Reid Main

Surprising absolutely no one, I failed to sleep through the night again. Even after waking up at midnight and falling back asleep, I found myself completely wide-awake by 3am. Less than six total hours of sleep and my body was apparently jacked to the tits. Elsie was also having trouble sleeping so we said fuck and it at 5:30am we prepared to leave for Hiroshima.

I have been to Japan four times now, travelled at all hours of the day, and have seen some unbelievably densely packed stations. But at 5:30am the dearth of people we encountered on the way to Ōsaka Station was bonkers. As we took the A Line up to Shin-Ōsaka I think we saw less than a dozen people. Even when buying our tickets for the first San'yō Shinkansen of the day we barely saw anyone. I actually can't even remember if there was anyone else in our car. For the ride I had purchased an absolutely delicious think cut pork cutlet sandwich and 90 minutes later we we arrived at Hiroshima Station.

We decided to walk to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park via the Heiwa-Ōdōri aka "Peace Boulevard". It was a really interesting / strange experience when you cross that final bridge and enter the park because if you did not know what you were approaching you would just think it is some beautifully maintained piece of public land. Nothing about it screams this is where the first nuclear attack in human history occurred. It is this serene place and it's only when you enter the buildings that you are truly hit with the magnitude of what happened here.

We started out by visiting the Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims which was hauntingly beautiful. It contains a queryable database of all of the victims of the attack. Photographs and stories of both those who were killed and those who survived. At the centre is a ramp that descends counter-clockwise down to the Hall of Remembrance, a 360 degree panoramic photograph of Hiroshima after the bombing.

Heading towards the north end of the park we passed the Children's Peace Monument before coming to the Genbaku Dome, also known as the A-Bomb Dome, one of the few buildings left standing after the blast. It is only 150 meters horizontally and 600 meters vertically from the hypocenter of the bomb, and even though the building withstood the blast, everyone inside was killed instantly. From here we headed towards the centre of the park where the Memorial Cenotaph resides. It is a concrete arch that covers a stone chest holding 100+ tomes containing the names of those killed by the bomb. If you peer through the arc it perfectly frames the Genbaku Dome.

Our final stop was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum which I highly recommend be your final stop as well because it is an objectively horrifying experience. The pictures and content on display are incredibly graphic and grim. I was honestly unaware that these kind of photographs actually existed. Each section would recount in gut-wrenching detail what the radiation did the people of Hiroshima and no matter what I write here I would not be doing it justice. I consider myself a learned person who has a strong knowledge of history (at least "recent" history) but my school definitely taught the whitewashed version of Hiroshima and the atomic bombs.

Hiroshima is the first "peace memorial" I have been to where I felt discomfort. I have never been to mainland Europe to seen any of their memorials for the World Wars so perhaps I will have similar feelings. But there was just something about touring a site where tens of thousands of people died in a matter of hours that made me feel guilty. I know the city of Hiroshima wants this kind of tourism and I would like to think that I was very respectful but it was still just a very odd feeling.

It was quickly approaching noon and we had seen everything that we wanted to in the park. Our plans had been to walk back to Hiroshima Station and take a train towards Miyajima where we would board a ferry to the island. But as luck would have it there is actually a ferry that goes directly to Miyajima from the Peace Memorial Park. It was a fairly choppy 45 minute ride but we were dropped off at the main terminal which was only a 20 minute walk from Itsukushima Jinja, home of the famous "floating" torii gate. Since we arrived at low tide we were able to walk right up to the base of the gate and bask in its majesty.

Unbeknownst to us when we planned this trip, the Miyajima Aquarium is only a five minute walk from the shrine and as the weather was starting to turn we figured we could take shelter there for an hour or so before heading back to the mainland. I realize that all zoos typically need to use their animals for entertainment to bring in revenue. But Japanese zoos always seem to have a rather melancholic nature to them. The enclosures appear too small and the animals feel like they exist solely for our amusement. At this aquarium there were porpoises swimming circles in a completely barren tank that was no more than 10 meters across. I am not saying there aren't zoos in Western countries that are like this. Just that every time we visit one in Japan I usually up feeling sorry for the animals.

By now it was 3pm so we headed back to the ferry which took us to Miyajimaguchi Station where we boarded the San'yō Main Line to get back to Hiroshima. As is tradition, we stopped by the Pokémon Center Hiroshima to buy a souvenir before hopping on the Shinkansen to take us back to Shin-Ōsaka. We boarded the Midōsuji Line to get to Umeda Station and promptly had our first "tourists lost in Japan" moment where we got turned around in the tunnels, taking almost 30 minutes to find our way out and back to our hotel for 7:15pm.

At this point we were running on empty so we decided to pop around the corner to a "British pub" we'd seen multiple times walking back from the station. They just so happened to have a English Premier League match on between Newscastle and Chelsea. Between some fish and chips, fried chicken, doritos, and something called a Shandygaff, we enjoyed a 2-0 Newcastle victory before retiring for the night.