Back in June, we went to Hiroshima, to check out the city where the first Atom bomb was dropped. When you think of Hiroshima, you might think of a small devastated town, but actually, it is a huge bustling city, and you would never  have thought that the city had been ever disturbed.

We got there by train, which we caught at Onimichi, following our cycling trip on the Shimanami Kaido route. Whenever we would get on a train in Japan, we would try and a window seat, and we would try and spot the Shinkansen line amongst the hills, tunnels and valleys. When we caught sight of it, we would keep track of it, and if it went through a tunnel, we would try to predict where it would come out. If we were lucky, we would actually spot a Shinkansen. I think we only ever spotted Shinkansens of the N700 Type.

Before we came to Hiroshima, a Shinkansen was the best thing you could possibly see. But, as we started to enter the ginormous station of Hiroshima, we started spotting Shinkansen lines everywhere and soon everywhere you looked, a bullet train would be whizzing by. Soon, we gave up counting them. I’ve given up counting a lot of things; when I was little I used to count police cars, fire trucks and ambulances- I stopped at around 3000, and I also used to count London Taxis- I gave up at around 7385, though I imagine I must have counted wrong. When we first came to France I would count trams, no idea when I stopped counting trams. I stopped counting Shinkansens (If you want “bullet trains”) at about twenty, as I couldn’t keep track.

So, when we got off the train and found our way out of the station, we stepped out of the station into…
The Biggest City I’d Been In For A Long Time. Hiroshima was busier and bigger than I had expected, and it had TRAMS! We were so excited about the trams, especially as they were not the same as the ones that we have in Montpelier: they were of an older and less elegant type, as I will show. A little older they would have been more elegant, but you can’t really compare them with a Montpellier modern tram. But the point is, they were different. Anyway, to get to the house we had rented (first time we rented a house in Japan and weren’t welcomed in by the owner but had it considered ours for the time we rented it and had to unlock it ourselves), we took the tram. When we got off the tram, we had to walk a bit since the tram stop wasn’t on the same road as the house. As a matter of fact, the house wasn’t even on a road, more like a tiny street; no I wouldn’t even call it a tiny street, I would call it an alley not even big enough to fit a Japanese minivan- one of the smallest types of cars in the world. So, once we had found this tiny little alley, we unlocked the door of the house… …and went exploring!

Samuel, Elliot and I looked all over the house, and then we played hide-and-seek. We also wrote in our journals quite a lot. We then went out for a walk to visit the statue of Sadako, and on the way back we stopped at a supermarket to get some stuff for Mama to cook with. In Hiroshima for dinner, we usually ate either Okonomi-yaki, Onigili (Rice-balls) or noodles. Mama cooks Okonomi-yaki really well and even now, back in Montpellier we have it every so often. We haven’t had Onigili for a long time, though.

There were a lot of memorials in Hiroshima. I doubt I’d ever seen so many before. The first thing (that is unique to Hiroshima) that we went to see after we’d put our stuff down in the house we’d rented was also a memorial. It was a statue of Sadako, as I have already said. dedicated to the children who died because of the dropping of the atom bomb.

Now, you might be wondering who is this Sadako… Sadako was a young girl of twelve who died ten years after the atom bomb was dropped of leukaemia. Leukaemia is a deadly disease and is also known as The Atom Bomb Disease. Sadako was two when the atom bomb was dropped and survived unharmed. In 1954, she got the first symptoms of leukaemia and in February 1955 was hospitalised. She heard from her father/best friend – depending on the version – that legend went that if you folded a thousand paper cranes, and repeated your wish every time you finished one, the gods would grant you that wish. Sadako didn’t believe in things like that, but she was ready to try anything to get better.

Again, there are two versions: She only got to 644 paper cranes before she died, and her classmates finished the rest, and she was buried with 1000 paper cranes, or, she got to a thousand but continued, and made more, but died anyway. Then her father kept 644 of the paper cranes that Sadako had made, and her classmates made additional ones to get them back up to a thousand and Sadako was buried with 1000 paper cranes. Anyway, around the statue were big glass boxes which were full of tiny coloured paper cranes stacked up into columns hung from the roof of the box around the edges which made pictures because all the colours were carefully stacked in a way that when you put the piles together, they formed a picture. For example, one of them made a giant paper crane! The statue of Sadako was also the last thing we visited before we left Hiroshima.

Over the next few days, we visited the Mazda Museum/Factory, the Hiroshima castle, the Polar bear ice-cream shop, a fancy ice-cream shop, an okonomi-yaki whole floor of a building, the Museum of the Dead, and we wandered all around Hiroshima. I’ll talk about the Mazda Factory first.

We had to get up early to catch the train out of central Hiroshima to the Mazda Museum. When we got there, Daddy got the tickets while Samuel, Elliot and I tested out the cars. Yep, you got that right- tested out the cars. There were loads of different Mazda cars in the entrance hall and you could get in and do all sorts of stuff. Since then, my official favourite Mazda is the CX5, Elliot’s is the MX5 Roadster and Samuel’s is the same as Elliot’s. After we had played in the cars a bit, the Mazda bus arrived. (It wasn’t actually made by Mazda, but it was used by Mazda). We got on it for a guided tour around the huge Mazda factory. We passed by the moulding place, the printing place, the painting place, the bridge Mazda had built (at the time it was the biggest bridge in Japan), and our guide told everyone in the bus all about all these buildings. Finally, we got off the bus and went into the factory.

Inside, we saw a film on the history of Mazda, and visited “the future of Mazda” and “Mazda cars over time” and at one point if we looked out of the window, we could see a huge car transporter boat that transported Mazda cars all around the world. But the most amazing part of all was the actual factory part- a seven km production line. It was fantastic. I can barely describe it. I’ll do my best.

Basically, the cars just went down a conveyor belt with people putting stuff on at each stage; for example, putting the engines in would take four people, putting the seats in would take one person and the windows would take two plus some robots. There were robot trolleys that would bring you the spare parts that you needed to build the car, and these were filled up from an underground circuit. Basically, a robo-trolley, once empty, would go into a small room-sized structure, then the shutters would close where it had come in, and the ground would lower like a lift onto the underground circuit, and it would then drive away. Then another would come up from the underground circuit and bring some parts do one of the car’s stages.

The robots that did the windows, well one of them would pick up the window and pass it to the other one who would put glue on it and pass it to the next one would put it on a big machine which, with the help of humans, would put it on the car. What was really cool though, was that all the windscreens were different and the robot recognized each one and put glue on exactly the right places.

And then near the end of the production line, the cars were lifted up by cranes and put on another track right above the parts I was talking about, and that was quite interesting to watch, because the cars which had hardly been started and only had a few pieces on them also passed by that track, and so we could see the huge difference between the just started cars and nearly finished cars. Then we left by Mazda bus and went back to the place where I had been in the CX5 and then we caught the train back to central Hiroshima.

 

 

The big road near where we were living was extremely wide, and the tram line was running in the middle. It was so big there were hardly any pedestrian crossings, instead, they had to cross the road. In a town such as Montpelier or London, this might have ruined the old town, but in Hiroshima, everything had been rebuilt since the dropping of the atomic bomb. There were lots of tall towers and shops. Often we would go on walks down the big road and we went to lots of interesting places. I’ll talk about EATING first (as it’s probably the best part).

The BEST restaurant was for sure POLAR BEAR. As you might have guessed, POLAR BEAR (By the way I’m putting POLAR BEAR in capitals because it is so great) is an ice-cream shop, and not a restaurant (or a Polar bear shop). Don’t ask me why I said it was a restaurant earlier. Anyway, POLAR BEAR was one of the best ice-cream shops in the whole entire world. We had read about this ice-cream shop when we arrived, but every time we came to it it was closed apart from our last visit to it. When we, at last, entered we were confronted with a hard decision… One flavour or two flavours? We decided to choose one flavour for starters. But then we saw the size of one scoop. It was HUGE!!!!!!!!!! It was about the size of Elliot’s head. We took one-scoopers. Sadly, we only got to ever go to POLAR BEAR once while we were in Hiroshima. Polar Bear also had a wide variety of flavours… Mama took Bamboo Charcoal, Daddy took Sesame, and Samuel, Elliot and I all took mango. Until recently, every time we had ice-cream, all us children would take mango (which, by the way, is the BEST fruit ever).

We also went to several museums including the Museum of the Dead. The Museum of the Dead was a memorial to- well, the dead. It was not above ground, but it spiralled around underground going deeper and deeper until it got to the core. All the way to the core the walls were covered with names. At the core, there was a film going on. It had many stories from survivors of the atom bomb. Most were very sad. After the core, the museum spiralled back up and then came out at a different exit. At the exit, a nice lady whose job was to make paper cranes for a display gave us two minuscule paper cranes in an origami box.

There were other memorials such as the atom bomb dome and the Hiroshima Castle. The atom bomb dome was (once) the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall and it was one of the two buildings that hadn’t been flattened by the atom bomb even though it was very close to the epicentre. While it wasn’t flattened, it was as ruined as a 3000-year old castle might be. If you want to see what I mean, look at the pictures below:

We visited the dome, and whenever we went on the tram or walked to the centre, we would always pass by it (it was right next to one of the main tramlines+roads+bridges). It is also part of the Hiroshima Peace Park, as are the Statue of Sadako and the big bell. That reminds me, I haven’t mentioned the Big Bell.

The Big Bell (as I call it) was on the other side of the river from the Atomic Dome, and was, rather obviously, a big bell. Not just big, but huge. To ring it, you swung a sort of small battering ram against it, and it was SO noisy. We all tried it multiple times.

Now about the Hiroshima Castle. It was originally built between 1589 and 1598 but later flattened by the atomic bomb. Amazingly, even though the castle itself was destroyed, three trees survived. They are still there to this day. The castle was partially reconstructed – there are still some ruins – and the keep was turned into a museum about the history of Hiroshima before the 6th of August 1945.

We brought sandwiches and ate on the castle side of the moat, but outside the walls. We also visited the keep (museum) and it was pretty amazing. There were ancient swords, daggers, axes, knives, etc… as well as portable chairs (for the king or for the lord), there were armours and loads of other things. There were stamps on chains on the various floors and you could take a piece of paper and stamp it with all the stamps in the museum as a souvenir. We did this and stuck the papers with the stamps in our journals. Oh, and speaking of journals, I finished the journal Felicity had given me in London a year before and continued on the journal I had bought in Thailand. Actually, right now, I’m still in Japan (in my journal at least).

In the museum we also learnt that Hiroshima was once a marsh, and the castle of Hiroshima was built in the Delta of some river and since it was a marsh they made islands in it to build the castle on out of mud and sand drawn from the bottom of the marsh and lined the edges with logs to stop the mud and sand getting away. The result was very good. There was one activity where there were lots of bits of wood and you had to put the right pieces of joinery together. There was another activity where there were old (well new, but old-fashioned) Japanese ladies robes as well as samurai outfits. The helmets were so heavy! But I think I’ve said everything on Hiroshima Castle. I’ll move on to what we did in the city centre.

As I mentioned before, we would go down for walks on that big human-covered street, and on the day before we left, we got Koshiro and Tojiro some presents for when we were going to go back to Tokyo. We got Tojiro a Lego Speed Champions Bugatti Chiron, and we got Koshiro a Lego Speed Champions Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG.

We also visited a kind of Okonomi-Yaki Theme Park- if you could call it that. At least that’s what Daddy called it when he suggested we go there. It was actually just twenty small Okonomi-Yaki restaurants on one floor of a tall building. There were some other people there so we went to one of the restaurants where there was no-one. The man there cooked us all absolutely HUGE Okonomi-Yakis right in front of us. Literally in front of us. The counter we ate off was actually a HUGE cooking board. It was hot enough to fry an egg- whether he did or not I’ve forgotten. He didn’t make them the same way as Mama did; he put in noodles and everything wasn’t all stuck together like in Mama’s one, so looked like a messy heap of cabbage, noodles and other ingredients on top of a pancake. In Hiroshima the Okonomi-Yakis are special because they put noodles in them.  They were very good. Mine was so big I couldn’t finish it.

One day, coming back home, we met an old American man who had been living in Hiroshima for a long time. We wouldn’t be staying that long. We had arrived on the morning of the 20th of June and we left on the morning of the 23rd. We had arrived by train, we left by train. But not on the same tracks. Well, obviously not on the same tracks, since we were heading for Tokyo when we left Hiroshima, and we had been coming from Onimichi when we arrived, but I mean the actual design of the rails were different. Yes, that’s right, we were heading north on… a Shinkansen!

We were all so excited. It was only when we got to the station that I realised that we hadn’t actually bought the tickets yet and we might miss the train. That’s the good thing about bullet trains. In France, if you want to catch a TGV, you have to book it weeks in advance whereas in Japan, you can just pop up to the station, get some tickets from a machine that looks just like an ATM then hop on the train! Actually, we didn’t just hop on the train. We had to wait for it first. Then we didn’t hop on it either. I took some pictures first. And even then we didn’t just hop on it. We waited until it had stopped. Actually, we never hopped on the train. We fairly calmly walked onto the train. And then we sat down. We did not hop. Even though it was a N700, the commonest and one of the coolest Shinkansens in Japan.

Actually, I was hoping for an E5 Hayabusa, one of the rarest, coolest and fastest Shinkansens in Japan. So actually the only difference is that the E5 is rarer and faster. But I didn’t have a chance. E5 s don’t come down as far south as Hiroshima. We had watched the same Shinkansen line that we were travelling on from the local train from Onimichi to Hiroshima, and played a game where we had to keep track of the line. Whenever we passed a hill, – as we were right on the edge of the Hilly Region (as I call it), we had hills on the left and not on the right so we just passed right by the hills on the left, and there were none on the right for us to have to go around, with the Shinkansen line on the left – it appeared to disappear. In the end, we concluded that either it went behind the hills, or it went through them, or even both.

We discovered on the Shinkansen that it NEVER ever went around them; it went through EVERY single one! And that was a lot. At the start, because there were quite a lot of tunnels, we played a game where every time we went through a tunnel, it was a night, and we had to keep track of how many days and nights we’d been on it. We lost track at around forty-two nights and forty-two days. We did the same thing as we did on the local train from Onimichi; we tried to keep track of the other line, but it was trickier because we were going ever so much faster. We also noticed that we were staying at around the same altitude all the time, for example when it stopped at both the stations of Hiroshima and Osaka, the shinkansen line was on the roof!

We all wrote our journals on the train, and that explains why parts are rather wobbly. The journey lasted three hours, and when we arrived in Tokyo, we were neither up in the air, nor down on the ground, but underground! We weren’t in a tunnel, but in a large ditch lined with concrete. Looking up out of the window, I could see that the edges of the ditch, the parts that were at ground level, were lined with all sorts of skyscrapers. We finally arrived at the Tokyo terminus, and the Tokyo terminus was a very big Tokyo Terminal! It was just littered with bullet trains.

When we got off the train, we took some photos of us next to the train, then I started to talk to Mama and Daddy about the E5 when Mama suddenly drew our attention to a hint of turquoise blue a few platforms away. We looked at it for a second, then jumped for joy: there was no doubt about it, Mama had just spotted an E5 HAYABUSA! We turned and ran. We ran down the stairs which led from the overground platform to the underground tunnel which connected the platforms together, we ran up the very next flight of steps which led to the next platform and discovered that…that we were still a long way away from the platform which harboured the E5. So we ran back down the steps, and this time skipped one flight of steps and went up the one after that one. But we were still a little way off. So this time we counted the number of platforms in between us and it, and ran back down into the tunnel and counted the number of flights as we ran…and we found a little barrage of ticket-checking machines separating us from the stairs we wanted to go up. A security guard explained to us that since we had come on an N700, we only had access to the platforms which harboured trains identical to the one we came on. So we were forced to be content with the platform next to the wanted one. Luckily for us, there were no trains in between us and our target so we got to take some shots of it. I got some good ones but not the one I really wanted to take: a shot from the front. It looks best from the front. In all the Shinkansen ads, there’s there Hayabusa, and it’s nearly always taken from the front.

 

 

 

Once we had had our fill of photos, we triumphantly marched down the steps and caught the local train back to Chisa, Masaki, Koshiro and Tojiro’s part of town.