Hiroshima

Arrived here yesterday, after my first bullet train experience, which included a somewhat bullet-like change of trains in Osaka. Admired the Nozomi trains, whose streamlining is truly space-age, but they are not included in my Japan Rail Pass. Still, my train was indisputably fast and comfortable. Fell asleep for most of the journey, then staggered to my hostel, still feeling rough. Woke up this morning finally feeling a little better, only to faint ten minutes later. The headache has become something of a constant companion.

Still, I managed, at a snail's pace, to wander through town to the Peace Memorial Park and its museum. It was - predictably - both moving and disturbing, as well as being an all round excellent museum with copious English explanations. Spent hours there. A haunting experience. Individual stories and eyewitness accounts can barely help you make sense of the scale of destruction shown in the photographs and enormous before and after models of the city, but most disturbing of all is the simplicity of the reasons why the bomb was used at all (in large part to justify the massive expenditure on its development), why against Japan not Germany, and how Hiroshima moved to the top of the target list. Then finally, the weather: "The day was fine, the sky clear, and Hiroshima's fate was sealed."

Just outside the park, across the river, stands the remains of the prefecture hall, which is now known as the A-bomb dome. It is an unimpressive building with the metal girders that once bore the domed roof still bare against the sky. Its very unimpressiveness is what makes it so impressive, the only damaged site still standing. It was almost directly below the hypocenter. Photos showed a few other buildings that had partially survived, but for a 2km radius, there was almost nothing but rubble. In the museum were fascinating objects showing the heat (up to 2000 or 3000 degrees C), such as roof tiles melted into lava-like blobs, bottles deformed and melted together, a stack of rice-bowls also partly-melted and made into one warped solid... And god, the stories of the burns, hundreds of people who staggered home with their flesh dripping off their bodies, who didn't die for another day or even two - how can anyone survive that, even for a day, with no medical care? Huge numbers of the immediate dead were children, junior high-school kids who were all involved in clearing fire-breaks in the city and so were working outside at the time.

I wasn't going to write about the museum really - those of you who know your history will know it all already - but somehow it just came out. The museum finishes with a display of nuclear arms in the world today and the developments in weaponry since Hiroshima. Chilling.