Let’s address the elephant in the room right away. Hiroshima is not famous because of its okonomiyaki. You’ve heard about it because it became the first victim of nuclear warfare on August 6, 1945. Did I mention that it was my country that dropped the bomb?

A number of people talked to me before summer vacation and asked me my plans. When I said the word Hiroshima, their eyes widened a little bit. Encaron looked at me as if I had just told him I was going to rob a bank. Tanaka-san asked why I would want to go there, somewhat suspiciously. I’m not completely sure of the reason myself. I just thought it was important.

The museum didn’t open until 8:30, so we wandered around the city until that time. The most striking thing about the city was how much it looked like every other city I’d been to. I don’t know what I should have expected, but I expected to see something. We meandered through the grounds housing Hiroshima castle and found a rectangle of bricks that was once a military building. On that Wednesday morning, with nobody around, it looked almost hidden. Just a rectangle of bricks and nothing more.

As we got nearer to the peace park, and nearer to the center of the city, a familiar feeling returned. Being a tall, white, blond foreigner in Japan, you get stared at. It wasn’t like the country in China, where they would stare straight at you, not breaking away when you met their eyes. Here they did it politely, discreetly. Just scanning an oncoming crowd you could watch the direction of the eyes shift the second you looked at them. I had gotten somewhat immune to it after two months in Tokyo, but it was back. Perhaps due in part to my own self-conciousness, knowing full well the question that those people were asking themselves, no matter how far back in their minds.

You don’t need a sign to tell you when you’ve reached the park. At the far edge is the A-Bomb Dome, a skeletal building that has been preserved to look like it did immediately after the bomb. At one time, it was one of the few standing structures in a field of rubble. Now it is dwarfed by skyscrapers, and passed by commuters. Even here, tourists take pictures of themselves in front of it, flashing smiles at flashing cameras.

There are many more memorials around the park. A large reflecting pond housing a flame that will burn until there are no more nuclear weapons. A stone arch covers a cenotaph with all the names of those killed by the bomb. The tone of the park is not all somber, though. Nearby, people line up to ring the peace bell. People from all over the world donate paper cranes in remembrance of Sadako Sasaki. It is called the Hiroshima Peace Memorial for a reason, and not the Hiroshima Grudge Memorial. World peace is a concept that is so easily caricatured. On a bumper sticker or out of the mouth of a beauty pageant contestant, it seems like a laughable, abstract ideal. Here, it feels urgent.

We entered the museum the moment the doors opened. Tickets only cost 50 yen. The first section traced the history of Hiroshima before the war, the actions of Japan that led to war, the development process of the bomb, and American justification for dropping the bomb. If you’re wondering about objectivity, I was amazed by the fairness. It struck a balance somewhere between complete acceptance as instigators in the war and Hiroshima as a star-crossed tragic Shakespearian character, being led along the tide of time, reacting rationally in the present, but still meeting ultimate destruction as a result of the actions of a higher level. After the second section, which explored in more detail than anybody could want the aftermath of the bomb, there was a sign reminding visitors that though many Japanese suffered from the dropping of the bomb, the Japanese military caused deplorable acts as well that deserve memorials built to them.

It’s easy for a conversation about Hiroshima degrade into a political argument about America’s justification for dropping the bomb. If convincing yourself that it needed to be dropped offers you some closure, then so be it. But anger at the United States is not a prerequisite to go to the park and empathize with some humans who attempted to live their lives, enjoy their friends and family, had hopes and dreams just like you. It’s not about who to blame, so much as it is about experiencing the scale of modern warfare, and being able to employ something other than cold rationality when evaluating the actions of the past. I’m perfectly fine if you come to the conclusion that everything was justified in the long run, but at least attempt to objectively view the situation instead of hiding behind a defense of total war apologetics.

Hiroshima is a place to go and think about something that deserves to be thought about. Resist the urge to come to a conclusion immediately. When I came back from the trip, someone asked if I had fun in Hiroshima. No, I didn’t have fun at all. But there are many reasons to go places that are more compelling than to just have fun.

***

After eating at the same okonomiyaki restaurant, where I had, and enjoyed, cheese okonomiyaki, we headed toward Miyajima. As long as I have known about Japan, there has been one sight that struck me as a perfect symbol of everything great about Japanese aesthetics: the floating Torii at Miyajima.

On their own, torii gates are impossible to get tired of. When they’re in the middle of a bay, maybe at sunset, and huge… they’re awesome. Without knowing where it was, I knew about the floating gate in Japan long ago and had always wanted to go there.

You get to Miyajima by a ferry operated by JR. We could theoretically ride on it for free with the Seishun 18 ticket, which is why I wanted to arrive at Hiroshima early enough that we could include it in our day, but we would have missed the sunset if we went the day before. It was about 2:00 when we finally crossed the water toward the big, green island and the floating torii gate came into view.

The island was pretty busy, and the deer were out in full force. It isn’t as if deer are incredibly popular everywhere, but we just happened to go to two of the most famous deer spots in Japan on consecutive days. We hung around the area of the floating gate for a while. It was high tide and I had to get my pictures in.

As Trisna and I walked toward the second main attraction on the island, a shrine that also appeared to be floating because it was built directly above the water, we heard somebody talking to us, looking for a trashcan. He had a French accent, seemed to be in his late 20s, and was just a really friendly guy. We talked a bit and went through the shrine together.

It turns out that his name is Guillaume (pronounced a lot easier than it’s spelled), and he was from Canada. He had done a ton of traveling all over the world with the strategy of going wherever he feels like and then finding someplace to sleep wherever he ends up. Way too many things for me to worry about, but it seems awesome in its way.

Since I wanted to stay until sunset to get pictures of the shrine, we had a great deal of time to kill. Lucky for us, there was a hiking trail up to the highest part of the island. Guillaume must have decided that he liked us, because he accepted our invitation to come along. The first part of the path was much like Enoshima, with many shrines alongside of a very wide staircase. But soon things started to get a little more rugged, and started to feel much more like the familiar feeling of hiking.

It took quite a while before there was any payoff, but after about an hour we could start to see some really great views. The island is ridiculously green and bushy from the outside, and it was every bit as lush from the inside out. The entire time, we only passed Americans or Europeans. I guess Japanese don’t hike too much. I think about two hours had passed before we reached the very top. We joked about how likely it was that there was somehow going to be a vending machine at the top, and there actually was. We then headed to the very top observation platform, and the view was, well… I stitched together about 8 pictures to create this panorama image posted below. Click on it to be taken to a high quality size and be able to appreciate it. The city of Hiroshima can be seen on the far left.

We headed back down after dwelling for a while, found a free bus that saved us about 10 minutes, and were soon back at the bay. By now, it was low tide and you could walk up to the gate if you wanted to. We joined the masses who were taking pictures all along the base of the gate. Up close, you could appreciate how it organic the shape of the gate was. It didn’t look like a cheap reproduction, but it was made from giant trees and painted a very vivid shade of orange that was somehow not kitschy. The sun began to decline, Guillaume started talking to another French-speaking couple, and I decided to stake out a spot for prime picture taking. It took a lot of waiting, but I finally got the shot I wanted.

Soon it was completely dark and we decided to get going. Guillaume hadn’t planned to spend as much time at Miyajima as he did, but he said he was glad to have met us because he had more fun than he would have just wandering around alone. He wound up staying at the hostel we were staying at for the night, and I didn’t get a chance to say good bye because it would be inhuman to wake someone else up at the time we decided to leave the hostel in the morning.

I spent a total of 17 hours on local trains that day, all the way from Hiroshima to Tokyo. At one point I was ready to cave and buy a ticket for the Shinkansen, but the over 10,000 yen price tag was slightly prohibitive. After that, I felt absolutely no shame in laying around the dorm for the remainder of the summer break. I went to work and did homework, of course, but this was a pretty draining trip emotionally and physically. In retrospect, everything worked out perfectly. There were no issues with our hostels, the weather was perfect every day, and it wound up being good that we got to Hiroshima late on Tuesday, or else we never would have met Guillaume and he never would have met us. I guess someone figured they owed us a good trip after the ill-fated Fuji-Yoshida attempt. I was able to check off quite a few things on my list during these few days. And I still have one more day left on my Seishun 18 ticket…