Hiroshima

We can’t help but think of that day on August 6, 1945, as we fly into Hiroshima when there were two suns in the sunset.  Today, a few months short of 55 years later, it’s a most beautiful and vibrant city set among rolling hills – with a lot of greenery. Was there ever a more perfect example of the mythical phoenix arising from its own funeral pyre?

We visit the A-bomb museum and its attached Peace Park   It’s all rather clinical, yet we cannot help but be moved by the graphic statistics and scenes from that day when America said to Japan – this is the final installment of the price you must pay for attacking us at Pearl Harbor.  An inscription on a stone in the park says  “Let all the souls here rest in peace.  We shall not repeat the evil”.  Question is who is “we”? Those who dropped the bomb or those who began the war?  The answer is quite clear.  We are all guilty!

 In the center of town is a reconstruction of  the 17^th-century “Daimyo’s” castle that dominated the city before 1945.  On the way there we meet a friendly man on a bike who wants to chat.  It turns out, he’s a “hibakusha” literally an A-bomb survivor who was 16 years old when the bomb went off.  He describes the flash.  Now he is a map maker.  He lives nearby with his wife but he has no children(!) Notwithstanding our respective lack of each other’s language, we have a wonderful warm conversation.  Somehow, we really manage to connect.  We’ll remember him for a long time. He is a symbol of an enmity between great nations that was and friendship that now is.

Wherever we walk in Hiroshima we meet friendly people.  Perhaps it is the result of the great suffering that occurred here.

We spend a half-day visiting the island of Miya Jima just off the coast.  While it is over run by tourists, we are impressed by the completely tame deer that walk around everywhere, the famous Itsukushima Shrine and the huge, floating Torri Gate seen below.  

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