Teach Treks Japan: Hiroshima
I got out of the habit of reading Douglas Adams (sad, I know), but there’s a half a sentence I think about all the time about the background-noise guilt being alive in the 20th century. I’m sure I’m short-changing his actual words, but, y’all, that kernel got stuck in my mental teeth and every now and then I wiggle it to remind myself of how vividly true that felt to read. It still feels vividly true this far into the 21st century. So when I made the leap and decided to go to Japan, I absolutely knew that I was going to find myself in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Hiroshima is much closer to Tokyo, so that’s where I took my first jaunt on the Shinkansen.
I mean, I know it’s kinda strange. “ERIN YOU FOOL, It’s a vacation. V.A.C.A.T.I.O.N.” And I hear that, I hear you, small voice in the back of my head insisting that I have better things to do like travel to Sapporo and dive into every ramen bowl I can find or visiting James Turrell’s House of Light. But as a former student of World War II, of Germanic Studies, as fan of Douglas Adams, and as a sentient human being in the 21st Century on Twitter who can concoct nightmare foreign policy scenarios at the drop of a hat, I felt like I had to spend time contemplating one of the 2 sites where an atomic weapon was used in anger.
The Peace Park in Hiroshima is a perfect execution of contrasts, especially on this glorious day in March of 2018 as Japan inches toward peak cherry blossom. On the one hand, the park is exquisitely beautiful, green and lush and peaceful and restful a beautiful memorial dedicated to the dead and to hope itself. There is a flame that burns near a cenotaph that contains the names of the dead. It is a flame that will burn until nuclear weapons no longer exist. I admire the specificity of that hope. This is not an eternal flame dedicated to mourning, but a signal of a determination to change the world. It is incredibly humbling.
And on the other hand, the Park is home to a series of exhibits and memorials that testify to the horrors inflicted on this very site. The main museum building is currently undergoing earthquake preventative medicine, so I was not able to visit it. In the building next door, I was treated to a précis of that building’s mission though. The museum is on stilts like that because below it is an excavation site preserving the layer of earth the atomic bomb hit. That is sobering stuff, especially in a time when so many of the, ahem, leaders in charge of the world’s nuclear weapons steadfastly refuse to be educated about the consequences of nuclear weapons. I have always felt that Truman was justified in dropping that bomb and Hiroshima was a more than legitimate military target, as the museum itself testifies, but . . . but . . . but . . . Seeing the consequences of that choice on the civilian population and the generational effect, it’s impossible for me not to think of the use of an atomic bomb as a war crime and something that we should frankly never, ever, ever consider again. The Hiroshima Peace Park is a place of profound beauty and I encountered it on a wonderful sun-soaked spring day when the cherry blossoms were making up their minds to grace the area with their presence. In the midst of that beauty, I was presented with clear evidence of the profound suffering of those who lived there. It was an experience that I will not forget.
I will say on a professional note, that the East Building, a mere 2 floors of exhibits, employed at least 14 projectors. I have the time stamped digital note to go with the photograph that I accurately guessed which make and model of projector they were using, so yeah ok, the TV guy may had a point about bringing my profession on vacation. They used Panasonic PT RZ-670s (which are LASER projectors and that will never not be cool) and no I didn’t do the math to figure out exactly which lenses they were using, but that’s only because I wanted to save my cell phone battery for pictures and not being lost, I did think about it quite a bit, sue me.
After spending a heavy morning in the presence of history and its consequences, I needed feeding. I sought out a place that the Internet recommended: Okonomi-mura, 3 stories of food trucks crammed together but without the trucks (I hope that makes senses), all making okonomiyaki, a kind of a cabbage omelette crepe thing with savory sauce (and oysters in winter) that Hiroshima is especially known for, or so I am told by the Internet. The okonomiyaki I had was ok. I don’t have pictures because there was barely enough room for a tiny plate on the part of the food stall that wasn’t the hibachi they used to cook the food. Hell, they actually served the thing on the grill, it certainly didn’t fit whole on that tiny plate; I just carved out chunks of it that were plate sized. The first chunk was hot but bland, the second chunk was a beautiful melange of sweet, savory, and spicy, the actual street food dream, the third was a less beautiful melange, and the fourth was, wait for it, over cooked. Keeping company with me through it all was beer, Suntory Premium Malts, sorry THE Premium Malts, and it could be I was thirsty or it could be that a frosty mug of beer after a five mile walk and some heavy emotional lifting is just deep down soul quenching good. It was the best beer I had in Japan.
I spent the rest of the day bouncing from place to place, walking up a steep, steep hill and back down again, counterprogramming to the all the sitting I had done in various airplanes. Based on the many cherry trees in the Peace Park and along the main boulevards, peak blossom is a week or so away and I suspect this town will look dramatically different then, even thought it’s already got some beautiful stretches, especially Hijiyama Park, a lovely place on a hill where you can find the manga library and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The MoCA is not a deep collection, but they do have some Yayoi Kusama (whose newest exhibition in Tokyo is already sold out for three months, sweet, maybe I can catch the exhibition in Cleveland, on sale April 16 — for July, yeah, no, you’re right, I’m just out of luck) as part of a collection dedicated to the “Women’s March” and global feminism, which I felt very connected to.
The last stop of the day, the one that got me up to 22.877 steps or 8.7 miles (but you gotta round down on iHealth, Camino taught me that), was a visit to the ruins of the old military headquarters in Hiroshima. It felt necessary to see how the Japanese memorialized it, to see if it contradicted the story told at the Peace Park. I didn’t take any photos of any kind there for reasons I can’t quite articulate now. There were many moments on this trip where it felt right not to take myself out of the experience by creating the distance necessary to take a photograph, let alone a good one. But now I think it’s a shame I didn’t snag a photo of the bride and groom having their wedding photos taken in the picturesque ruins of a place of pure militarism devastated by a super weapon that was deliberately not reconstructed as a way not only to remember the past, but as an active effort not to repeat it. So, nope, no contradictions here, the acts of cultural memory are operating in sync in Hiroshima. The bride and groom looked very happy.
Kyoto is up next, now that I have spent some time with the darkest things that humans can do to one another. Activating the JR Rail Pass on this day puts medium sized day trips within reach (like Arashiyama and Fushima Inari, where I most definitely took pictures). There will still be plenty of walking, there always will be, that’s just who I am. Fortified by my netto and rice and miso breakfast (and a coffee flavored chocolate milk from 7–11), I checked out of my delightful little hotel room and caught the train to Kyoto.
