Kyoto to Hiroshima

We headed for our 7:42 Shinkansen train to Hiroshima. We got another look at the train station in Kyoto. The entire station was open to the outside- and their climate is like ours. So, in the summer, it’s very hot and humid. It’s hard to imagine what the winter must be like. It was very amusing to watch the people running through the station to catch their next train.. the life of the “sarariman”- the salary man.
The train, as always, arrived on time and left on time. Every time any of the rail staff exits the car, they turn around and bow to the (mostly empty) car. The trains don’t appear to be crowded at any time of the day. They must be heavily subsidized.
Once in Hiroshima, we took the local tram to Peace Memorial Park. The park was filled with Japanese school kids of all ages.

At one end of the park was the “A Bomb Dome”, formerly the Industrial Promotion Hall, a charred and twisted skeleton that was allowed to remain as a reminder of the destruction. On August 6, 1945 about 8:15 a.m. the bomb exploded, killing half the population of 400,000 people (about 80,000 died immediately) and almost totally destroying the city.

The Park was primarily a series of monuments to the bomb victims.

The Children’s’ memorial was inspired by Sadako, a girl dying from radiation poisoning who believed that if she folded 1000 paper cranes she would recover. She died after folding 664 and now children fold paper cranes in her memory and leave them at the statue.

The memorial to the Korean victims was only recently put up. Over 20,000 Koreans, who had been brought to Japan as slave labor during WWII, were killed in the bomb. To this day, Koreans and their descendants suffer discrimination in Japan (weddings can be cancelled if any Korean blood is found in the family tree). The memorial, of course, doesn’t call these victims slave laborers, but refers to them as civilians working for the military.
A Peace Flame burned in front of the Memorial Cenotaph, never to be extinguished until all nuclear weapons are abolished..
The Peace Museum was, once again, more of a memorial to the victims- and to the “victimization” of Japan by having to suffer through the first Atomic bomb. While the photos and exhibits were moving, it was also disturbing to see the intellectual dishonesty. There was no mention anywhere in the museum of the role Japan played as the aggressor in the war. One of the plaques said, “A surprise attach on Pearl Harbor catapulted Japan into World War II”. We were under the impression that the surprise was on the part of the US, not Japan!
We’d had enough of the A-bomb and headed through town to find a place for lunch- more noodles, this time Italian.

Then it was a stop at the liquor store for a few cold frosties for the train and we were headed back to Kyoto. 2 hours and we were back “home”.