2002-07-25 - 1:18 a.m.
I just got back from a wonderful little trip to Hiroshima, a great city. I left Kimitsu for Tokyo early on Monday morning and from Tokyo I took the shinkansen (bullet train) for almost five hours. The route traveled south through Yokohama and west past Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka, reaching Hiroshima at the westernmost end of Honshu, Japan’s main island. From Tokyo to Osaka, the landscape of rice fields, houses, and factories set against a backdrop of distant mountains was unchanging. After we passed through Kobe the mountains seemed to edge closer together and sneak up toward the tracks, creating small mountain villages in between the green hills. For the final hour of the trip the shinkansen darted in and out of mountain tunnels and I wondered what it would be like to be an English teacher in one of those little towns.
Upon arriving at Hiroshima Station, I found the tourist information office, which was staffed by women in suits, pillbox hats, and white gloves. I picked up a couple of English maps, confirmed the location of my hotel, and set out to find the right streetcar to take me there. The streetcar (tram) system turned out to be really easy, and I must say I’m a huge fan of this form of transportation. Riding the streetcar down Hiroshima’s main avenues was immediately orienting. I had a clear sense of where I was in the city and which way I was going. If Hiroshima had a subway system, I wouldn’t have seen nearly as much of the city or known which way I was headed most of the time. Unlike buses which drive on the outermost lanes, streetcars ride down the middle of the road, providing a great view. Hiroshima’s streetcars were bought up from all over Japan when other cities switched to buses and subways. The city never painted or remodeled them into a uniform fleet, so they’re all different colors and styles. I saw one that had been brightly decorated by school children.
After finding my hotel, located on Heiwa O-dori -- Peace Boulevard -- right near the Peace Park, I checked in and cooled off before heading out again. I took the streetcar to a park in the northeast part of the city, and strolled around, checking out the numerous turtles inhabiting the big pond. On my way out I saw a sign with a picture and some text in English and Japanese. The picture was of this park right after the bomb -- it looked like the remains of a forest fire. Immediately after the bombing, a large number of survivors came to the park, but died before they could get any medical help. Their remains are interred in the grounds of the park.
From the park, I made my way back west to Hondori, the commercial center of Hiroshima. The Hondori is a covered pedestrian shopping arcade that stretches for blocks and blocks. Winding around a big department store, I came upon a tiled plaza with some modern sculptures and lots of young people hanging out and e-mailing on their cell phones. Just off the plaza, I stopped to get some dinner at Okanomi-mura. “Okanomiyaki” is like an eggy pancake, cooked with whatever vegetables or seafood you want in it. “Mura” means village. Okanomi-mura houses dozens of small restaurants which specialize in the Hiroshima version okanomiyaki, called “hiroshima-yaki.” My “nikku-nashi” (without meat) hiroshima-yaki was made in front of me on a large grill. First, the cook made a small, thin, circle of pancake batter on the grill. On top of that he put shredded cabbage and onions and lots of seasoning and flipped it, letting it cook for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, he fried some soba noodles in oil and some kind of sauce, and next to that, fried an egg. Then he put the parts together into a kind of pancake sandwich. On the bottom was the pancake, then the vegetables, the soba, and finally, the egg. This was flipped a few more times and then he slathered it with a brown Worcestershire type sauce, cut it into eighths, and slid it onto a plate. Though I suspect that fish products made their way into it somehow, it was great... and not something I’m sure I could accomplish at home without it turning into a big grilled pile of slop.
On Tuesday morning I set out before it got to hot to see “the bomb stuff.” It was a short walk from my hotel across a bridge to the Peace Park. One of the things that makes Hiroshima such a lovely city is that it is divided by several rivers (which actually have attractive bridges, unlike most places in Japan). The Peace Park is on an island between two of the rivers. The museum in the park is really well done. It first goes through Hiroshima’s history and Japanese military history leading up to World War II, and then the historical facts of the bombing itself. The first part of the museum finishes up with information about nuclear arms and the need for nuclear disarmament. The second part of the museum is the more graphic stuff, focusing on the destruction and suffering brought about by the bombing. Like the Holocaust Museum in D.C., the Peace Memorial Museum concludes with video testimonies by survivors. There are also messages from world leaders who have visited the museum. I looked through three books of these messages before I found one from a U.S. leader. Not surprisingly, it was Jimmy Carter. No other U.S. President has visited the museum.
I learned a lot from the museum. Before-and-after models of Hiroshima effectively conveyed the destruction caused by the bomb. One chilling artifact was a wristwatch that stopped at 8:15, when the bomb was dropped. A photograph showed how people wrote messages about the condition of loved ones with white chalk on walls and roof tiles which had been blacked by the bomb. I was disturbed to learn that for the six years of U.S. occupation after the war, the U.S. imposed a ban on writing and artistic expression about the bomb. Parts of books were cut, and it was illegal to sell pictures of the bombing. It’s hard to imagine such a thing in our media-saturated world, to be deprived of images, information, and artistic interpretations of a large scale tragedy. Not surprisingly, after the occupation ended, such works proliferated rapidly. Two pillars are plastered with copies of telegrams from successive mayors of Hiroshima, who have written to world leaders to protest every nuclear test carried out since the late 1960s. The latest one was addressed to President Bush and dated earlier this summer. It struck me as emblematic of the kind of place that Hiroshima is that the leaders of this small city consider themselves duty-bound to advocate for peace on a global scale.
After the museum, I wandered around the park for a while, looking at the different monuments. One remembers the Korean victims of the bomb. One out of ten killed were Koreans, who were performing forced labor in factories for the Japanese army. Though this population was so significantly affected by the tragedy, no prayers were said or memorial services held until recent, more tolerant times. The children’s memorial was surrounded by thousands and thousands of paper cranes folded by people all over the world.
I left the park and walked along the river to the A-bomb Dome, a building close to the epicenter of the bomb which survived with more than half of its shell in tact. In its gutted state, it is actually quite beautiful. The UN has declared it a World Heritage Site. I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art before finally surrendering to the heat and returning to the hotel for a nap. I set out again after dark to take some night pictures of the city and the A-bomb Dome and get dinner. There was nearly a full moon out, and as I crossed one of the bridges near the Dome, I decided that Hiroshima was the first city in Japan that I really liked aesthetically. It seems to have been constructed -- reconstructed -- with something in mind other than a race to cover every available surface with concrete. Even in Kyoto, which has so many cultural treasures, the that convenience stores seem to be pounding at the temple gates. In Hiroshima, there aren’t many hidden temples or spectacular gardens to seek out, but what the city does offer is a thoughtful, if painful, integration of its past and its future.
After I saw that sign in the garden on my first day, I understood that everywhere I went in Hiroshima I’d be confronting the bomb in some sense. Indeed, these markers were everywhere. Waiting on a corner I glanced at the building behind me, and learned that it was the Bank of Japan, which had reopened two days after the bombing, even though all forty-two employees working there at the time had been killed. Taking a shortcut through an alley, I saw a sign across from a mechanic marking the spot as the hypocenter of the bomb. Under all the new buildings and roadways, the city itself is one massive grave site. There are 291,824 living survivors of the bomb in Japan. 88,592 of them live in Hiroshima, a city of 1,123,745. I went to Hiroshima expecting that it would be a depressing, perhaps even terrifying experience. Instead, I found inspiration in its people’s capacity to rebuild, their thoughtful commemoration of the tragedy, and in their commitment to affect global change. In Hiroshima, the dead are everywhere, but there is also so much life.
