An American's Japanese Life XII

May 26, 2015

        It seems that I am no longer able to sleep past 8 am. Every time I try, I get some news or announcement saying that I have to be somewhere at a certain time early in the morning. Truly I am not mad at that. Rather be doing something in Japan because I can always get me sleep later. Time is the most valuable resource I have and I can't afford to waste it on something such as sleep. The reason for today's early morning call was because we were going on a trip to the historical site in Japan known as Hiroshima.
      In order to get to Hiroshima, we had to once again catch a train. This time we were on the train for about ninety minutes. Once we got to the city, we went right to exploring. The first place we went was to "Ground Zero". That was the very spot (Hypo center) that the A-bomb blow up over. At that very spot was the Hiroshima Peace Memorial which stood in that place prior to the explosion. The building was just in ruins with only the infrastructure left barely intact. Hiroshima left the building in that condition to serve as a memorial to what happened on that day.
      We walked across the street to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The museum had a large array of artifacts from the day that bomb drop spanning to several weeks afterwards. Each artifact had a story that was written underneath it and a lot of these stories were really sadden to read. One story that really hit me was this story of a boy who, after getting exposed to the bomb, was so thirsty that he drank the puss from his wombs. There were stories like this all over the walls of the museum. Another one was a step that had a shadow actually burnt into the stone. In the middle, they had this model that showed the blast radius of the bomb and it showed everything that was engulfed in explosion.
      The museum had such an impact on the group that we had a debate over the logistics of war and who was in the wrong. Eventually, our debate came to an end and we went off to explore more of Hiroshima and get some food before we get back to the train station. We met up with the rest of the group that stayed in Kyoto and headed back to Tokyo. Today was a day not of amusement, but of reflect and understanding.