This morning we checked out of the Moxy and met downstairs for our first trip on Japan’s famous Shinkansen (bullet train). We also met one new member of our group who unfortunately had a delayed flight the day before and couldn’t make it to dinner.

This was the first of three times during the trip where our main luggage was taken away and sent ahead since there isn’t a ton of luggage compartment room on the Shinkansen. So we’d be using overnight bags for the next two nights in Hiroshima before meeting our bags again in Kyoto.

After a slight bust at Universal Studios a couple of days ago, I was happy to find some actual Japanese Minions stuff to bring back to work with me! This is also a good time to point out what an oddly high percentage of Japanese souvenirs are snacks. At least half of every souvenir store across the country was filled with little confectionaries, decorative boxes of cookies and candy, etc.

Turns out this is a thing called omiyage – bringing back snacks to your friends and family is common and expected. Either way, I was happy to find these little Minions snacks that were like a fluffy bread filled with banana custard. Even though the food itself would expire before I was back in the office, the box (and bags!) they came in were adorable.

Maho said these are always sold out, and I got lucky!

After a very tasty lunch, we had some time before we needed to meet the group at the end of the shopping street, so the six of us took the time to wander into a bunch of the stores we passed, including a really lovely bakery, and a really epileptic prize arcade.

Once we got to the top floor (or at least as high as we went), we found a whole floor of photo booths – not just photo booths, but a full cosplay and makeup section for people who wanted to either go glam or be a character. We chose a booth and all piled in, to do a little video thing with special effects.

Of course the machine speaks in Japanese, but Krista was able to figure out how to do it and we captured our video! We think. Unfortunately you need a specific app in order to see it, which you can’t download from an American or UK phone’s app store, so it’ll sadly have to go forever unwatched.

Definitely a fun place to walk around! But we had our eye on the clock and after giving up on the video we headed over to meet the rest of the group.

This plaque says:

The A-bomb Dome is the ruins of the former Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall which was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever to be used in the history of humankind on August 6, 1945.

The atomic bomb was detonated in the air at an altitude of approximately 600 meters almost right over the hall. The explosion by a single bomb claimed the lives of over 200,000 people and the city area of about 2-km radius was turned into ashes. In order to have this tragic fact known to succeeding generations and to make it a lesson for humankind, the reinforcement work of the ruins has been done by the contributions of many people who desire peace within and out of the country. The ruins shall be preserved forever.

August 6, 1967 Hiroshima

One of the most well-known stories to come from this tragic time in history is that of Sadako Sasaki, a little girl living just outside of Hiroshima who was 2 years old when the bomb hit, and ultimately died of leukemia (which they called the A-bomb disease at the time) when she was 11.

The account goes that while she was in the hospital, her friend visited and told her a story: Japanese cranes live for 100 years, and the legend says that if a sick person folds 1000 origami paper cranes, they’ll get well. Sadako apparently folded well over 1000 cranes (often out of scraps of paper in the hospital) but unfortunately it wasn’t enough.

Her story spread, though, and became a national and then international peace movement. A memorial statue was built in the Peace Memorial Park only a few years after her death, and now people from all over the world send folded paper cranes to be placed beneath the statue, honoring the message on its base:

This is our cry, This is our prayer, Peace in the world.

I had read a novelization of the story (Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr) as a kid and it always stuck with me; then it unexpectedly came back into my life as an adult working in book publishing when we published a reissue. I always found the story really beautiful, so it was particularly special to see the tributes to Sadako in Hiroshima.

Next in the itinerary was the most unique thing we did on the trip, and also the most meaningful. Flash Pack arranged for us to meet Ms. Yasuko Kondo, an 82-year-old survivor of the atomic bomb who was going to tell us abut her experience so many years ago as a 4-year-old. She works as a volunteer and ambassador, sharing her story in an effort to educate and prevent this cruel history from ever repeating itself.

We gathered in a classroom in the basement of the Peace Memorial Museum, and settled in to hear her story. About halfway through she told us that this was the first time she had done this presentation in English, and you could tell how proud she was! It absolutely warmed all of our hearts.

Her story was as moving and difficult as you’d expect, and it was hard to not get choked up hearing about the physical ailments she and her family experienced, as well as her feelings of helplessness surrounded by devastation and so many people in indescribable pain.

There were some moments of lightness too, as she talked about how people or her town came together to help each other, and the sign of hope she saw in a single Japanese lantern plant that survived. I keep dried orange lantern plants as decor in my apartment and had never really heard of them otherwise (got them on a whim one fall), so was surprised that they came up in her story!

After she read her prepared words, we did a Q&A (with the help of Maho translating), before she ended by walking around to pass out some shrimp chips for the “class.”

The text of Ms. Kondo’s story (I believe this is at least the majority of it).

Goes without saying, but it was definitely an experience that I will remember forever.

What made the afternoon even more meaningful, though, is that she told us that she had gone to school with Sadako herself (of the paper cranes), and as we were saying our thank yous and goodbyes after the presentation, she handed me an origami crane that she had been holding as she spoke.

It was just a coincidence that I happened to be the one standing there, but it is now in a display box in my living room, and is something that I will unquestionably treasure forever.

Incredible memento of a very special afternoon.

After hearing firsthand about the horrors of the bomb, we made our way upstairs to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, a space dedicated to telling the story of what happened that day and the countless repercussions after.

When you walk in there’s a warning sign about graphic content – I’ll echo that here with these pictures. It was a really tough museum to walk through just thinking about what happened, and having these immersive visuals made it so much more visceral. It was hard to not walk through fully choked up.

Leaving the museum, it was a beautiful day so a bunch of us wanted to have our own hanami under the cherry trees. They line the whole walkway along the river, so it’s so picturesque, just like Osaka.

We stopped at a nearby 7-11 to get some drinks and snacks, then found a spot by the river to settle down.