Hiroshima

For our vacation on Golden Week (kind of like Spring Break) we took a trip down to Hiroshima for a couple of days. On the second day we visited the Hiroshima Peace Park, an assembly of memorials and museums located at the epicentre of the A-Bomb blast from August 6, 1945. Estimates vary widely, but 100 000 - 200 000 deaths (mostly civilian) were caused by a single human act of war. Visiting the memorial is a difficult experience to describe.

This is a monument to Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who died from radiation exposure (leukemia) ten years after the bomb was dropped. According to Japanese legend, a person who folded 1000 paper cranes (origami) would be granted a wish by the gods. Sadako folded 1300 cranes, but died at the age of 12. Today people from all over the world fold paper cranes and bring/send them to this monument.

This is a statue of a mother escaping the blast with her children. Survivors of the bombing are called hibakusha in Japanese. Health complications from radiation exposure remain a contemporary issue in Japan. (A monument to the 30th anniversary of the Park Flower Festival is in the background.)

This is the A-Bomb/Peace Dome. It was one of the few buildings in the blast radius that remained standing, and has been preserved as a monument. Hundreds of homes were completely flattened by the bomb. This more sturdy building had been a municipal office.

This watch was worn by a victim of the bombing and is forever frozen at the moment of the blast - 8:15 a.m.

This three-way bridge (on which Tiffany and Liz stand) was the target of Little Boy, the bomb the Americans dropped from the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber. The bomb missed the bridge by several hundred meters. The bridge survived the blast and remained in use for decades (it has since been replaced).