11 Hiroshima

This was my second visit to this very touristy area of Japan. I have been here 10 years ago, visiting Japan for the first time as a student majoring in Japanese with a scholarship from the Japan Foundation. The beauty of Miyajima amazed me and the horror of the atomic bomb explained in detail at the Peace Memorial Museum struck me and I thought these are two things that should not be missed while in Japan so I wanted Hunor to be able to see these places. 

Well, we were not very lucky. After all the amazing sunny weather we got in the first weeks, it started to rain, a typhoon was on it's way. We were still very enthusiastic tourists, so we got up early in the morning and went to Miyajima, to get there before the crowds arrive, but it was hard to see the beauty of the place from under our plastic ponchos and through a curtain of rain. Even the deer who always wander around in the park stood freezing under cover. We arrived relatively early, so we headed for the must see, Itsukushima shrine, which is a shirne complex on the shore and a huge red shinto gate in the sea. Again we were not lucky, because apparently at high tide it looks like it is floating on the sea with the temples built on stilts right on the shore facing it. We came at low tide so it was not a breathtaking view. I started to get frustrated with the cold and the rain and our bad luck, but Hunor took it very well, so I managed to tune in to his mood and give up on trying not to get wet and simply stop complaining and it worked. One thing I got to learn (and have to practice more and more) while traveling is that when you give up all the expectations that exist nowhere else but in the guidebooks, in people's stories and in your imagination, you are finally free and open enough to embrace a place as it is at the moment you are there. We explored some of the more unknown temples in the back of the complex and had an amazing time. Senjokaku  (Pavilion of 1000 tatami mats) is just behind the Itsukushima shrine up on a hill. It was a massive hall, the ceiling and the walls full of paintings and sculptures of horses and battles and boats, each one with a mystical story lurking behind it. What we both liked most about the hall was the flooring. Hundreds of years old wooden floors, it felt like those immense pieces of wood with their simplicity could tell more stories than the banners and paintings above. For a few minutes I just walked and danced around on them, feeling their energy, stillness and patience. Then I sat down by one of the huge pillars on the ground and just watched the rain and listened to the thunder for the next half an hour. 

the shinto gate at low tide

When I go to a place I want to enter its atmosphere. It is something like being able to hear the heartbeat of a place for a short while. It is something beyond the guidebooks and beyond my understanding. It is a short period of time, sometimes a moment, sometimes an hour when a place with all its generosity and love turns to me, opens up for me and all my senses are fulfilled with its character. I feel the colors on my skin, I smell stories in the air and see sounds around me. I never know where or when I would get that feeling. Sometimes it comes at a spectacular spot, sometimes in the middle of nowhere but I need to be ready and accepting, no expectations, no frustrations (see above) to block my senses. This is the feeling that I love most about traveling. And I know Hunor has it too, but he would never put it the way I do. He is way more skeptical than that. But I can see it on his photographs. When a place opens up for him, he connects to it through his lens and the place shows him incredible images that he is then allowed to take with him as his photographs.  

We both had a time to connect with Miyajima in the dome of Senjokaku. Before that we were planning to head back to Hiroshima right away but now we had no problem with the rain and thunder. We hiked to Daisho-in, a big buddhist temple complex on the other end of the small town. You could find small jizo statues, official ones in the halls, and cute garden-gnome-like ones hidden in the bush, each of them happy and in a different pose. These small creatures were like small giggles at the foot of a serene temple, secretly stole happiness and life to our tour and as we were concentrating on trying to spot each one of them in the grass, they gave us a free and lighthearted lesson of awareness too. 

We headed back to the city because we wanted to save the afternoon for the Peace Memorial Park. Nuclear energy is not something humans can play around with without serous consequences and the memorial park with plenty of data, photographs and stories of people whose life was taken or brutalized forever by the tragedy of the atomic bomb, burns it into the visitors' head for good.

There is plenty of information about the exhibit, you can even take a virtual tour on the website of the Peace Memorial Park so I will leave thorough exploration and learning to the reader. However, there are two pieces of information that I have discovered on this visit and I will share those. One of them is a wall full of diplomatic letters. I have learned that every time a country does nuclear testing anywhere in the world, the mayor of Hiroshima sends a letter of protest asking them to stop using nuclear energy. He strongly hopes after each letter that it would be the last to write...

The other piece of information was the notion of "nuclear winter". This was the first time I heard about it in detail. I have took a photo of the explanation so I will let you read it for yourself.

Hiroshima is a beautiful city with lots of green areas, although after the atomic bomb, it was predicted that no greens would grow in the area for the next 70 years. The Peace Park with the ghostly Atomic Bomb Dome is a must visit in an time when the question of nuclear energy raises so many questions, doubts and concerns. 

It is not a light afternoon tour, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to face the future by being brave enough to see the past.