Hiroshima and Beyond
...written on 08.31.02, @ 2:25 a.m.
Fri August 30, 2002
I wrote about procrastinating before my trip to Hiroshima. Well, finally, after scurrying around, packing and cleaning (my mom always said to clean up before you go on a trip so you can come back to a clean place), my biggest pre-trip predicament stared at me from the middle of my kitchen floor . . .
It was a bag of trash.
It was Thursday morning you see and trash wasn't due for pick up for another 24 hours. You wouldn't believe the various scenarios that went through my head in trying to think of ways to get rid of this bag of refuse. Like, take it for a ride around Ogaki to find a place that had Thursday pickup, or call John and ask if he could put it out for me here, or I could just take it to his place, or leave it in my apartment for 11 days (pew!)or leave it in the outside hallway in a garbage can (big no-no) or bite the frigging "the rules are the rules" bullet and surreptitiously leave it in the pickup place for a good 10 hour dose of hot sun and then a good stewing for another 14 hours . . .
I finally settled on the latter and to my utmost joy, when I returned from Hiroshima, didn't find the orphaned bag on my doorstep with a note of reprimand (I've never gotten such a note, but I've seen them stuck on bags left by the Japanese sanitation engineers).
I made it to Nagoya ok and boarded the Shinkansen for the almost 3 hour ride to Hiroshima. I then settled quickly in my hotel and went about exploring.
Hiroshima, while it is a very modern city with a large foreign population, it has a very conservative feel to it. No outrageous teen outfits, crazy advertising, etc. I found it to be a rather mellow town.
I called Mark, my buddy from college in Dayton, Ohio and we arranged to meet for lunch on Friday and made plans to go out on Sunday with his girlfriend.
Every day I shopped until I dropped and would lug me, and my packages to the hotel, toss all on the floor and then submit myself to a cold shower and a nap. I had breakfast and dinner at the hotel a couple of times, but then went out to explore other establishments.
Hiroshima is famous for okonomiyaki. Mark took me to a building that was four floors of nothing but okonomiyaki stalls. We sat down around the crowded grill and ordered one each. Sometimes these are called "Japanese pizzas". A thin layer of batter is spread on the grill and then layers upon layers of ingredients are added. These can include shredded cabbage, pork, egg, ginger, octopus, squid, noodles . . . you name it, and in it goes basically. Here is a picture of a godzilla-sized okonomiyaki zooming in on the shrine at Miyajima:
Early on I went to the Peace Memorial Park and Museum.
I went twice. While the destruction represented was incredible, all buildings within a mile radius were crushed and burned,
glass bottles melted,
clothing patterns were tattooed onto flesh), I was most affected by the personal stories, you know, when you put a name or face to the sandal that a mother found under a plastic bottle with the shadow of her daughter's foot seared on it, or read about 3 year old Shin's father as he relates his feelings as he dug up his son along with the tricycle that was buried with him,
or actually see some of the more than 1000 paper cranes
that Sadako Sasaki (two years old at the time of her exposure to the bomb) folded in hopes that she would be cured, but who went on to die at 12 years old, two years after falling sick with leukemia.
There is also a collection of pictures drawn by survivors that were solicited in 1974 for a peace project. Tadao Inoue, 35 at the time of the blast, drew a picture (at the age of 64) of a blackened 3 year-old child walking the streets eating a red tomato, the red fruit a startling contrast to his charred skin. Hisato Yamane, 38 years old in 1945, at 68 remembered the last words of a jr high school student who thanked him for shielding his scorched body from the sun with a straw mat.
Every year, the mayor of Hiroshima issues a declaration of peace and each time that it becomes known that a country has carried out a nuclear weapons test, a telegram is sent to that country imploring them to abandon such plans and destroy their nuclear arms. While the effects of much tragedy are on display here,
there is also a strong desire for the world to remember the lessons of Hiroshima and to see it as a city of Peace.
Classes started on Monday and all of my classmates were at the same hotel. I was the only American in our group of eight (6 women and two men), one each from Italy, England, Canada, Sinapore, the Philippines, and two Japanese. After classes, most of us got together for dinner and chatted about the class of the day. Our trainers would later remark that they had never seen a group as friendly and "together" as ours. We were also a bit controversial as well, but hey, the little bit of spice was exciting.
I took a lot of my teaching supplies with me and one night in the hotel lobby, I showed some of my friends how I used them. Everyone said I should do teaching workshops.
Sunday, Mark, his girlfriend Yoko and I went to Iwakuni. There is a military base there, but we didn't go (Mark is in the Marine Reserves). We went to the Iwakuni Park and History Museum (lots of samurai stuff) and saw a white snake exhibit as well.
Thursday night my group went out to an Italian restaurant (Mario's) across from the Peace Park near our hotel. YUMMY! SCRUMPTIOUS! FANCY! ELEGANT! Friday night we went out with the trainers to a different Mario's restaurant in the Hondori shopping district. It was delicious as well.
Our last workshop day was Saturday and most of the group left that day. On Sunday, Tom, Nannette and I went to Miyajima for a few hours. That was a little disappointing. The famous shrine was in sore need of a paint job. It didn't look elegant or stunning like it does in the postcards.
Tom, who is going to England in two weeks with his Japanese fiancee to get married, left next. I called Mark and arranged one last meeting at Kemby's, a bar popular with foreigners. It had good American-like food: wings, fajitas, burgers, etc. Nannette joined us and we even ran into one of our trainers there as well.
The next day I was off to Okayama to see an old friend. He let me off to do some shopping while he had a staff meeting and I found some cups and saucers I liked and bought them (my one and only fancy Noritake china cup broke).
They are colorful and make me smile. I need that right now.
I have been down in the dumps lately. My Okayama friend figured I am about 80% happy. That's probably more than enough for some people, but I have to work on at least 10% of it (the other 10% will be resolved one way or another, shortly). I have some health issues that I am concerned about.
My futon is calling my name. Time to snooze. I'm going to turn off all the lights and fall asleep watching my new window decoration.
