Hiroshi­ma

Published Categorised as Japan, Travel No Comments on Hiroshi­ma

You can see more photos from Kyoto, Tokyo and other cities I visited in the Japan category, and also read about the trip in the zine I wrote.

One of our final stop-offs in Japan was Hiroshi­ma. Hiroshi­ma is most famous for being the first city (and so far 50% of all cities) to be nucle­ar bombed. Nearly everything in the city was destroyed, and at least 50% of the popu­la­tion died, with the surviv­ors often suffer­ing extreme health prob­lems after­wards. Nearly all the build­ings in the city are modern- the Atom­ic Dome pictured above was one of the few old build­ings stand­ing. Visit­ing Hiroshi­ma has only increased my belief in nucle­ar disarm­a­ment. (And I’m for unilat­er­al disarm­a­ment- some­thing the UK govern­ment had the chance to do last year but didn’t, with choos­ing to renew the Trident missiles).

The castle is a modern replica of the origin­al. The origin­al one was blown up along with most of the other build­ings in the city.

A memori­al to victims in the Peace Park. I was disturbed however when I read through some guide books on the stall of a man offer­ing tours. The English version barely mentioned the Second World War, framed it as being econom­ic­ally posit­ive, and mildly referred to the actions of the Japan­ese Army in the war as “miscon­duct”. I think China, Korea, the Phil­ip­pines and the vari­ous POWs in Japan­ese camps would have some­thing strong to say about that (along with the govern­ments still trying to wrangle an offi­cial apology). I also wonder what the Japan­ese and Chinese editions of the book on offer had to say. (There was also no Korean edition, which is strange for tour­ist things in Japan). It was espe­cially jarring to see such an aggress­ive nation­al­ist deni­al of people’s suffer­ing inser­ted into a memori­al dedic­ated to remem­ber­ing war suffer­ing and making sure it didn’t happen again.

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