A-bombs and Okonomiyaki

I cremated my oldest daughter Naoko (three-years-old). The tears flowed without stopping. 'You go first, I'll follow you!' I joined my hands in prayer.
My second son Tatsumi (nine-years-old) was still missing. I prayed that he had fled to safety somewhere.
As she burned, the oil in her body gradually flowed out. A huge amount, what a healthy child! So piteous! I couldn't stand to watch, I thought I would go crazy. How could this be the real world? It was hell....
I have continued to live for 30 years feeling guilty towards my two dead children. Forgive me! I didn't keep my promise, a parent's responsibility. (I didn't have the courage).
--Tamaki Ishifuro (35 at time of bombing, 65 at time of drawing)

Not many people leave the Hiroshima Peace Museum smiling.


ok, so Stuart may have been blinking rather than blubbering... but it was still disturbing

Though we couldn't have asked for better weather on our trip, the irony is that it was precisely the fine weather and clear skies on 5 August 1945 that sealed Hiroshima's fate, and made it's name synonymous with the horror and inhumanities of modern warfare. With an unprecedented 2.2 billion dollars already invested in the Manhattan Project, the US military would settle for nothing less than a clear and unobstructed view of the effects of their latest toy. A few clouds in the sky and it might just have been another Japanese city that ushered in the nuclear age that day. But Hiroshima was chosen, and the rest is history.

We spread our visit to the Peace Park and Peace Museum over 2 days, but it was still pretty overwhelming. This is no sugar-coated version of the events. There are pictures of victims bodies with the patterns on their kimonos etched into their skin; a photo of a little girl lying in a makeshift hospital, her eyes melted by the blast and her face burnt beyond recognition; a life-size diorama with wax models of a mother and her two children burning in the aftermath, their skin melting off their arms; a 13-year-old boy's steel lunchbox bent and warped in the extreme heat, the carbonised remains of his uneaten lunch still inside (his mother found his body lying on top of the lunchbox, still clutching it in his hands). Outside in the park are monuments everywhere to those who died as a result of the blast. There is the Children's Monument dedicated to Sadako who folded paper cranes while dying in hospital of leukaemia.



There is a somewhat belatedly erected monument to the Koreans who died in the blast (largely working in Japan against their will). (click for image)

And there is the park's centrepiece – the A-dome – the skeletal remains of a government building, preserved lest we ever forget what happened.



But the truth is that other than the Peace Park and the A-dome there are few reminders left now of Hiroshima's horrific past. Hiroshima today is a thriving metropolis, and as much as it symbolises mankind's capacity for destruction, equally now it must also symbolise mankind's capacity for survival and rejuvenation. Roads that once served as mortuaries for the hundreds upon thousands that died are now paved-over and bustling with traffic. City blocks that were once nothing but tortured rubble are now filled with high-rises, neon lights and "Delivery Love Rooms".



Where once there was a city with nothing left but despair, now there are nightclubs with Hiroshima's friendly youth bouncing to Brit-pop.



And where once there was radiation and starvation, now there is okonomi-yaki (sometimes called a Japanese pancake, though that hardly does it justice). I recommend the pork...



click to hiroshima photo gallery