Oriental Hiroshima

... br>Her short, simple answer was, "A symbol of peace."

It was an interesting answer. I thought about it for a moment.

As I did, Tomoko asked me the same question.

I paused briefly, and said what came to my mind, "It means destruction to me."

I pictured the devastation, like I'd seen in famous photos of Hiroshima: a leveled city with only scant few ruined buildings barely rising from the vast expanse of rubble.

We looked ...

... ATOM BOMB.

-----
ONE THOUSAND CRANES:

I didn't know what to expect. I'd seen photos of the memorial, but had only read about the cranes. School children fold cranes and string them together for offering in memory of those "classmates" that died.

Well, a fairly steady procession of groups of school kids paid tribute at the monument. In culmination, they marched their strung cranes to any one of a number of clear plexiglass enclosures and amidst much excitement ...

... That would never happen on New Jersey Transit! Back in Hiroshima, the clerk at the Family Mart convenience store asked me where I was from and what I thought of Governor Schwarzenegger. (If you check the annual report for Family Mart, you will discover that they are on a campaign to differentiate themselves from their competitors by providng their customers with a friendly and warm extended family experience. The annual ...

... of the rest of the tour group for some beers and yakitori (like japanese satay things) and eventually headed to bed and had enough time to collect literally every type of Pocky (chocolate coated pretzel stick) - strawberry, white choc, dark choc, milk choc, double coated hazelnut, double coated choc and white choc and strawberry - don't even get me started on the Fran desert sticks too! Available in every corner shop I was soon on a train to Nagasaki in pocky chocky overload!

... us, we read and saw all of the exhibition, and left with our heads swollen with new and shocking information, horrendous images, and devastating firsthand stories from survivors.
At 8:15 am on August 6th in 1945, the US dropped an A-Bomb, in Hiroshima and a second in Nagasaki, effectively wiping out the populations in a moment. No warning was given to its people, and this was the first ever nuclear weapon used in warfare, and thus the start of the nuclear age. I am not ...

... the blast in a vertical manner which was the strongest resistance direction of the building. It is now just a shell of the building it once was and all the people that were in or around the building on that day in August were killed instantaneously. Today it stands on a busy street opposite the modern Hiroshima Municipal Baseball Stadium. It is a stark reminder of the fury and enormous devastation of war. It is an experience to stand in a place where such a tremendous ...

... to be said that everyone was in bed and asleep by 9pm! Today we visited the Peace Memorial Park and Museum. The museum was interesting with the greater emphasis on peace and the danger of the nuclear arms race rather than the horrors of the A-bomb being dropped on Hiroshima itself, although there was a tableau of three badly burned children emerging from the ruins and Steven asked, "Are they monsters?" It was ...

... irreal, parece una postal de cuento. Cuidado con los monicos!! No les mires a los ojos!! , menos mal que los carteles nos advierten, está plagado de monicos, algunos despiojando a los ciervos, que bonito es el amor entre especies. Mirando el plano parece que hay un camino para subir a otro templo, y ver las islas desde un mirador aun mas alto, así que nos disponemos a llegar alli... pringaos! menuda subida! nos dejamos medio pulmón y unos cuantos litros ...

... delicately formed them into a perfect roll about 6 inches long. A few seconds later he added more egg and repeated the process three or four times until the roll was about an inch thick. He then took a sushi mat and compressed it a bit. He let it cool a minute and sent it out. Work of art. The plating of dishes was also interesting. Everything went out on tin foil. The chef would often finish the dish on piece of foil placed on the ...

... The most recent letter on display was directed to our very own G W Bush and was dated February 2006. Apparently we had tested some sort of device on or near that date - who knew? What we did know was that despite all the rhetoric about how the bomb was responsible for ending the war, the Hiroshima museum encouraged us to call this assumption into question. The first and most obvious reason to doubt this common belief is that by the time we dropped the first bomb the Japanese ...