Bruce wanted to visit Hiroshima since he likes to see how people react to major events in our history. He watched “Oppenheimer” in the plane on the way to Japan and by coincidence happened to be reading a book based on the events of the Manhattan Project in the week leading up to us getting here.
It was horrifying to see the planning going into such an event and to see the devastation that resulted from it. Going through the museum, there was no attempt to hide the events leading up to the dropping of the bomb from both the Japanese and the American perspectives.
Hiroshima nows wants to make sure that such an event never happens again and the Peace Park is full of commemorations to the efforts to ensure that nuclear weapons are eventually banned.
The city is so different to everywhere else since it was totally redesigned and built from 1950 onwards. Unfortunately it does has an American city look about it, but the atmosphere is very Japanese.
This region is famous for its style of ominominaki, a Japanese pancake meal, so Robyn found a really good example of a restaurant that serves this. The restaurant consisted of about 10 small booths, which each sat about 12 people. The bench in front of where you sat doubled as a hotplate and the meal was prepared right in front of you and then placed in front of you, still on the hotplate. Ours had cabbage, egg, squid and prawns and was fantastic. Rosie and I shared one since it was so large.
On our second day in Hiroshima, Rosie and I went to a small fishing village near Fukuyama called Tomonoura. It was a bit off the tourist map, which is what we like and required us to take a 100km train ride on the bullet train, this took just over 20 minutes. We then caught a bus to the port.
It was really pretty seeing the boats lined up in the water and the cute lighthouse at the end of the groin. The town is situated on what they call the inland sea since the island of Japan wraps around this large waterway. There are many small islands just off the coast which adds to the beauty of the place. The only downside of our trip was that it was so quiet that most of the restaurants weren’t open for lunch, a problem in a lot of the areas we have visited. We had to return to Fukuyama to have lunch before catch the train back to the hotel.
This is a really nice area to visit for a couple of days and we were pleased to have come here.
