A Visit to Hiroshima

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

The Children's Peace Monument.  

Origami crane mosaic pictures, sent to Children's Peace Monument.

Mike (on the right), a music teacher from Houston who is part of our group, trades iPods with a Japanese youth we meet at the public foot-bath onsen.  They check out each other's favorite music.

On Sunday morning, our big group of 160 teachers split up into smaller groups of 16, and each group headed out for a week in a different city.  My group's destination was Sanyo Onoda.  It's a small city on the coast, in Yamaguchi prefecture.  Japan, you may remember from my earlier blog posts, is divided into prefectures, and Yamaguchi prefecture is on the southwestern tip of Honshu Island.  It was a 2 hour flight to get there, and we arrived in the early afternoon and checked into a hotel in Yamaguchi City, the prefecture capital.

Yamaguchi City is locally known for it's hot springs, called Yuda Onsen.  The Japanese word onsen means hot springs.  There are lots of onsens all over Japan.  Because Japan is located at a point where different plates of the earth's crust are pushing against each other, water is heated below the earth's surface by the same pressure that causes earthquakes and volcanoes in the Japanese islands.  Yamaguchi City has some small public foot-bathing onsens in different parts of town, and one of them was in a small park right behind our hotel.

As soon as we checked into our hotel, most of us headed for the train station.  Our host and guide had told us that it was possible to get to Hiroshima City in an hour's time, by taking the Nozomi shinkansen -- the fastest bullet train.  There is a monument, a park, and a museum in Hiroshima memorializing the tragic event of it's destruction by the atomic bomb during the second world war.  After hearing Keijiro Matsushima, the hibakusha I met in Tokyo, I knew I had to go to Hiroshima if I had the opportunity.  We were able to reach Hiroshima by mid-afternoon, and caught a streetcar from the train station to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

We spent the afternoon learning about the history of Hiroshima, both before and after the bombing, from the museum.  It was very saddening.  We walked around the large Peace Memorial Park, where the museum is located, and looked at different memorial monuments.  The one that I most wanted to see was the Children's Peace Monument.  This monument exists because of the efforts of school children, who started fund-raising activities to raise a monument in memory of their classmate Sadako.  Sadako survived the bomb's blast, but then developed leukemia 10 years later from exposure to the bomb's radiation.  During her last months of life, she folded hundreds of origami cranes, because of a legend saying that anyone folding 1000 paper cranes will be granted a wish.  Sadako's wish was to live.

So this is a monument initiated by children, and I think that it tells something very inspiring and encouraging about the compassion, wisdom, and hope of those children.  It has the following words inscribed on it:

This is our cry.

This is our prayer.

For building peace in the world.

The monument is surrounded by thousands and thousands of brightly colored origami cranes, in glass cases, that have been sent by people from all around the world who want to express their desire for world peace.  The inside of the monument is a bell, with a metal origami crane as the clapper.

You can read the true story "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes" in our school library, to learn more about the history of the monument.  You can also click here to go to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum website, and take a virtual tour of the museum.

Some of the origami cranes I saw displayed had been used very creatively, as mosaic pieces glued to a flat surface to make a picture or design.  I've posted some pictures of them above.  Which do you like best?  

We got back to Yamaguchi City around 9 p.m., and on our walk from the train station to the hotel, we passed the public foot-bathing hot springs and decided to take off our shoes and soak our tired feet.  While we were sitting and soaking, we met some Japanese people, and then some Taiwanese people (vacationing in Japan)  who came to enjoy a hot foot bath at the onsen as well.  It was really great talking to them, trying to communicate across the language barrier.  Fortunately, there was somebody in each of their groups that spoke a little English.  

Working at communicating with different language speakers is actually fun, as long as everybody is really willing to try.  It can become a little like playing charades, with lots of hand gestures to try and show what you mean, and lots of nodding and smiling.  Anyway, we were disappointed when the onsen closed down at 10 and broke up the fun.  All the water drained out, and we had to put our shoes back on and go back to the hotel.  It had been a really long and busy day, though, and I fell asleep almost as soon as I got to my room.  With nice clean feet.