June 17, 1971: Miyajima, Japan
	June 15-16, 1971: Osaka, Japan
	Return to the Index for the Japan Trip

The third stop on my tour of southern Japan was the city of Hiroshima- a city we have all read about and seen pictures of, although those pictures showed the city at its nadir. As those are usually the only pictures we've seen, it's tough to imagine it looking any other way. But I assumed that it did, and I wanted to see it for myself.

From Osaka to Hiroshima

It was just after noontime in Osaka when I arrived at the main train station for my ride down to Hiroshima, and, once again, I made use of the Japan Travel Bureau to arrange my passage for me. After visiting Mt. Hiei in Kyoto, I collected my things from the ryokan and by late morning was back at Kyoto Central Station for the short trip further southwest to Osaka, Japan.

The trip to Hiroshima was the longest rail trip I've taken in Japan; Hiroshima is just about 250 miles from Osaka, and the trip took over four hours, so that when I got to Hiroshima it was late in the day. Unlike our trip here in January, though, it was still light (and stayed that way until after 7pm.

I recall getting off the train from Osaka and thinking that I had just arrived in the city that is probably, aside from Tokyo, the only other city in Japan that most Americans can name- for the obvious reason. I don't know what I expected, but whatever that was, that wasn't what I found.

By now I was used to finding the JTB office in the station, and I asked them to make me a reservation at the Hotel New Hiroshima- one of the three hotels my guidebook recommended. I chose this one because it was actually in Peace Park, the major site that I wanted to visit.

I inquired as to the best way to get there; even though the guidebook had something to say about the bus system in Hiroshima and how easy it was to use, I thought I would go ahead and spring for a $2 taxi ride from the station to the hotel. The aerial view at left is, of course, circa 2020, not 1971. While I am sure the city has changed dramatically since I was there, I can, even so, approximate the route the cab must have taken- knowing where the station is and where the hotel was.

Yes, one thing that has happened since my visit is that the Hotel New Hiroshima has been demolished- but not replaced. Instead, the Peace Park has been expanded. Now, the former site of the hotel is an esplanade just west of the museum. But more about that in a bit.

The reason that I can approximate the route the cab took, even now, fifty years later, is that I took two pictures during the cab ride that I can place on the aerial view.

The first one I did not consider good enough or interesting enough so that when I transcribed my slide narratives that I wrote at the time into the paper photo album pages that I created in the early 1990s, I did not include this picture in the album and so did not retain what narrative I might have written about it.

Fortunately, I am able to locate the spot where I took the picture by restricting my search to the area that any reasonable cab driver would have taken to get from Hiroshima Main Station (marked with the red locator on the aerial view above) to the Hotel New Hiroshima. I was able to find that the only spot from which I could have obtained a view like the one at left would be for the cab to be crossing a bridge heading south, just south of the station, and for me to be looking upriver from the bridge we are on to the next street bridge upriver. You can also see how the river curves out of the picture the the left, which, if I were taking the photo from the photo spot in the upper right, would have appeared just so. The river is a permanent enough feature that I can be almost certain that the picture was taken at this spot.

I can also place this picture with relative certainty on the aerial view, for I did retain the description (short though it was) that I wrote for it in 1971. That description was "Peace Boulevard, looking East, in Hiroshima, Japan". And I remember how I came to take it. The cab dropped me off at the Hotel New Hiroshima, which then sat just to the west of the Hiroshima Peace Museum which, at the time, occupied just one building. I checked in to the hotel and found my room in the modern new building, and then went out for a walk. It was a bit late to try to tour the museum, so I just walked around the area.

Peace Boulevard runs east-west in front of the hotel and the museum, just south of both of them. The hotel and museum are on a very long island in the Motoyasu River, actually, and there are bridges just east and west on the boulevard. I walked across the bridge to the east to take the picture at right, so we are looking eastward along the boulevard. You can see the end of the bridge railing at left in the picture. To orient you, the hotel and Peace Museum are just out of the picture to the left and a bit behind me at the other end of the bridge on the island.

It was late in the day, and so all I did for the rest of the afternoon was to do some walking around the area, and I ended up having some supper in a little restaurant I found in a neighborhood near the hotel. I recall having to once again point to an item on the menu to do my ordering, although one of the younger persons working in the restaurant spoke a bit of English.

During my walk around this afternoon, I thought a lot about what the city has gone through. When one considers that the city was absolutely leveled by the explosion in 1946, the job of rebuilding that has been done is remarkable. The city is extremely modern, as is to be expected. The original city was cramped and congested, but the new one has been well laid out with parks and broad avenues. Perhaps I expected to feel some sort of guilt for what was done, and people do tell me that many Americans come here with just that sort of apologetic countenance. I was quite surprised to find that the average Japanese, however, seem to be very "philosophical" about it, and I never once was made to feel an intruder as one might expect. I'll say more about this later, when I recount an experience I had in the museum the next day, but in all my travels here in Japan I have never felt like anything but an honored guest, even though we are just one generation away from all-out war. I was again struck by how much change time has wrought.

I stayed in Hiroshima two nights, and did some sightseeing around the area, taking one day trip to Miyajima Island. Probably the best way to organize my pictures is to simply group them into the various sites I visited. So, in no particular order, here they are.>P>  

Hijiyama Park

Hijiyama Park is about a mile from the hotel to the east, and the walk down there along Peace Boulevard, and up to one of the observation platforms, was very pleasant.

Hijiyama Park is famous for its impressive mountainous and forested landscape. The park has a walking trail with statues and observation decks that travels through areas of different terrain.

I also saw numerous playgrounds and such, and there were lots of vendors selling all kinds of refreshments. (Note from 2022: In 1989, the most visited site here in the park will be constructed- the notable MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art).)

Hijiyama Park was the first official park in Hiroshima city, and is a popular spot for cherry blossoms. As it was only about two kilometers from the hypocenter of the bomb blast in 1945 and immediately after the atomic bombing, many people gathered to escape the spreading flames and took refuge in the pathways and under the shade of the trees.

I walked across the Tsurumi Bridge and into the park, and made my way to the observation building. On the way, I saw a couple of small memorials and monuments related to the park itself and to the bombing in 1945. From the Fujimidai Observation Platform there were wonderful views of Hiroshima City and the Seto Inland Sea, and I took some pictures.

This view looks north from the observation platform at what appears to be an industrial area of the city. I can place the Enko River in the background, if the little map in my guidebook is accurate.

The reinforced concrete bridge at left spans the Kyobashi River; called the Hijiyama Bridge, it was completed in 1939. It was 5,000 feet from the hypocenter, and the blast blew off part of the parapet which fell into the river.

(Note from 2022: While traces of the damage remain, the bridge it is still in use today.) I think that everyone has seen pictures of what this city looked like at the end of the Second World War; here is the city today. As you can see, it is thoroughly modern, and intelligently planned.

At left is an aerial view of the area where the observation deck is. You can see the Hijiyama Bridge in the lower left in the view below- which looks directly west:

Hiroshima is the capital and largest city of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chūgoku region, with other major cities including Fukuyama, Kure, and Higashihiroshima. Hiroshima Prefecture is located on the Seto Inland Sea across from the island of Shikoku, and is bounded to the north by the Chūgoku Mountains, and those are the mountains that you see in almost all the pictures I took here in Hiroshima.

This view looks northwest, and is mostly residential. The fact that the city backs up to mountains affected the damage done in the bombing.

This is Peace Boulevard looking back west towards the museum and the Hotel New Hiroshima.

The Hotel New Hiroshima

I mentioned above that I stayed in the Hotel New Hiroshima, a reservation that was made for me by the JTB. The hotel was very modern if a little stark.

The Hotel New Hiroshima

In the picture at left, the Hotel New Hiroshima is the building in the exact center of the picture, and the Peace Museum is just to the right. As you can see, the hotel was very convenient. I would like to be able to tell you more about the hotel but, sadly, it is no longer there (in 2022) and I cannot find any information about it online.

Oddly, among the search results I did run across references to the 1959 French New Wave film "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" ("Hirosima, My Love"), and one of those references said that one of the filming locations for the movie was the "New Hiroshima Hotel". Thinking this might actually be the Hotel New Hiroshima, I found some excerpts from the film online and, indeed, the hotel appears in the film.

If I can, I will put some of those excerpts here because, other than the photo at left, I have no pictures of the interior of the hotel. I do remember that the hotel was very plain, and seemed very "1960s", with angular lines, very simple furnishings, and the long, low lines of a suburban home from that era.

The Hiroshima Peace Museum

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was the centerpiece of the Peace Memorial Park, and was located right next to the hotel I was staying at. The museum is dedicated to documenting the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in World War II. The museum was established in 1955 with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall. It is the most popular of Hiroshima's destinations for school field-trips from all over Japan and for international visitors. Hundreds of thousands of people visit the museum each year- most of them Japanese. But I was among the ten thousand or so foreigners who also visit the museum each year. The architect of the main building (seen to the right of the hotel in the picture in the previous section) was Kenzō Tange.

At left is one of the two pictures I took inside the museum, and it shows some of the typical exhibits that were arranged on two floors in one long hall on each floor.

I was hardly prepared for what I found in the museum. Inside are mementos of what kind of damage was done to the city by the bombing, with pictures and exhibits. Some of it is pretty rough, but then so was the bombing. It is one thing to read Hersey's account, and quite another to actually see the results.

This chimney top was scorched and the steel rod melted and bent.

As I said, the citizens of Hiroshima have not set this museum up to depict American atrocities, or as any sort of self-penance, but rather out of an honest desire to show people what could happen on a very large scale were the use of these kind of weapons ever to be widespread.

In this exhibit, we see a piece of structural steel showing where it was melted and broken by the heat and blast. And the pictures on the walls show the bomb's effects on Hiroshima buildings.

I do want to tell you about one interaction I had inside the museum. But before I do, I have to say that as I was going through the exhibits a sense of guilt had been growing. While I knew that we had not taken this action lightly, and that we had been attacked originally, and that it was the general consensus that dropping the new weapon actually saved lives- both American and Japanese, I could not avoid feeling some guilt for the massive scale of the destruction.

At one point, I happened to be standing near a Japanese family, and I could tell that all four of its members knew some English, as I understood words and phrases they were using. (I assumed that the parents were trying to enhance the English skills of their young children. At one point, when my eyes met those of the two adults, I felt the need to say something, and all I could think of was to apologize for the bombing and the destruction it caused.

I was actually thinking that I might have gotten some accusatory comments, or perhaps I would be ignored entirely, but that was not the case. It was the young father who said something to the effect that he was well aware that in that time in Japan's history that militaristic generals and others got the Emperor's ear and his reluctant approval for the war against the United States. He also said that he understood that the United States and its other allies would have to do all they could in their defense, and so the "blame" for the destruction of this entire city was as much on Japan as it was on the US- probably more so.

It surprised me that I was not met with hostility and blame; I actually never was in all the time I spent in Japan and even here in Hiroshima. The feeling I got from the Japanese here in Hiroshima (very few of whom I think were either alive or living here at the time), was sadness that the relationships between Japan and other nations could have gotten so bad that an act like the bombing of Hiroshima might ever have become an option. I think I responded with something like "Well, I am still very sorry that this happened, that we ever felt it necessary. And I hope that nothing like this ever happens again."

The entire experience was very sobering, and left an impression on me that to this day I have not forgotten.

Note from 2022:
I happen to be working on this page as Russia is attempting to take over Ukraine by force, and the world has been threatened with the use of bombs much, much more powerful than the one that leveled Hiroshima. If you are reading this, than nuclear armageddon has not occurred yet, and I sincerely hope it won't. But I, like millions of others, is beginning to wonder if it is inevitable, or whether the mere threat of it is enough to allow a madman to impose his will on the rest of the world- and of course on Ukraine. Will Hiroshima remain as one of only two cities destroyed by atomic weapons? That, I guess, remains to be seen. As I said, though, if you are reading this, then Hiroshima still has that inenviable distinction.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, located in the center of Hiroshima, is dedicated to the legacy of Hiroshima as the first city in the world to suffer a nuclear attack, and to the memories of the bomb's direct and indirect victims (of whom there may have been as many as 140,000). The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is visited by more than one million people each year. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was planned and designed by the Japanese Architect Kenzō Tange at Tange Lab.

The location of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was once the city’s busiest downtown commercial and residential district. The park was built on an open field that was created by the explosion. Today there are a number of memorials and monuments, museums, and lecture halls, which draw over a million visitors annually.

The annual 6 August Peace Memorial Ceremony, which is sponsored by the city of Hiroshima, is also held in the park. The purpose of the Peace Memorial Park is not only to memorialize the victims of the bombing, but also to perpetuate the memory of nuclear horrors and advocate world peace.

Every year on 6 August, "A-Bomb Day," the City of Hiroshima holds the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony to console the victims of the atomic bombs and to pray for the realization of lasting world peace. The ceremony is held in the morning from 8:00 AM, in front of the Memorial Cenotaph with many citizens including the families of the deceased. During the ceremony, a one-minute silence to honor the victims is observed at 8:15 AM, the time of the atomic bomb's explosion.

In the evening of the same day, a lantern ceremony is held to send off the spirits of the victims on lanterns with peace messages floating on the waters of the Motoyasu River.

This first picture from Peace Park shows two of the iconic monuments and memorials in the park. In the nearground is the Cenotaph, and in the background is the "A-Bomb Dome". I'll visit each of these sites a little later on.

One of the many things I did not know was that among the 400,000 people who were killed or exposed to lethal post-explosion radiation, at least 45,000 were Korean, but the number is uncertain, because the population has been neglected as the minority.

Additionally, 300,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki returned to Korea after liberation from Japanese colonialism. The Korean Cenotaph monument, decorated with Korean national symbols, is intended to honor Korean victims and survivors of the atomic bomb and Japanese colonialism. The monument's inscription reads:

"The Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the A-Bomb. In memory of the souls of His Highness Prince Yi Wu and over 20000 other souls. The souls of the dead ride to heaven on the backs of turtles."

I spent quite some time wandering around the Peace Memorial Park. There were lots of other people about- singles, families, and groups. I did not happen to see any other Westerners- except near the A-Bomb dome.

The Memorial Cenotaph

Near the center of the park is a concrete, saddle-shaped monument that covers a cenotaph holding the names of all of the people killed by the bomb. The monument is aligned to frame the Peace Flame and the A-Bomb Dome. The Memorial Cenotaph was one of the first memorial monuments built on open field on August 6, 1952. The arch shape represents a shelter for the souls of the victims.

The cenotaph carries an epitaph that translates to "please rest in peace, for [we/they] shall not repeat the error." In Japanese, the sentence's subject is omitted, thus it could be interpreted as either "[we] shall not repeat the error" or as "[they] shall not repeat the error". This was intended to memorialize the victims of Hiroshima without politicizing the issue, taking advantage of the fact that polite Japanese speech typically demands lexical ambiguity in the first place. The epitaph was written by Tadayoshi Saika, Professor of English Literature at Hiroshima University. He also provided the English translation, "Let all the souls here rest in peace for we shall not repeat the evil."

The inscription on the front panel offers a prayer for the peaceful repose of the victims and a pledge on behalf of all humanity never to repeat the evil of war. It expresses the spirit of Hiroshima — enduring grief, transcending hatred, pursuing harmony and prosperity for all, and yearning for genuine, lasting world peace. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ambiguity of the phrase has the potential to offend; some right-wing circles in Japan have interpreted the words as an admission of guilt—implicitly reading it as "we (the Japanese people) shall not repeat the error"—and they criticize the epitaph as a self-accusation by the Japanese empire.

The Peace Museum

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is located in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, and is dedicated to documenting the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in World War II.

The museum was established in August 1955 with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall (now the International Conference Center Hiroshima). It is the most popular of Hiroshima's destinations for school field-trips from all over Japan and for international visitors. 15 million people have visited the museum since it opened. The architect of the main building was Kenzō Tange.

According to the introduction in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum's English guide:

"The Peace Memorial Museum collects and displays belongings left by the victims, photos, and other materials that convey the horror of that event, supplemented by exhibits that describe Hiroshima before and after the bombings and others that present the current status of the nuclear age. Each of the items displayed embodies the grief, anger, or pain of real people. Having now recovered from the A-bomb calamity, Hiroshima's deepest wish is the elimination of all nuclear weapons and the realization of a genuinely peaceful international community."

The Peace Flame

The Peace Flame is another monument to the victims of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, but it has an additional symbolic purpose. The flame has burned continuously since it was lit in 1964, and will remain lit until all nuclear bombs on the planet are destroyed and the planet is free from the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The park was very sobering. I walked north past the Cenotaph towards the "Atomic Dome".

Children's Peace Monument

The Children's Peace Monument is a monument for peace to commemorate Sadako Sasaki and the thousands of child victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Sadako Sasaki, a young girl, died of leukemia from radiation of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Sasaki was not killed outright in the blast but lived long enough to help innumerable other people, many of them blinded and injured, to relative safety before she succumbed to the aftereffects of the explosion. Inside the cone there are hanging ropes to which hundreds of thousands of written prayers have been attached. They hang down like paper chains.

Designed by native artists Kazuo Kikuchi and Kiyoshi Ikebe, the monument, unveiled in 1958, was built using money derived from a fund-raising campaign by Japanese school children, including Sadako Sasaki's classmates, with the main statue entitled "Atomic Bomb Children". Sasaki is immortalized at the top of the statue, where she holds a wire crane above her head. Shortly before she passed, she had a vision to create a thousand cranes. Japanese tradition says that if one creates a thousand cranes, they are granted one wish. Sadako's wish was to have a world without nuclear weapons.

Thousands of origami cranes from all over the world are offered around the monument. They serve as a sign that the children who make them and those who visit the statue desire a world without nuclear war, having been tied to the statue by the story that Sadako died from radiation-induced leukemia after folding just under a thousand cranes, wishing for world peace. However, an exhibit which appeared in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum stated that by the end of August 1955, Sadako had achieved her 1000-crane goal and continued to fold more cranes. Unfortunately, her wish was not granted and she died of the leukemia on October 25, 1955.

I continued walking north on the island until I came to a point opposite the Atomic Dome from which I could get a good picture of it. It is probably the one image from Hiroshima that has been seen by more people than any other.

The Atomic Dome

If you can remember any pictures of the devastation at Hiroshima, you might remember that only one building was left standing, even though its veneer was collapsed. This is that building, called the "atomic dome" and it stands on the very site where it was destroyed. It has been fenced off, and nothing has been done to it to keep it in shape, perhaps as it is it makes a more striking reminder of the destruction. There are little radioactivity signs posted around the structure, and I imagine that the metallic parts of it are still radioactive. It presents quite a stark contrast to the other modern buildings of the city. Of course, were this sort of tragedy to occur now, with the new weapons that have been developed, even this kind of wreckage would not be left in a center city.

The A-Bomb Dome is the skeletal ruins of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. It is the building closest to the hypocenter of the nuclear bomb that remained at least partially standing. It was left as it was after the bombing in memory of the casualties. The A-Bomb Dome, to which a sense of sacredness and transcendence has been attributed, is situated in a distant ceremonial view that is visible from the Peace Memorial Park’s central cenotaph. It is an officially designated site of memory for the nation’s and humanity’s collectively shared heritage of catastrophe.

Note from 2022:
When I visited the dome, the UNESCO World Heritage List was still a decade in the future. The Atomic Dome was added to that list on (appropriately) December 7, 1996. Many A-Bomb survivors and Hiroshima citizens were pushing for the A-Bomb Dome to be registered as a World Heritage Site as it was "a symbol of horror and nuclear weapons and humankind's pledge for peace." This collective petition from many citizens groups was finally given influence when the Japanese government officially recommended the dome to the World Heritage Site committee in December 1995. A marker was placed on the A-Bomb Dome on April 25, 1997 by Hiroshima City. It reads:

"As a historical witness that conveys the tragedy of suffering the first atomic bomb in human history and as a symbol that vows to faithfully seek the abolition of nuclear weapons and everlasting world peace, Genbaku Dome was added to the World Heritage List in accordance with the "Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention)." December 7, 1996, Hiroshima City"

I have to say that even after reading John Hersey's book "Hiroshima" many years ago, I was still not quite prepared for what I found here. Physically, yes, things were pretty much as I expected. But it was the attitude of the Japanese people I passed or, in one case, talked to. I'd heard about the Japanese tendency to be philosophical about many things; not everything is somebody's fault. I did not feel "blamed" for what happened here; if anything, I felt a sadness that such a thing had even to be considered. I had been prepared to say "I'm sorry" quite a bit, but something more like "We are all sorry" ended up seeming more appropriate.

After a kind of "downer" visit to Hiroshima, I was looking forward to a more pleasant visit to Miyajima.

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	June 17, 1971: Miyajima, Japan
	June 15-16, 1971: Osaka, Japan
	Return to the Index for the Japan Trip