High Speeds, Hedonism and Hiccups in Hiroshima Part One

And so it was, in yet another voyage to a must-see part of Japan last weekend, that I found myself cramped into the busy adjoining section of a Shinkansen or ‘bullet train’. I’d managed to get on at Shin-Osaka and happily met Mark on the train itself – given how busy it was, it was just as well. Somehow, the packed ‘standing room only’ nature of things wasn’t quite what I’d expected from Japan’s premier rail service. And, more to the point, not what I’d expected from a 50 quid fare either.

Still, rocketing along at God knows what kind of speed, we were in Hiroshima in little over an hour, somewhat the worse for wear (poor old Mark had been standing all the way since the express he’d got from Toyama-ken) but at least with time on our side, it being 2pm. With my ears gradually returning to normal after all the popping they’d been doing throughout the journey (people frequently compare the Shinkansen to going by plane for a reason) we hopped in a cab and made our way to Minshuku Ikedaya, our digs for the next two nights.

Pretty basic as Japanese-style (which basically means there’s tatami mats in the room and you sleep on a futon) places go, we were nonetheless pretty much in the center of town. Thus, once we’d rested up a tad and got our room TV fill of CNN, MTV, the Disney Channel and Jude Law getting bludgeoned round the head in a showing of The Talented Mister Ripley, we were ready to head.

A fifteen minute walk got us to Hiroshima’s main landmark, the famous A-Bomb dome. For those that don’t know, this is the only structure still left standing in the center of town since the bomb fell in August 1945. Now fenced off and regularly maintained to keep it preserved exactly as it was in the immediate aftermath, the skeletal remains look ghostly when set against the usual Japanese cityscape of high rises and neon.

Attached to this is the large, green expanse of the impeccably looked-after ‘Peace Park’, based around a central boulevard that takes in a flame that will be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon is decommissioned (excellent sentiment, but with the current people in charge, I’m not holding my breath) and leads to the wonderfully brutal, modernist building that houses the memorial museum.

With a charge of \50 (25p) to get in, making a profit is not exactly the aim of this place. Instead it does what every good museum ought to do, leave you more informed and knowledgeable than you were before.

Broad in scope, the ground floor explains the Hiroshima’s role as virtually a city-sized war factory in the late 30’s and early 40’s and goes on to briefly explore Japan’s intervention in China. The museum, not to mention large sectors of the government, have come under fire in recent years for playing down, or at the very least not doing enough to atone for, the sins it committed back then in the name of empire expansion. Here at least we get a mention of the siege of Nan-King and the massacre of Chinese civilians carried out by the Japanese military. The reasoning and thinking behind the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour does go brazenly unexplained, however. Fair enough, it’s not the aim of the museum to give a complete narrative of Japan’s history throughout WWII, but given Peal Harbor’s crucial importance in setting in motion the events that would ultimately lead to Hiroshima’s near total destruction, you’d think they might fill you in a bit more as to why they did it.

Where the museum surpasses itself, however, is in the display cabinets containing declassified memos and communiqués from within the Allied Forces in the run-up to the attack, demonstrating one of the hardest, coldest processes of bureaucracy you’re likely to see outside of the arrangements for the Holocaust. Shown alongside deeply strange photographs of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin sitting together and looking all chummy, it’s quite an education.

Upstairs is where the gallery of the grotesque begins – battered watches with their hands frozen at 8.15, torn and tattered school uniforms, life-sized dioramas of stricken children fleeing burning buildings with their limbs melting, stark black and white photographs of traumatized burns victims, large blocks of granite with the silhouettes of people burnt into them…it’s all pretty harrowing.

After moving through here in near total silence along with everyone else, one then emerges into the Why Nuclear Weapons Are A Really Bad Idea area. Wall friezes explain the (very) basic principles of nuclear fission and fusion and their respective employment in Atomic, Hydrogen and Neutron Bombs, a large 3D model of the Earth illustrates the location and arsenal sizes of the nuclear powers (though as Mark pointed out, oddly failing to include Israel) and various bits of text and illustrations that outline the facts behind nuclear testing. The only major omission as far as I could see was the absence of any comment regarding the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, who didn’t get so much as a look in. Something of an oversight, I thought.

With the announcement that the museum would shortly be closing, we drifted out into an eerily deserted Peace Park at dusk. We’d been on our feet for hours and really needed to unwind for a bit, so we headed townwards to take in Hiroshima’s unique and extremely tasty take on that Kansai culinary staple okonomiyaki (lots of bean sprouts, noodles, egg and pork sandwiched between a pancake/falafal hybrid) before hitting a rather trendy bar by the name of Opium for a couple of so-so lagers. After some bawdy and highly experimental booth-based karaoke (with just the two of us there, we thought we’d attempt some rather more outré selections than usual – I now consider ‘Informer’ by Snow to be almost avant garde in its lyrical complexity) and the obligatory half-pissed Picture Club (another time), with a provisional plan of taking in the attractions of Miyajima the following day, we called it a night.