Today is travel day! It’s Monday and we’re heading to Hiroshima, but because we’ve booked tickets on the very special Hello Kitty train, we have to wait until the once a day departure at 11.37am. So first – some school work. It works, kind of, Joe and I rushing around, getting all the moving parts organized to be away for two nights, while the girls do their school work on the computers.
At 9.45am, we set off. First a subway, then another subway, and then we’re finally at Shin-Osaka, ready for our Hello Kitty Shinkansen ride. It’s also lunchtime, so we pick up four bento boxes at the station. Joe is sitting down with our carry on suitcase, and not shopping for lunch, which means I get to decide what we eat. We find the right platform, we confirm the time, the train number, the destination, and everything is as it should be.
Except the train that arrives is NOT the Hello Kitty train. It’s an ordinary train. I see other tourists shaking their heads, their Hello Kitty accessories out and at the ready, but the train does not have anything Hello Kitty about it. It’s not pink, it’s not fun, it’s just ordinary. How extremely disappointing. We are now travelling later in the day, on the route that stops at Every Single Station along the way, because of Hello Kitty, and for some reason, she’s out of service the entire week. Big sigh.
The 90 minute ride between Osaka and Hiroshima is now 150 minutes instead, so we have plenty of time to eat our bento boxes. Téa has the Hello Kitty lunch box, which is super cute but also very small:
Maylin has the Kuromi lunchbox, which she opens, eats half, starts to play instead, and after about 20 minutes of it sitting open on her tray being ignored, it gets knocked down and the rest of her lunch is now on the floor.
I buy the two bento boxes I crave the most for Joe and I to share. The first one we open is the sushi box:
The second one is a wagyu beef sukiyaki with glass noodles over rice.
After I bought the bento boxes, Joe went off to buy treats. After our lunch, we get to open a special fruit mochi each. Mine is persimmon, Téa and Maylin both got strawberry, and Joe had a very juicy melon.
When we get to Hiroshima, the girls instantly run towards the indoor playground for the photo op.
We find a bus that takes us from the station to right outside our hotel for the next two nights: Toyoko Inn. We have a regular twin room that fits 4 people, and that’s pretty much all it could fit! The suitcase and four pairs of shoes are a stretch…
Once we get settled into our room, we set out towards the Peace Memorial Museum. Everywhere in Hiroshima has a sign on it, stating the relevance to the bomb that was dropped in 1945, or to the peace efforts since. Trees along our walk say “this tree was so-and-so far away from the epicentre of the bomb”.
Téa remarked on this as well, but overall Hiroshima feels so much greener than Osaka. Maybe because of the above-mentioned call for trees, when the City of Hiroshima was rebuilding after the bomb, and didn’t have enough trees. All of Japan sent trees, and Hiroshima today feels green and lush. Osaka is very different, where trees are planted as part of the city landscape, whereas here the trees and parks and nature is given it’s own space.
We’re heading straight to the heart of the matter, the Peace Memorial Museum is the most famous place to visit in Hiroshima. When my mom and I were here in 2007, it was NOT this busy. The place is packed, with lines and queues everywhere. Every photo and every display you have to fight your way to the front of the line.
The first room we come to, is a photo of the destruction after the bomb that stretches from one corner of the room all the way around to the next. It’s all just ruins, plus the only remaining structure, the A-bomb dome. In the middle of the room, there’s a round 3D map on the floor, with a video displayed on top, showing how the bomb falls from the sky, explodes, there’s the cloud, and then there’s rubble.
The rest of the museum is this time a blur. I see some of the things I remember from last time. The lunch box and the story of the boy who died before he got to eat it. The tricycle and the helmet. The shadow of a soul imprinted on the stone steps of a building (yes, they brought the steps and the front of the building into the museum).
The pictures on the walls are horrific. Death and damaged bodies, I shield the girls from the bulk of it, and I choke back my tears. It hits so differently to walk through this part of history today when I am a mother, and I have children whom I happily send off to school every day when we’re home. That’s what Hiroshima’s mothers did on August 6th, 1945 as well.
Once we’re past the darkest portions, we go back through the corridors, this time with windows, towards the entrance building. Outside we see the Memorial Park, and the A-bomb dome in the distance. Peaceful, serene and a place for contemplation. Today, the organizations that run the museum and the peace preservation efforts in Hiroshima are working hard to prevent any other city from ever having to experience an atomic bomb and it’s aftermath.
The next section of the museum is more interactive and a lot easier on the hearts. There are sections where you can choose to read plaques under pictures on the walls, or scroll through them on touch screen computers in a large table. Of course the girls are interested when there’s a touch screen involved, technology always being more fun than reading printed material.
I will never forget Hiroshima.
Outside it is now getting dark. We take a walk in the Peace Memorial Park to take in the serene surroundings, with others who are doing the same.
Then we get to the Children’s Peace Monument, and I can’t get the words out. This is a monument to all the children who died from either the bomb or its aftermath. The story that lives forever in my mind is the one of Sadako Sasaki, who survived the bomb but later developed leukemia from the radiation she had been exposed to. A Japanese legend claims that if you fold 1000 paper cranes, you will be granted a wish. All she wanted was to get well, but she passed away at age 12, before completing her 1000 cranes. Sadako’s classmates finished her cranes for her in her memory, and the tradition continues: school classes all over Japan send cranes to Hiroshima to be stored in the boxes surrounding this monument. We happened to witness a ceremony where two classes were handing over their cranes while we were there, and my voice broke when trying to explain to Téa and Maylin what was going on.
It was an intense afternoon, and the mood changes as soon as we leave the Peace Park area. We head towards the bright lights and (hopefully) food options, it’s time for dinner. I’ve dreamt of Hiroshima style okonomiyaki since 2007, so Joe finds a couple of options nearby, and we go in search of them. On our way, we see this:
We finally find one of the restaurants, barely seen from the ground floor, where the only hint that there’s a restaurant is an elevator and a sign in Japanese. It takes a detective, I tell you!
The elevator doors open straight into the restaurant, where we sit on stools to place our order while we wait for a table. There’s a group of four waiting ahead of us, otherwise the restaurant is packed to the rafters. Suddenly, one table gets up to pay and leaves. Then another. Then another. By the time we’re seated and our drinks arrive, we’re one of two occupied tables in the entire restaurant.
As soon as the staff finish setting up each place setting with a cup of tea and a plate, the entire restaurant is suddenly full again. All the tables. Such a weird pattern!
After dinner, we take a walk down the Boulevard of Peace. The city’s Christmas lights were lit at 6pm this evening, and so we get to take in the opening night energy.
Téa and I hop into Lawson’s for a little bit of dessert… She found a chocolate cookie ice cream that I hadn’t tried before, Maylin had vanilla coolish, and Téa picked the vanilla chocolate mixed soft serve in a cone – from the freezer!
We paired one adult and one kid in each of the narrow beds, and fell asleep in our above ground beds, dreaming of soft mattresses.