Hiroshima, Japan
Our next stop in Japan had a very different tone. On 6 August 1945, the US dropped the world’s most powerful bomb on Hiroshima, completely obliterating the city in a matter of seconds, and killing 140,000 people. It feels impossible to explore the city without that one event dominating your visit.
One of the quirks of the British school system is that most pupils only ever learn about two things: the Tudors and the second world war. Photographs of the atomic bomb dome in Hiroshima featured in many of my history textbooks, so I was curious to visit Hiroshima and see it for myself, and to learn more about the effects it had on the city.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is a pretty bleak place, with wall after wall of photos of complete devastation, and witness accounts that don’t hold back. Not that they should, but it makes for a very sobering visit, which makes you question why on earth the world has armed itself with such destructive weapons. There’s very little balance or context for the bombing in the museum, as it focuses on peace; the main international perspective comes in the form of photos of world leaders who’ve visited the museum and pledged to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Outside the museum the atomic bomb dome sits directly under the spot where the bomb exploded. Somehow the structure of the dome survived, and it’s been preserved as a ruin as a reminder of what happened on that day. Around the dome is a peace park with several memorials to victims of the bombs, and monuments for nuclear disarmament and peace. It’s a calm, respectful place, with benches and trees offering places for people to reflect on what happened here. Small groups of respectful school children file past solemnly to learn about the history of the city, some of them getting a little too enthusiastic in their ringing of the peace bell.
After a fairly heavy day or so learning about the destruction of Hiroshima, we also wanted to find out more about how the city rebuilt, and to see what rose from the ashes in the years since then — it must be strange to live in a city that’s so synonymous with such a horrendous event. We wandered about, had some coffee and soaked up the atmosphere in the city centre. Of course, except for the park you’d never know what had happened here; busy shopping streets, modern buildings, gardens, parks and the usual hustle and bustle of a large Japanese city.
One particularly busy street was Okonomimura, a building dedicated to okonomiyaki. Hiroshima is home to a very different type to the one we’d previously had in Tokyo; here they use noodles in the pancake as well as the egg and cabbage. By now we were self-declared experts in okonomiyaki, and we ate the Hiroshima variety with a suitable level of scrutiny, talking about it to each other like we were doing a piece to camera in a travel show.
On our last day in the Hiroshima area, we took a short ferry trip out to the nearby island of Miyajima. Famous for its deer and waterside torii, we quickly saw both and set about getting some lunch. We bought a few of our usual favourite snacks from a nearby 7-eleven and sat looking out to sea when an inquisitive deer snuck up and snatched the plastic wrapper of my picnic from the bench next to me. I wasn’t sure how to get the wrapper back, but I definitely didn’t want to be the only person in the whole of Japan to litter, and was also worried that the deer was about to eat plastic. I managed to get some of the wrapper back, put it in the bin in the shop, and we decided there were probably better places to finish the rest of our lunch.
We packed up our bags and headed to Hiroshima Station to catch the last shinkansen of the trip, to Kyoto. We were idly looking out the window at a station when I noticed a bullet train pull in alongside us. But this was no ordinary shinkansen – it was entirely yellow, from roof to wheel. I thought this was odd, as every photo I’d ever seen of a shinkansen had been white. I snapped a quick (bad) photo from my window and googled ‘yellow shinkansen’. And what a discovery we had made. There’s a shinkansen affectionately known as ‘Doctor Yellow’ that travels up and down the high-speed rail lines of Japan, and instead of passengers, it’s packed full of monitoring equipment to check everything is working as it should. Seeing Doctor Yellow is rare and no-one knows where on the network it’s going to be at any point. It’s such an enigmatic train that spotting it is meant to signal good luck.
Buoyed by seeing a yellow train that moments beforehand, we hadn’t known existed, we hoped to carry the luck with us around the world for the next few months. Or failing that, at least onto our next destination: Kyoto.
