After our short but packed stay in Nagasaki, we’re moving north-west to the biggest island in the Japanese archipelago: Honshu. Home to Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, this is usually the main destination for visitors and we’re expecting a lot more crowds than in our first quite peaceful couple of days.
Of course, we’re taking the Shinkansen to get there - and on our way to the station we get to experience a delightful bit of Japanese attention to detail as all the traffic lights in our path synchronise to our walking pace to give us an uninterrupted run of green. Although we have to change trains a couple of times, with characteristically little time allowed, everything goes smoothly. We even get to finally check out the iconic front carriage of our Shinkansen: an elongated, aerodynamic shape that gave rise to the unflattering nickname of “duck-billed platypus”. In this engineering marvel, it’s only a couple of hours to cover the 420km to our next stop, and we alight in Hiroshima before lunch.
Another victim of the atomic bombings, Hiroshima is understandably modern-looking, and to be fair, as we walk to our hotel, it feels quite similar to Nagasaki in terms of urban planning: large, straight, tree-lined avenues full of tall modern buildings, knitted together by smaller, more human-scale back alleys, all interspersed with the odd shrine, and combinis at every corner. Our lodgings at the Knot are right by one of the many branches of the Ôta river, very close to the Peace Park, and while we’ll skip this museum (one is probably enough), we still want to go pay our respects.
Before we get there however, we’re distracted by the beautiful rows of cherry trees lining the river. It’s a cold, windy spring day today but despite that we can’t resist the draw of the sakura, and quickly buy a combini picnic to have under the flowers: dreamy! We’re not the only ones and across the river slews of young Japanese are doing the same: engaging in hanami, the tradition to celebrate the blossoms by spending time under them.
Just a short, pretty wander later, we find the stately museum and Peace Park - somehow more official-looking here than in Nagasaki. The perspectives are carefully curated to frame the eternal flame sitting at the center of the park, but really the star of the show is the Atomic Dome: the skeletal remains of the old Court of Commerce, just a few hundreds of meters from the hypocentre, still standing thanks to its reinforced concrete structure. The ruins are now a striking testament to what happened, and a key attraction - especially now they’re framed with pretty sakura. Consequently, it’s busy with tourists from all over (Hiroshima is a lot more accessible than Nagasaki!) and we don’t linger amongst the tour groups - it was more impactful to go through the details of this somber history in a quieter setting.
As we move away, we pass a tall building whose glass facade displays etched cranes and a curious white wave. Upon further investigation, it turns out this is a gigantic memorial: in the space between the building’s double glass skin, visitors to the Peace Park can drop a folded origami crane as a mark of respect - and the millions of cranes slowly fill up the facade to create the pattern that intrigued me. As we watch, a few additional birds drop: it’s a powerful statement of how close these events still feel to many people.
Time for some slightly less bloody, slightly more ancient history: Hiroshima’s samurai castle - our first one in Japan! We’re not far now, and after getting a bit lost in some impressive shopping centres (and walking past the omnipresent arcade), we get there. The castle is protected by a moat (the last surviving of three apparently), and similarly to European medieval fortresses, contains some outbuildings, including a temple. Winding further into the grounds, through lovely landscaped gardens, we get to the main event, what would be our equivalent of the keep. Here, it’s a four-storeys stone and wood building, rising in decreasing square tiers adorned with pagoda roofs.
While the 16th century original was destroyed in the bombing, a perfect replica has been built and to our inexperienced eyes, retains much of the magic. It’s an impressive, elegant structure and even today it’s easy to imagine the samurais rushing out to battle out of the carved wooden doors. The steep-looking floors discourage us from exploring the inside however - since we arrived in Japan, we’re easily averaging 15km of walking per day, and there’s only so many staircases we have strength for!
Instead, we head back to our hotel and take advantage of its spectacular top-floor lounge bar, just in time to catch a lovely sunset over Hiroshima before heading out to dinner. We’ve come to slightly dread picking restaurants in this otherwise delightful country: for foodies like us, not being able to browse menus before selecting a place to eat is mildly distressing. We’re struggling with all our other tools as well: reviews on Google Maps are sparse (and often confusingly translated) or downright non-existent, and wider searches for “best restaurant in Hiroshima” just point us towards eateries so popular they have hour-long queues.
Giving up on any method, we decide to just walk around until we find something appealing - and soon implement a ban on even trying to translate the menu headers to speed up our snail-like pace. Everything looks very similar: small rooms with an open kitchen dishing out various kinds of noodles; and we’ve got no way of knowing exactly what’s being served, or how good the chefs are. In the end, we just walk straight into the first of those which sports an English menu - we don’t fancy any more puzzling today. It turns out to be a very good choice despite our worries to the contrary: our food is exquisite, and I get to try a delicious dry noodle dish (as opposed to soup variations), mazemen, which despite my best efforts we will not see again for the entire trip. That’s the luck of the draw however - and tonight, we struck gold!
Comments