flat scraper-lifter tool in each hand and deposits the whole lot on a cast iron skillet. The server brushes the top with basting, adds cheese and seasoning and serves!

Really yummy! AND we managed to double-bill with a deep-fried oyster starter (important as the city is equally known for eating inexpensive oysters in casual setting “oyster huts”).

Our restaurant was close to the historical sites, so we walked the few blocks along the river front. Everything is named Peace -Something so we walked along Peace Promenade to get to Peace Park where there are Peace Memorials and a Peace Museum.

The first sight is the A-Bomb Dome. The building was first built in 1915 as a government office of sorts and was popular for its distinctive – and considered attractive – dome. The building now is relevant as it was the only building left standing near the hypocentre (the epicentre of the blast) from the notorious A-bomb drop on 6 August 1945.

The building soon became commonly called the Genbaku (“A-Bomb”) Dome, due to the exposed metal dome framework at its apex (all the roof tiles and outer casings had burnt instantly in the blast). The structure was scheduled to be demolished with the rest of the ruins, but the majority of the building was intact, delaying the demolition plans. The Dome became a subject of controversy, with some locals wanting it torn down, while others wanted to preserve it as a memorial of the bombing and a symbol of peace. Ultimately, when the reconstruction of Hiroshima began, the skeletal remains of the building were preserved and now serve as a tangible icon of what happened and place where people come to honour the lost and commit to peace.

Over the bridge is the Cenotaph memorial for A-Bomb victims. Quite austere with the eternal candle, giant flagpole, dedications and lots and lots of fresh flowers on display, the monument is the central element in a big quad and park with water features and smaller monuments dotted about.

Behind the cenotaph is the Peace Memorial Museum, offering bargain entry price of 50 Yen (R5).

The museum is a small but well structured collection of photos, exhibitions and artefacts from the fateful day, explaining how it all came to be, what happened and – refreshingly – educating on what’s happened subsequent with nuclear armament and why we need to sustain peace and avoid such an awful thing from happening again. To anyone.

Sure, we learn what happened in history at school, but it’s so “day and date” that you lose the perspective on the human element. The displays really drove home for me how utterly devastating that bomb was. A fireball a million degrees Celsius at its core, reached maximum diameter of 280m in a second. Fierce heat rays and radiation burst out in every direction, flattening buildings within a 2 km radius and burning hundreds of thousands of people to death instantly. 85% of Hiroshima’s buildings were within 3km of where the bomb exploded, so the damage extended to virtually the entire city with 90% of all buildings destroyed beyond repair.

And yet, despite getting the magnitude of the destruction, the display that hit me the most is one of the steps of a bank that have been lifted to be displayed as they were in situ, and you can see how the stones on the wall and steps have been whitened from the heat… except the grey patch where someone had been sitting. The remnant shadow of where someone literally instantly melted.

Our little tour of the peace sights vindicated our decision to daytrip to Hiroshima. Otherwise, it’s a lovely city anyway. Beautifully laid out and pleasing on the eye. Apparently at a British junket in Hiroshima a few years ago the mayor was asked why Hiroshima is so neatly grid-style unlike other major Japanese mazes and he was quoted as saying “We had some help from the Americans.”

I would have liked to catch the ferry across to Miyajima Island to see the famous torii gate at Itsukushima Shrine, but with a 20 minute streetcar + 20 minute train + 10 minute ferry, we’d left it a bit late. Oh well, next time.