Exhausting, upsetting and beautiful

It’s Thursday, it must be Hiroshima. When in London, we’ve always laughed at the Japanese tourists, doing exactly what we are doing. If you travel all this distance you want to see everything. Of course you can’t but you travel great distances, clicking away with your camera, barely taking it all in.

It was exciting to get the Shinkansen and travelling 500 miles in five hours in relative comfort is not to be unappreciated but it is exhausting. 

Since arriving we have visited the peace park, the museum, some gardens, a shrine and the castle. A Japanese woman giving a private tour to a rich American told her that Shintoism has 80,000 gods and its not really a religion, more of a spirituality. It is the most amazing place; a Phoenix that has risen from the flames and dedicated its life to hoping that no where else suffers the same way. The stories of what people went through (and are still going through) made me so glad that I’m a woolly lefty liberal, who is totally against war and completely committed to suggesting that no war is ever justified. 

 

Hiroshima is a very pretty place. The cherry blossom is still just in bloom, which gives the whole place a pink glow. We struggled to understand how a place could feel so safe. We walked through a park where there were tents set up. There had been a flower show, which was then closed for the day. The exhibitors and stall holders had just left everything out for the night and gone home. We kept saying, “You couldn’t do this at home .” and it made us feel a bit ashamed. 

In the evening we were brave and went to a restaurant where we couldn’t even read the name. We love the feel of these bar/restaurant type places. Serious businessmen in their regulation suits sit and drink beer and Sake and relax. Today we had Okonomiyaki, a speciality of Hiroshima. We sat around a large hot plate where the chefs made a layered dish of thin omelette, cabbage, pork, bean sprouts, sweet corn and noodles in front of us. It was topped with a stick, slighly spicy soy sauce and we were given a spatula and chopsticks to eat it with.