Tenth Full Day in Japan

Today we are going to do a day trip to Hiroshima. It is about two hundred miles between Kyoto and Hiroshima. We took the Shinkansen high speed train and we traveled that distance comfortably and conveniently in an hour and forty minutes. Every twenty minutes there is a Shinkansen departing from Kyoto bound for Hiroshima with the same frequency on the return trip. Each trainset has about sixteen cars and each car is full of passengers. What an experience.

We got on the train in Kyoto at 7:20 and arrived in Hiroshima at 9:00. Our first stop was the Peace Memorial.

This is the A-Bomb dome. It is a building that was near ground zero when the Enola Gay dropped the atom bomb on August 6, 1945. The wreckage of this building has been preserved as part of the Peace Memorial.

We then walked over to the Peace Memorial Museum and spent two hours exploring this museum and examining the ten separate exhibit spaces.

I did not take pictures of the exhibits in this museum. The initial exhibit space graphically illustrates Hiroshima before August 6. Hiroshima was one of the few Japanese cities untouched by the American fire bombing raids. Following the initial exhibit space there are a number of exhibit spaces that document in graphic and gruesome detail the complete and total devastation and destruction of the city and its inhabitants caused by the atom bomb. Approximately seventy thousand people died immediately after the bomb’s explosion and another seventy thousand people died in the days, weeks, months and years after the explosion as a result of their physical injuries and radiation exposure they sustained when the bomb exploded.

The purpose of the museum is to illustrate the destructive power of an atomic weapon in the hope that such a weapon will never be used again.

After we finished our time at the Peace Museum we took an Uber out to the Miyajima Island ferry.

This is the ferry. It is a ten minute ride to the island.

This is Miyajima Island. It is reputed to be one of the most scenic spots in Japan.

The waters around Miyajima Island are chock full of oyster farms. When we got to the island it was time for lunch so we found a restaurant and had an oyster feast.