roganjosh

I went to Hiroshima, which is by necessity a very modern city. The peace park at its centre is full of trees and crowding around it are hotels, office blocks and shopping malls. It would be incredibly hard to make the connection between the destruction of Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on it in 1945 and the city that it is today if it weren’t for the A-bomb dome; The skeletal remains of the concrete and metal building sat on the bank of the river next to the peace park, unchanged since it was gutted. In wartime Hiroshima, as in most Japanese cities, the majority of buildings were made of wood. Pictures taken a few months after the bombing show only a handful of concrete buildings left standing, while all around them are the charred remains of rubble and tree stumps. The A-bomb dome is instantly recognisable in those pictures, and I think it’s lucky that the city held onto it in its current state when people wanted to tear it down and move on.

Modern day Hiroshima is an incredibly friendly city, and I enjoyed my two nights there. Aside from the peace park and museum I made an excursion to nearby Miyajima island, home of the famous floating torri gate, which is the second of Japan’s most beautiful/photographed scenes that I’ve now visited - only one more and I’ve got the complete set! Miyajima is stunning, with wild deer, pagodas and temples everywhere you turn, and the famous gate sitting in the bay. I’ve moved on to a larger island now - Shikoku - the smallest of the major islands that make up Japan. Going to be spending a couple of nights here before seeing if I can make it to the naked man festival in Okayama! I’ll keep you posted…

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 5:09 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.