Trip Blog Post/Serious

My faithful blog readers,

It's finally time to tell you about my trip away from Kanazawa! When was this trip, you ask? Last weekend? Two weeks ago? Well, really... it was in June... I'm sorry! This has been a long time coming! But here we go.

Now, June 25th, a Thursday, was our first of two three-hour final exams. It was very long. But don't worry, because just an hour or so after it was over, I had boarded a bus to Osaka, and I was very happy. Wendy, Caitlin and I rode a double-decker bus for five hours to get there. What is convenient about Japanese buses (although I've never really ridden any in other countries to compare... not for 5 hours anyway) is that they stop every few hours to let you stretch and go to the bathroom. So we were really fine.

And then we were in Osaka! The second biggest city in Japan! And... there was very little to do! We met up with Christine at our hostel, and set out for the "hip" area of Osaka, which we knew how to get to thanks to one of our teachers. There, at about 8:ooPM, we ate takoyaki for dinner. Takoyaki, as you may or may not know, are made of octopus and a flour-y dough. They are about the size of golfballs, and they are delicious! I will take you to eat them in New York, New York friends. Seattle friends, please come visit me!

So we ate takoyaki, and we set out to search for dessert. We searched. And we searched. But everything was CLOSED. At about 9PM on a Thursday night! Why?!? Some big city... We left Osaka, sort of disappointed, Friday morning, and rode the train to Hiroshima.

Hiroshima is, of course, famous for having been destroyed. So this is where my normally light and cheery blog has no choice but to get a bit darker for a post or so.

Hiroshima was beautiful while I was there - no sign, of course, of the 60-year-old history. But of course we went first to the Peace Park, so the invisible damage was on all of our minds. It was sad, to look at the one ruined building preserved in the park, but mostly it was inspiring to finally see the statue of Sadako Sasaki, with her thousands of paper cranes folded all over the world, and the eternal flame dedicated to the dead. You don't turn a nuclear bombing into something positive, but the park calls for peace, adn I didn't feel guilt, but hope, at the determination to look to the future following the travesty of the bomb.

But then we went to the museum.

We went to the free exhibit in the basement first, sort of arbitrarily. It was a single bright, museum-style room, with a large free-standing sign in its center, announcing that the exhibit was a collection of pictures drawn by people who had experienced the bomb, but made many decades later. The museum, this plaque told me, has hundreds of these pictures, voluntarily sent by survivors. Every month, the museum chooses a new theme, and displays 30 or so pictures that fit that theme.

In June, the theme was labor groups - during World War II, labor was at such a premium that middle- and high-schoolers were removed from school to do manual labor. The artists whose drawings were shown in June were all working in Hiroshima when the bomb fell.

Every picture was worse than the last. I passed around the room, feeling like I might faint. I have read about Hiroshima - facts, dates. Pictures of that famous mushroom cloud are barely meaningful anymore. But these were not pictures of the nuclear bomb. These were drawings - memories of the bomb hitting people.

I am having trouble allowing myself to remember the pictures, and their two-to-three sentence descriptions. These people, who drew and described melting skin, naked, charred, bloated children drowning in rivers in which they sought relief, and the bright rain of radiation falling down on their heads, these people were the survivors. These were the ones who had experienced such a small percentage of the damage that they lived to 60 and 70 years old. These were the experiences of the lucky. And all of their pictures were of students, still wearing school uniforms, 12 and 13 and living through a nuclear bomb with not an adult in sight. Not the typical coming of age.

How does one know something like this? How do you remember this and act normally? How do you forget it? I can't figure it out. It is too late for blame - the people who made the decision are long out of power, and I do not expect that it can ever be made again. The survivors are dwindling - this is truly fading into the past.

But I am learning its true horror for the first time - what am I to do with my new information?

I don't really know. But I guess it's always better to know than not to know. Right? Maybe? I don't know! So there we are. I know some things. I don't know other things. I guess I'll just keep thinking.