Day 12 – Tuesday, 9 April 2024
Our hotel is only two hundred metres from Peace Memorial Park, and there is, after all, only one reason that really puts this small, regional city on anyone’s itinerary, so there is no reason to do anything else first but to take those last few steps of the pilgrimage. Hiroshima feels more like Adelaide than anywhere we’ve been on this trip so far – unsurprising given that it is almost exactly the same size. That’s a sobering thought, but then almost all thoughts on this first morning in Hiroshima are sobering. It is undeniably slightly eerie to stand less than a hundred metres from the detonation locus – the hypocentre – of a nuclear bomb.
The park is peaceful, and not too saturated with visitors, although the queue of people waiting their turn to toll the bell and have their photograph taken seems mildly grotesque. Sebastian is grumpy because he has just learned that one of the places that he had his heart set on visiting in Tokyo is booked solid for the week we will be there, and in this of all places his sulkiness seems disproportionate to the disappointment. In the most absurd moment of the day, I try to draw him out of his funk by switching his focus to the event commemorated here. If you ever find yourself trying to lift a child’s mood by referring to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents, give up and walk away.
There is a visitors’ centre that at first I mistake for the museum, built into a structure that survived the blast. It has small exhibits and preserved damage, as well as the testimony of the only survivor of the dozens who were in the building that morning, saved because he was in the cellar looking for some documents that were inexplicably not on his desk. The gift shop is another mental discordance.
A visit to the National Peace Memorial Hall, a shrine-like crypt, finally seems to set the appropriate mood and the tears come, for those long dead and those just lost who could remember August 1945, part of a childhood now erased.
Some more walking, lunch, a lifting of the mood, another visit to a Pokémon Centre by Sebastian and me and then back for a rest. Out in the evening to fulfil our solemn mission to decide whether Osaka or Hiroshima deserves the All-Japan Okonomyaki Grand Prix, at a restaurant called Mitsu, not far from our hotel. Hiroshima, no contest.
Dessert at a music café just round the corner from home, where six guitarists with the distinct feel of a class of relative beginners under the guidance of their sensei strum out the Tuesday night. Then to bed.
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