That fateful day
Trip Start
Sep 10, 2008
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22
75
Trip End
Sep 03, 2009
Hiroshima, Chugoku, Japan
Friday, December 12, 2008
As such, its almost a given that when in Hiroshima you look round the A-bomb museum and Peace Park, but I also had a bit of time to see the rest of the place.
And so, four of us from the hostel dutifully headed towards the peace park. Whilst getting our fill of photographs of the monuments and the thousands of colourful paper cranes adorning and surrounding them, we were approached by some local women. This is not entirely uncommon when travelling through Japan, as the Japanese are a very homogeneous society, you stand out as a geijin (foreigner). People are often interested to talk to you, shake your hand (a novelty in Japan) and even have their photo taken with you. The nice thing is, its the one country where I`ve been happy to talk to people approaching me, as I know that they're not trying to sell you something. Or so we thought. After spending a few minutes talking to them, with all the usual, where are you from, how long are you here questions, they asked us if we believed in God. Not really the sort of thing that turns up in polite conversation! It turns out they were actually Jehovah's Witnesses. Apparently, even the Buddhist country of Japan is not safe from the ones known for knocking on your door at the most inconvenient time. After one of us obliged them by reading a passage from the bible, they invited us to "learn about Jehovah's Witnesses in our home countries", err thanks...
Shortly after, whilst still wondering round the "A-Bomb dome" (once a grand hall, amazingly still standing but badly damaged as it was almost directly under the hypocentre) another man approached us. We needn't have worried this time however, as he was in fact a free tour guide, and wanted to tell us a bit about his family history. Various members of his family had been killed or affected by the bomb, including himself, and he showed us many photos which was really interesting. Apparently he used to work for the museum and we got a sense that he seemed a little bit bitter towards it, making comments about information the museum does not provide.
Heading away from the peace park I visited a rather different landmark on the ferry. The floating red torri at Miyojima, look very impressive, whatever angle you look at them. Unless you are unlucky enough to go when the tide is low. Then, rather than floating in the Ocean, the gates are in fact, floating in a big pile of mud. The island itself was lovely, if not very touristized, with deer wondering amongst the crowds.
I somehow then, managed to squeeze in a visit to a big wooden bridge, build using no nails, and a lovely little town called Kurashiki, full of lovely traditional architecture and shops that managed to tempt me into spending far too much money.
