I know on all of my other blogs, I tend to focus on food, but it does not feel right to do this on this day due to the experience we had. But to at least somewhat keep up with the bit, here are pictures of what I ate that day:
On this day, we paid a visit to Hiroshima and saw the Peace Memorial Dome as well as the Peace Memorial Museum. It was what I would consider a haunting experience. Seeing the dome, which seemed to be a beautiful piece of architecture in its prime, reduced to a skeleton of what it used to be surrounded by rubble is a scary image.
At the museum, the pain everyone suffered was immortalized with pictures and words, and it was nauseating to experience. How could someone morally do this to not just another innocent human being, but thousands of them? The thought itself is incredibly upsetting, but seeing it all before your very eyes brings it to a new level. Seeing all of the possessions the deceased had held dearly even during the bombing and the stories of people desperately trying to keep their loved ones alive was heart-wrenching. What may have been even more upsetting to me was the stories of those who submitted to their fates after fighting off disease caused by nuclear pollution for years.
The whole experience felt absolutely terrible, but I believe it was a necessary experience. We need to know history and why our ancestors were wrong to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes and lose our humanity as they did.
Next, we went to a Shinto shrine with hundreds of yellow lanterns.
Finally, a small group of us ran to and from the Hiroshima Pokémon Center before we hopped on the train back to Kyoto. That was the end of an incredibly emotionally draining day on this trip in Japan.