05.10.05, Hiroshima

I decide to take it easy and just go to The Museum and then rest and eat and drink tea for the rest of the day.

The city looks, sorry for the cliche, like it has been bombed. Not just-bombed, of course, with ruins and all, but in the same way in which many German cities look like they don't have a building from before 1945.

I came here because I wanted to see and touch and know it was real. Also, because i wanted to see that there is something more to it than having been bombed in 1945.

Well, there isn't. I mean, it's a fairly big city, and people live there, but pretty much all the center is geared towards the war rememberance. There is a fairly good-looking castle (Hirosima was founded as a castle town) with a moat and walls and turrets and its own rock garden and Shinto shrine, but even that is full of explanations about how each point fared in the explosion and who was where, etc. There are ruins of Imperial Army headquarters on the castle grounds, and even every tree that survived the bomb has a note on it saying that this is a tree that survived the bomb.

I feel quite relieved when inside the castle there is some mention of middle ages when the castle was first built.

An observation, later repeated a many other places: Asian tourists in Japan, when they need to ask something, tend to approach other tourists rather than Japanese. Probably due to language problems.

Hiroshima is a hell for a childhater like myself. It is full of schoolchildren (fron kindergarden to high school) on school trips. Must be Japan's favorite school trip destination. It wouldn't be that bad, but quite a few of children seem to be from places where they have probably never seen a white person, and tend to react strongly and initiate contact. When they see me they start screaming "hara! hara!" and clearly expecting some reaction. My first reaction is to wonder why they are saying "shit" in Hebrew. It takes me a few such incidents and some observation of other foreigners' reactions to understand that they are trying to say "hello" but having trouble with the 'l'. I say intermittently "hello" and "konnichiwa" back to them but feel annoyed and stressed at it.

There is a fair lot of foreign tourists here, though not as many as in Kyoto.

The park commemoration the war and the bombing is called the Peace Memorial Park. The A-bomb Dome, formerly the industrial promotion hall, is the exhibit number one. The park is full of higly annoying children, graves and memorials to various groups of victims, from children to Koreans.

I get accosted by a group of three or four children aged about 10. They are doing some school project and are supposed to interview tourists. Their questions are written for them on a paper in English and Japanese, and their pronunciation is quite good, but their English is still quite poor and unsufficient for understanding any answers, so they give me a paper to write my answers on. The main question is "what do you think about the Second World War?" What am I gonna tell them, what? Who the fuck comes up with such questions? Do they expect me to write an essay? "You guys really shouldn't have started it" feels a bit mean-spirited under the circumstances and I settle for a more neutral "I wish it had never been started".

The museum itself is quite large. It costs 50 yen but rents English-language audioguides for 200 or 300 yen. I rent one but there is really no point in it because there are texts in English everywhere. The place is extremely crowded. The exhibition is in two parts, both of which are impressive, but the especially the second part is quite gruesome. There are fallen-off nails and hair of the victims, and large pieces of keloid scars. And then there are clothes, a lot of them. Everybody who'd read about it knows that there were high school students mobilized for the demolition work near the hypocenter of the explosion, but there you see that most of those "high school students" were 12 to 15, and they were also very small for their age, probably both due to being Japanese and to growing up during the war, so there are all those tiny-tiny clothes with holes burned in them and notes saying "13-year-old student such-and-such was doing demolition work when the bomb struck but managed to crawl home before dying in the evening". This does not of course make their death a bigger tragedy than that of their grandparents, but makes me wonder who the hell can send someone that size to do demolition work.

At some point a cynical thought came to me and I started wondering what kind of atomic bomb museum they will build in Tehran.

The museum was certainly worth the trip. I am still not convinced that it was a bad idea to use the bomb, but I think it would be good to have all the people who have the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons visit this place before assuming such authority.

Later I go shopping. It's raining, but thank god and Japanese people for roofed shopping streets. I run into a missionary from Gibraltar who asks me whether I think I will go to heaven, and say "no". He tries to continue the conversation, and I start explaining everything about Olam Haba (the world to come) in great detail, even though the rabbinical scholars themselves are quite unclear on the details. He imagines he has run into a religious nut and leaves me in peace.

During the shopping I encounter, but unfortunately do not buy, a Star of David made of (silver) bones and decorated with a skull. I am not sure what the symbolism is supposed to mean.

The museum store did not have any books in English, and I buy a book of Hiroshima eyewitness accounts and a grammar book in a real bookstore. Locals seem to be using the store for reading manga. When I pay for the book the girl asks me something. I say "wakarimasen", which means "I don't understand" and is a very useful word. She waves her hands and runs to get her boss, who does not speak English either. Finally some customer translates: they were asking me wether it was OK to charge all the money at once or whether I would like to spread the purchase for a few months. That was for about 20 euro worth of books.

I have some tea and cake in Doutor, which is a very nice cafe chain. They have layer cakes where layers are made of pancakes. Then I explore the city some more, have some kaiten-sushi and go back to the hotel to drink endless tea.

They had turned the fridge off for the day. Bugger. What the fuck were they thinking? Luckily there was just a suspicious half-eaten pudding thing in there.

I check out the tv programs and notice that they transliterate Chinese names into katakana. Funny.