here we go

okay blog
here are some more cool pics of my trip to hiroshima from last weekend. a few weeks ago. a while ago.

welcome back to hiroshima. it is a regular city.

well it is regular and normal in almost every aspect except for what happened around 65 years ago a block away from this spot.

here we are in the peace park, one of the main islands of hirioshima that has the whole north section as a big monument garden. this one is to the girl who died folding the paper cranes. people were lined up to ring a bell inside and pray.

yeah those big glass cases are able to withstand the elements, and they hold thousands of tiny paper cranes that school kids from around japan made. heiwa means peace. there are so many, see!?

if you look down this way you see the long elevated museum building and the curved cenotaph, and a fountain.

lots of crazy weird statues.

this is not a sculpture. this is a plant. and it is ALIVE. and i think it was irradiated by the bomb and so now its gigantic and monstrous. not totally clear on this though. but still, i asked and people told me this was a living plant.

side view of the cenotaph. a cenotaph is a monument to the dead whose remains are elsewhere. this is a very non-western design. usually cenotaphs are big rectangular vertical slabs.

here is the inscription. they had it in russian and german and other languages too. this flavor of peace propaganda is everywhere.

awesome picture of some people's remains inside that little box, some flowers, a long reflecting pool at the dome in the background.

this thing was outside the museum to the victims. its own little building.

and here is a little description of what is going on here.
i just got really hungry. lunch is not for an hour and then some.

this was inside that museum. i thought it was interesting that the elevation of the blast was edited. i think it used to say 580. make sure they get that one right. also, devastation.

names and photos of the victims on a digital display. if you know someone who lived in the area and died recently you can go to the library and submit their name, because maybe what they died of was bomb influenced. now this is the only time i was really moved. you think that only japanese people died in these attacks. not so. lots of chinese and koreans were in town, as prisoners or workers, or whathaveyou. but there were also american prisoners of war. and you can look up victims on another digital display, and so i put in my initials L and R and found 2 american air force people who died in the blast who were my age. pretty sad that the only way i could be emotionally moved was by realizing that people like me suffered as well.

chillers, chilling.

here is what really went down. the island to the right i where the peace park is. you can see how the dome used to be a real building.

this i thought was really great. every year the mayor of hiroshima writes a letter to the ambassador of each and every country that has nukes or tests a nuke, with very strong wording like "the people or hiroshima are disgusted" or "we demand you stop this at once" or "this is a total outrage to the people of hiroshima who love peace". copies of all the letters are displayed here. we are in the actual main museum now.

dome piece is on the left, and if you can see it there is a red line and a white card indicating where the hypocenter was.

and here is the before model. notice how the dome was a real building. it was a government industrial promotion building, designed by a czech architect.

ok, so the hiroshima bomb was dropped on the 6th of august, 1945. nagasaki was bombed on the 9th. but the japanese did not surrender until the 14th. what most people dont know and i didn't know until recently was that the bombs did not end the war. the usa firebombed tokyo AFTER both atomic bombings, and this is what forced the japanese to surrender. the museum seriously drops the ball with this one, opting for the narrative that the bombs ended the war without saying what happened in the week after.

the museum was very crowded and i could hardly read anything or look at anything. it was flower festival day and that is why. big replica of the dome inside the museum.

here is the really interesting bit. check out the top part about south africa admitting it had tested nukes but got rid of them, and the bottom part saying israel has nukes and everyone knows it but since israel hasn't joined the nonproliferation treaty, and has a policy of opaqueness on its arsenal, they can't put it in the boxes. when this was question #1 on my international relations 101 test, the answers were different in the midterm than they were for the final, because the year i took it was the year north korea tested its nukes. this is out of date, because north korea is not in the boxes.

here is a nice little globe with nuclear warheads indicating the size of each country's arsenal.

very peculiar and another negative point about this museum was the white paper left on north korea, indicating it had a warhead indicator there previously, but it has since been removed. why?

also i guess america's arsenal used to be much bigger.

another inaccurate map. israel is not shaded in, because nobody can point to exactly when and where their tests took place, and south africa is also not shaded. the vela incident is widely recognized as a joint south-african israeli nuclear test.

flowers getting ready for the flower festival.

crowded cramped section of the museum where there are plastic bricks all around. saw a bunch of japanese people tapping on them listening to see what they were made of.

aaahhh horrible dramatization exhibit of the immediate firestorm. flesh is melting into clothes and skin is peeling off oh noooo

yikes

they cannot have enough maps.

the picture you were waiting for. it's a replica of little boy, the uranium bomb that destroyed hiroshima. they were going t call it "thin man" instead, but it was redesigned and got less thin.

this was incredibly rough. they had lots of pictures and accompanying stories written and drawn by survivors of the bomb of just general havoc and desolation during the aftermath.

some charred and melted stuff including buddha statue.

tiny paper cranes actually folded by that girl who folded all those cranes.

long view of the peace park from inside the museum.

like i said, it was very crowded.

big flaming flower mountain.

there was even a parade with dancers.

these people hopped on some jetskis and cruised down the river.

dome and bridge.

this is the actual hypocenter, a block away from the peace park. this is the only thing here, a modest marble slab with an inscription. it is next to a parking garage. notice it still says 580 meters and has not been edited to match the picture from before.
i think this is a good place to end this post. the next place i went was the modern art museum, which is a totally different vibe. probably not going to put it up today. hope you enjoyed this somber, nuclear post.
great!

get ready

what up blog,
i have a sore throat. drinking a lot of tea. uploading hiroshima day 2 photographs. the atomic bomb museum is in this set. i took a lot of pics that day, so i might have to split it up into two posts. almost one week until liz gets here. very unexcited about afternoon classes at the mountain school today. more later.
great!

my trip to hiroshima part one: day one

hello blog, and welcome to my trip to hiroshima part one: day one
i took a train to hiroshima, by myself, well actually three trains, during "golden week" which is a period of successive national holidays: constitution day, green day, and children's day. from my house hiroshima is about 3 hours away, maybe a little less, and it costs around 7500 yen or a little more than $75 US to get there. let's get started.

here is a bridge i crossed by train. i live on an island, so i had to go over some water to get to the mainland of japan, or honshuu, the biggest of the 4 main islands, where hiroshima is.

i took a train two stops west, then another train for a while north, to okayama, where i got on this thing. this is the infamous "bullet train" although here it is called the special new express train, or something. it is like being on an airplane, really, and it moves so fast. kind of expensive though, even for an unreserved seat.

soon i got to hiroshima and up to my little hotel room where i threw my sweatshirt on the bed. the room was cute and cheap! only 6000 yen per day, i think, so like way less than $100. i think two people could have even fit nicely in this little room.

i got to the hotel from the trainstation by way of one of these - streetcars. they are like trolleys, or above ground subways, or just trains. they move along tracks in the road and stop at stoplights and crosswalks. they are cheap too but confusing. i think i understood what i was doing at the very end of the trip. oh by the way these photos are in order of when i took them, and i only deleted a few. so stay with me.

check this out. it is a covered shopping arcade that started by my hotel and, if you follow it all the way to the end about ten blocks, ends at the atomic bomb dome and the peace park, where the museums and monuments are. in this photo there is a mcdonalds (red and yellow arches) across the street from a shinto shrine (rope and hanging white paper). i just thought it was an interesting situation.

here is the shrine from the front. it is really just a little wooden box you can throw money in. maybe some stuff happens up those steps, i am not sure. it looked closed.

this store is called octopus army.

crazy balloon artist entertainer man with black balloon hat and red balloon cat. pink balloon on the way. small crowd was around him.

if you go to hiroshima, maybe you will see this guy, who was tan and red from standing out in the sun all day. it got warmer the week i was there, hot even, for the first time all year. but this guy was SCREAMING, chanting OHMMM as loud as he could, i guess looking for buddhist donations. later there would be other people doing this. some had hats, some were ladies, one beat a drum, and some were quiet.

i walked around a lot and decided i wasn't ready for the a-bomb stuff, so i walked north, where i found the hiroshima museum of art. it was small, really small, two main buildings, special exhibit and permanent collection. the permanent collection was in that circular building. i think i walked straight in without buying a ticket. lots of semi-modern, late 1800s early 1900s european and european stlye (by japanese people) art. i think they were having an exhibit on dutch paintings over time? it was pretty boring but i liked it.

i walked further north and found hiroshima castle, which was destroyed in 45 but rebuilt. sorry i do not remember that light post being in this photo.

this is one of the two entrance gates. there was a big moat all around the castle.

from within the compound, with a stone map. i walked up to the castle but did not want to pay to go in and up, because it was hot, and i wasn't very interested.

took this picture and turned around. it wasn't as impressive or as huge as osaka castle was. that thing was massive. this was more modest.

snapped this picture of a cool car on my way out of the castle. now i notice the guy was posing. his girlfriend laughed when i took it. very cool car.

so i was looking at the map and i was like ok if i am here the peace dome should be right there...and there it was. spooky.

but this monument, i think to children, was in front of it. it was kind of nice, if you pressed a button a voice talked about it in english! there are little doves at the top.

and the god of peace, i guess, at the bottom, being peaceful.

and then like a bajillion paper cranes attached to this thing, because there was one girl named sadako sasaki who was 2 when she lived a mile away from where the bomb dropped, and 9 years later she got leukemia. her friend was like if you fold 1,000 paper cranes your wish will come true and she was like 'okay i want to not die' but it didn't work out because she died a year later. her mom said it was an atomic bomb disease so i guess it was. this is why paper cranes mean peace now, i think. there are a ton of them here, from people from different schools, and even more later at the sadako sasaki memorial itself, which is crazy.

and here is the dome. which used to be a government bureau of industry, or something, before the bomb blew up a block away from it and killed everyone inside. eventually the city of hiroshima passed a law that this building will be maintained as a symbol of the devastation of the bomb and a reminder and a symbol of peace for eternity, in perpetuity, forever. the corner of it came out to where that foundation is. i was not emotionally prepared for any more bomb related stuff, so i turned around and headed back to the hotel.

i think this is a cool picture, do you? parking lot, naked lady sculpture, a bunch of discarded juice boxes and soda cans, coke machine and a benz. stuff like this all around the city, and all around japan in general.

i took this picture at like 6 PM. these people are waiting in line for okonomiyaki, a pancake shaped japanese food that hiroshima is famous for, because they do it differently than how the rest of japan does.

and another very long line. i was like what gives, i dont want to wait on that line. so i ate somewhere else and wandered around later at night until i found a smaller place.

there used to be a big kirin beer factory in hiroshima near the train station, i read. kirin means giraffe, but the logo is a dragon. go figure! big sign was kind of neat.

this is a photo of the front of a pet shop from across the street. it took a couple of tries but i think this one turned out pretty well. i don't think they sell monkeys or apes, so that's false advertising, just for cuteness.

this little rodin's thinker was across the street from my hotel on the corner. i bet he was thinking about eating crab at that restaurant.

and here is the outisde of my hotel, HOTEL ACTIVE! really the best name ever. i would go back there again, seriously, because they had free western buffet style breakfasts every morning, and it was just a nice place.

so later i found the okonomiyaki place that wasn't crowded. just a few guys eating a drinking, so i became a curiosity to them for the night. the owner's 5 year old son kept poking me in the back, and i would be like speak english, and he's say "no way!" but about the food. right. so anywhere else in japan, you will get a bowl filled with batter liquid, cabbage, and seafood and pork ingredients, and you are expected to pour that onto a griddle, let it cook, flip it, and then cover it with sauce and mayo and eat it. not so in hiroshima. instead of all mixed up together, hiroshima okonomiyaki is a delicate layered situation. first a little circle of batter is cooked up, upon which a ton of cabbage is stacked. then seafood, pork, while some noodles are cooked elsewhere, and an egg is mushed up and fried. the whole thing gets flipped two or three times, and then you put sauce and mayo on it. it was great! i am telling you.

here is the finished product, sprinkled with sesame seeds and seaweed flakes. it was delicious. i was 1/4th the way done before the chef handed me the mayo spray bottle, which was extra great. in hiroshima it's the style to eat this thing with the little metal spatula, so i tried that and resorted to chopsticks when it became impossible.

ahahaa and here i am about to eat. this picture was taken by a 40 year old computer programmer with no girlfriend. on the right is the chef and under my head is this weirdo guy who was sitting next to me. also the chef's wife is there. you can see the little metal spatula, even. wow, the chef is holding a big cabbage head. awesome.

so then i walked around more, and took this picture of hiroshima at night. it is like any major japanese city, really. not as intense and big as osaka, though. they have it all. pachinko, slot machines, sketchy hotels by the hour, video arcades, thousands of tiny little bars on high floors of buildings with weird names, convenience stores, everything.

here are to japanese girls i met at a bar throwing the victory sign, which everyone does automatically. the one on the right even showed up the second night i went to that bar, because she goes out with one of the guys who works there. i was an interesting spectacle to them, which was okay.
and that is it for my first day in hiroshima. i hope you liked it. there are two more days coming up, so stay tuned.
i bought a dollar's worth of shrimp, which is like 15 little shrimp, so i am going to make shrimpy broccoli pasta for dinner tonight.
liz and sammy are coming over soon, and then right after that i get to go home, which i am looking excited for. alright. have a good one.
great!

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