Hiroshima Castle, Peace Park, and DREAMINATION

Okay, this is gonna be a big post with a lot of pictures, but bear with me!

This weekend Joanna and I went to Hiroshima Castle.  Like Okayama Castle, it's been rebuilt, but unlike Okayama it has a good excuse - its site is about a kilometer from where the atomic bomb went off.  All of my students rag on the castle, saying "if you've seen one castle in Japan, you've seen 'em all!" but I had to remind them how cool it was to be in a country that actually HAS castles.

Anyway, this is what we saw:

Hiroshima Castle is surrounded by a HUGE moat - ain't nobody gettin' in this castle unless they can swim.

The castle itself!  6 floors of coolness.

They had this part where you could dress up like a samurai.  I got really into it.

For the ladies, you could wear a kimono!  Joanna got really into it too.

You know how I said everything has a cute mascot?  Well, even the castles do.  This is Hiroshima Castle's mascot, a samurai cat with an eyepatch.  Adorable!

After that we walked over to the Peace Park.  That's where the A-bomb Dome and the museum are.  I won't go into too much gory detail, but for those of you not in the know, the Hiroshima Memorial Museum is maybe the saddest place on Earth.  We're talking a place with a diorama of children with their skin falling off and countless examples of the actual charred clothing of those children.  To make it even better, they come with audio recordings detailing their families' grief as they died however many short days after the blast.  There's a 3-year-old's tricycle, charred and melted, and a recording of how the father buried his son in the backyard with it.  Like I said, saddest place on Earth.

Wandering the park and going through the museum had me walking out feeling awful, saying to myself "THE WORLD IS A TERRIBLE PLACE.  WHY ARE PEOPLE SO HORRIBLE."  So I guess it did its job.  (Poor Joanna - she's already been through the museum and she had to do it again with me!)  But as I thought about it and observed the bustling city around me, I felt a bit more confident in the human race as a whole.  How so much could spring up from such destruction is really inspiring.  I mean, scientists thought plants wouldn't grow for 75 YEARS after the explosion, but lo and behold, they started growing back in a few months.  The train was back in service 3 weeks after the blast.  Rebirth is an ever-present theme around Hiroshima - it'd have to be after what happened here  .

Enough waxing poetic, have a few pictures:

The A-Bomb Dome (note the bird in the window!)

Paper cranes at the Sadako Children's Memorial.

There are these funny lumpy trees all over the place.  I don't know if they come like that or if they're cut like that or what!

The Flame of Peace, which will be extinguished once all nuclear weapons on Earth are abolished.

The Cenotaph.  The Japanese inscription reads "Rest in peace, for the error will not be repeated."

Not many pictures from inside the museum, but here's a scale model of before the blast...

... and after

Actual cranes folded by Sadako!

So after that haunting experience, we needed a pick-me-up, and what better way than with the HIROSHIMA DREAMINATION?  All through December, Peace Boulevard is lit up with these enormous Christmas light displays that have nothing to do with Christmas.  Check em out!

Joanna in a giant picture frame!  Behind her is a pipe organ made of lights.

A big cool pirate ship!

In the whale's mouth!

Aladdin's palace!

There were these Christmas carriages going up and down Peace Blvd.  The handlers were wearing Santa suits.

So that was all one day of the weekend.  What about the other?  We got okonomiyaki and found a mountain shrine, but I'll save that for another post this week.  Stay tuned!  Same blog time, same blog channel!