What time is it there?!

There are two sides to Hiroshima. At first glance it's a fairly normal looking place, without much that really distinguishes it from many other Japanese towns, although this being Japan it does have a number of impressively large designer clothing stores. The designer stores are of course not the main reason why people visit the city. One of the only surviving pieces of pre-war architecture is the building now known as the A-Bomb Dome which stands at the edge of the Peace Memorial Park. It is surprisingly intact, having only survived because it was almost directly below the bomb, and was therefore not hit side on and flattened by the blast. The building has been left exactly as it stood 60 years ago and is now surrounded by a number of memorials and shrines.

The park itself has numerous memorials and shrines dedicated to the Japanese, and people of other nationalities, who died. There is also a display of paper cranes, these are here in memory of a young girl who died of leukemia 10 years after the atomic bomb. She had believed that folding paper cranes would help her recover. The Childrens Peace Monument was built in her memory and millions of cranes are now sent from around the world each year. You can make one yourself if you wish. If you happen to be delivering a large number on behalf of a school you're asked to leave the details so that a record can be kept of the donations.

At one end of the park is the peace memorial museum, we didn't visit the main part of the museum because we spent quite some time at two temporary exhibitions. The first was a collection of paintings by survivors, these seem to have been painted relatively recently and so in many cases they are the childhood memories of people who are now pensioners. Most of these people are not expert painters, but it really didn't matter as each piece was accompanied by the artist's explanation of what they had actually seen. The second exhibition was the work of two young Japanese photographers who were sent to Hiroshima only a few days after the bombing. These photos were apparently suppressed for quite some time in an attempt to cover up the full extent of the destruction.

The other main tourist site in the town is Hiroshima Castle. This was the wartime headquarters of the Japanese army and therefore the reason for Hiroshima being targeted. As a result of this it was also the first of many castles we would visit that were actually much younger than they looked, the result of extensive renovation and rebuilding since the end of the war.

A short tram and ferry journey from Hiroshima is the temple complex at Miyajima, the most distinctive landmark here is the 'floating' Torii. It's not really floating, it just looks that way if you arrive at a suitably high tide (if not then it just looks like an archway sticking out of the mud!). We were very fortunate to be here on a Saturday when there was a wedding going on, so we can report that it takes just as long to arrange wedding photos in Japan as it does in England!!

Back in town and we were starting to get reasonably confident with the food, so we hunted down the food hall where all the restaurants serve nothing but the local speciality 'Okonomiyaki'. This apparently translates as something like "As you like it", which still doesn't give you much idea what it might be. It's basically an omelette filled with layers of noodles, beansprouts, onions, cabbage, some meat of your choice and a thick soy/BBQ kind of sauce, and it's actually very good, especially if you're worried that there is nothing but raw fish here.