We had a restful night’s sleep and checked out of the hotel by 9 am. Mr. O’Brien mastered the Japan Rail timetable and got us from Kyoto to Shin-Osaka with time to spare for the hour and a half train ride on to Hiroshima.
Most of us had a quiet trip on the shinkansen, but Anthony sat with an Irishman and shared stories with him for the entire journey.
When we arrived in Hiroshima, we dropped our bags off at the hotel and made our way up to the 11th floor of a local department store for lunch. Ms. Tebbutt and the junior school students found the coolest tatami room with great views of the city and mountains.
After lunch, we took a tramcar up to the Atomic Bomb Dome and the Peace Park. The atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 exploded 580 metres above the Atomic Bomb Dome memorial; it was one of the only buildings left standing in all of Hiroshima after the blast.
We made our way into the Peace Park and split into two groups. Ms. Gracia read the Year 8’s and Mr. O’Brien the picture book Sadako, the true story of a young Japanese girl who develops leukaemia from the bomb. She decides to start folding paper cranes and she believes that if she can fold 1000, she will recover. She dies before she reaches her goal, but her classmates fold the remaining 300 cranes and eventually establish a memorial for her and all the other young victims of the bomb in the Peace Park.
Natalia then taught us how to fold our own paper cranes to leave at the memorial. George and Aisleen folded beautiful cranes. Charles and Richard’s cranes looked more like squat chickens at first, but Natalia helped fix them up.
The group then made our way to Sadako’s memorial and left our cranes along with the thousands and thousands and thousands left by Japanese school children and other visitors. We registered our visit in the database and left a message of peace from SCECGS Redlands.
The Year 8’s and Mr. O’Brien then continued on to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. We were struck by the models of Hiroshima before and after the blast and the multitude of personal effects collected and displayed in the museum. We also learned that 1 in 10 of the victims of the bombing were Korean slave labourers.
As the name of the museum implies, its focus is peace. For example, each time since 1968 that a nation has tested a nuclear device, the mayor of Hiroshima has sent a letter to that country’s ambassador urging that nuclear weapons be eliminated; the wall of these letters sends a powerful message of the people of Hiroshima’s desire for peace. We couldn’t help but leave the museum feeling that humans need to move beyond the Nuclear Age and need to move now.
Ms. Tebbutt read Sadako and the book My Hiroshima to her group of younger students. They then asked several Japanese schoolgirls to teach them to make paper cranes. After making the cranes, they all made their way to the Sadako memorial where they observed a ceremony of high school students presenting a wreath of one thousand cranes. They then left their cranes at the memorial and made a wish for peace and wandered around the Peace Park.
After the two groups rejoined and made our way back to the hotel, we checked in and made our way out for a delicious dinner in small groups. Following dinner, the boys posed for a photo in their hotel robes and weaponry. As all weaponry was brought out for the photo, this provided the opportunity for a group deposit of all arms into the Gracia/Tebbutt armoury for the evening.
This is our last night in a hotel. Tomorrow we travel early to see the water shrine at Miwajima and then on by shinkansen to Osaka where we will catch our evening flight back to Sydney. We will be catching Flight JL 777, landing in Sydney at 9:55 am. We’ll be making the most of our final day in Japan…
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