Hiroshima: no more black rain

It was finally time to leave Kyoto. We did see the imperial palace and several other interesting things there, but I quickly realized that I would not be able to cover everything on my blog if I was to keep up with all the other things on our agenda.

So we got on the Shinkansen train to Hiroshima, a city I think most people must have heard of. And I have to show you the Shinkansen train here, because I will not write a whole blog post about Shinkansen trains:)

Hiroshima will be remembered forever because “Little boy” was dropped there on August 6, 1945 killing about 80,000 people. And the reason the bomb was dropped there was because there were no POWs held there.

The main attraction (if you could call it that) in Hiroshima is the Peace Memorial Park, which contains the Peace Memorial Museum and the Atomic Bomb Dome, among other things.

Irene and Christer went to the Peace Memorial Park on the same day as we arrived, and then Zoe and I went there the next morning. We discovered that it is sometimes nice to split the family in two. A keeping-your-sanity measure.

Early in the morning, Zoe and I took the tram to the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, or the “Atomic Bomb Dome” as it is commonly called. This building has been portrayed in many places and is a stark reminder of the horrors that happened here.

The park was almost empty this morning. By the way, we have hardly met any foreign visitors or tourists on this trip. The few tourists we usually encounter are mostly Japanese.

We stopped to look at the Children's Peace Monument in memory of all the children who died including Sadako Sasaki, one girl who developed leukemia as a result of the bomb. She decided to fold 1,000 paper cranes (In Japan, the crane is a symbol of longevity and happiness), but died before she had a chance to finish all. Her class mates did the rest. This story is one of the reasons paper cranes are so popular to fold in Japan.

Then we headed for the museum. The information in this museum managed to fill in some of the gaps about what actually happened here in Japan before, during, and after WWII. And I was impressed that Zoe took so much time to read on all the information displays. However, the last part we walked through quickly, because it showed real and scary pictures of people and their injuries due to the bomb, and I could clearly see that Zoe was disturbed by this.

The “black rain,” mentioned in the heading, refers to the rain that fell in the aftermath of the bomb causing severe radiation burns.

Let's just hope that there will be no more bombs dropped and no more black rain ever.