August 7, Hiroshima and Miyajima

We returned to the Peace Memorial Park for a tour of the monuments and to explore the Museum.  The weather was much better.  My host family took me to meet the group and we began a tour of the monuments.  There are so many monuments that we couldn't possibly see all of them.  One of the first we saw kind of set the stage.  Because it was the day after August 6, many flowers and gifts had been left the day before.  This is an example.  The mound in the background is called the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound.  Sadly, a vault inside contains the ashes of victims who were unidentified or whose whole families perished.

The most most touching memorial for me was the Children's Peace Monument.  The figure atop the monument is a statue of Sadako Sasaki, whose story popularized the custom of folding 1,000 cranes.  She was two years old at the time of the atomic bomb and she was exposed to radiation, which caused her to develop radiation-induced leukemia.  She set the goal of folding 1,000 and reached it...though she died in 1955.

As a result of Sadako's story, people are inspired to bring origami crane strings to this memorial (as well as other places around Hiroshima).  This memorial, though, is especially popular and this structure was built so that people could hang those colorful strings of cranes.  It's a very impressive sight.

We got a better view of the Hiroshima Dome than the one we had yesterday:

We also presented a wreath in front of the cenotaph, a gift from All Souls Church Unitarian.  Reverend Rob Hardies and Judith Bauer laid the wreath while we sang our song,  "When I breathe in, I breath in peace; when I breathe out, I breathe out love."  I didn't get a picture, but I did get a picture of our guide just before that little ceremony.

We then visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which is amazing.  It is hard to take it all in, but I learned a lot about why we need to work against any more nuclear weapons.  I did buy a t-shirt and some books.

We boarded the bus and were bound for Miyajima.  We had bento lunches on the bus.  Miyajima is the island where there is the very famous Shinto shrine, Itsukushima Shrine.  It is famous because the torii gate, and often the shrine, too, appear to be floating on water at high tide.

When we were there, the tide was pretty low and people were walking out to the gate, so my pictures aren't as good as the one above.  There are a lot of deer on the island, and they are very aggressive.  They are considered sacred because they are considered messengers of the gods.  I did get this picture of a "messenger" with a man on a bench:

The shrine really is on an island, and we got there and back by a ferry ride.  We got back on the bus to return to Hiroshima and stayed at the Hotel Granvia Hiroshima that night.  The hotel is right at the train station and we needed to be on the train early the next day for the trip to Kyoto.  That night, we had a banquet for our Hiroshima friends from RKK and from Honkawa School.  There were a lot of speeches and promises to meet again next year in Washington DC.  Here is one of our young people, Charlee Mize, sharing her thoughts and her proud dad, Greg.  He should be proud.  She gave one of the best speeches of the night.