Hiroshima
We wake with our bellies full of french food and minds full of art. We open the curtains to see the art installations in the park and head back to the Terrace Restaurant for an obligatory breakfast. We are staying in an art museum! It is no less special the day after.
What is there to do? Open our eyes once more to see the last works of art that time allows us to. We move in quiet reverence onto the Benesse Art House Museum, where works by many big names like Jasper Johns can be found, but the hidden amusement is "Weeds" by Yoshihiro Suda. Found high in the wall, between the concrete slabs are yes indeed weeds. Small if not insignifact, art imitates life indeed.
As we leave, our bags are waiting in the lobby for our imminent departure from the island. Our shuttle bus, boat and train heads towards Hiroshima — our future destination brought about by history not art. An entirely different experience awaits.
Late afternoon we pull into the Hiroshima train station, to be greeted by our AirBnB host, Kumiko. Our hello was cut short prematurely by a hearty-laugh. White men can be easy to find in a crowd in Japan but I, Randy's partner was assumed to be a woman. Her hearty-amusement led us all the way to her car and was shared with her friend. The giggles between them were infectious and without an ounce of regret. Perhaps the warmest welcome unexpected guests could ask for.
Kumiko's friend kindly came along to guide us to the entrance of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, all the while practising her English. We bid her farewell and took a deep breathe as we put on our audio-guide headphones, to enter the exhibit.
There is a feeling of enormous weight in here. The impact is swift, it bears down on you, stuns you to silence. As you walk through, insights are gained through first-hand accounts and fact. The recordings, the science and the physical remains all amply the seconds, minutes, hours, days and decades after that frightful day on August 6th, 1945.
The emotions we feel are difficult to explain. Deeply personal but without an ounce of blame, only regret of what people can do to people. They run deep and flow up through the exhibition till you leave with nothing but tears to wipe and an overwhelming sense of peace and hope for the future.
The bombs hypocenter and the museum are surrounded by the Peace Memorial Park, where monuments and memorials stand, in the centre of Hiroshima. They cement the feeling of peace and give way to healing.
The A-Bomb Dome is the ruins of a former hall, a building closest to the hypocenter that remained partially standing.
A stone cenataph arch symbolically sheltering the souls who died, an inscription vows "Let all the souls here rest in peace for we shall not repeat the evil". Underneath are books that list those who died — originally tens of thousand, now more than a quarter of a million.
The Children's Peace Monument is dedicated to the memory of the children who died, based on the story of Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who died from radiation and believed that if she folded a thousand paper cranes she would be cured. Today, people, mostly children, from around the world fold and send paper cranes to Hiroshima to be placed near the statue — which now has a continuously replenished collection.
The Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall is underground, a clock frozen at 8:15am, the time the bomb went off and a Hall of Remembrance with a 360 degree panorama of the destroyed Hiroshima created from 140,000 tiles — the estimated number of people who died by the end of 1945 — 70,000 instantly.
We pull ourselves together with a quick beer and cross the bridge over beautiful Hiroshima to catch a train to Kumiko's local station, where she again warmly welcome us, and asks us about our time at the museum. The few words we could say were enough for her, perhaps for her, as an AirBnb host, our reaction to the museum is common. Conversation quickly turns to dinner and are soon sitting with her at an okinami restaurant. Incredibly local, a savoury pancake of sorts, Hiroshima-style made with an impossible amount of cabbage. Deeply satisfying and remarkably easy to eat with a spatula straight from the hot plate!
At Kumiko's home we quickly settle in at her kitchen table, where she teaches us to fold paper cranes — very poignant given our visit to the Children's Memorial. Aside from learning to make paper cranes, we learn this traditional Japanese home is her childhood home that she shares with people on AirBnb, but she lives in another home. Over the past few years both her mother has passed, and her architect-husband after a long battle with cancer. In his final days he thanked her for giving him such a happy life.
Her desire to make others happy, including us, is a testament to her spirit. She's a great teacher, and mother to her daughter and son no doubt — we Skyped with her son and daughter-in-law over the course of the evening. She dressed us in his traditional kati and told us a story — puppet theatre! All before bed.
Tonight we will sleep well, with Kumiko's open heart just downstairs. AirBnB super host indeed. Talk about a home away from home. A testament that peace needn't be found a world away.
