Go Feedback:It's hard for a visit to the city not to be dominated by the nuclear bomb but there are many other sights, writes Mary Morrissey
HIROSHIMA IS a name that conjures up horror, the city that was incinerated when the first nuclear bomb was dropped on August 6th, 1945, claiming 140,000 lives.
What is easy to forget is that Hiroshima had an identity before the A-bomb and that identity – a beautiful garden city, a veritable Venice embroidered with six rivers, set in a bowl of magnificent mountains on the Seto Inland Sea with its archipelago of islands – is what attracted me after several months living in the brazen clamour of Tokyo. That and a novel, or to be more precise, a description in Australian author Shirley Hazzard's novel The Great Fireset in the aftermath of that war. The hero, Aldred Leith, arrives into Kure, the port of Hiroshima, and takes a ferry to the island of Etajima: "The little ship, sailing to its appointments, passed among islands all glorious with morning, on a blue course."
It was a journey Hazzard herself took when she was a teenager and her father was stationed in Japan. "I'll never forget it," she said recently in an interview with Narrativemagazine. "This vast body of water, and the towns along the edges of the sea; we had never seen that architecture, the Asian masts in the harbours. And then we came into Kure, and it was just full of sunken ships, lopsided, capsized."
Even in literature, it is impossible to ignore Hiroshima’s shadow existence as a salutary reminder of the monstrosities of war, but thanks to Hazzard’s mellifluous prose, my overwhelming impression of the city before I went, was of beauty, not terror. There are no sunken carcasses of ships in Kure anymore, but the coastline is mottled by the monstrosities of new architecture, large industrial buildings, the visual junk of a working port.
I took the ferry Leith had to Etajima, which once housed Japan’s naval academy (now a museum). It’s a short crossing – eight minutes no more. But once away from land, it was as though time had slipped away. A heat haze had settled on the water, wisps of cloud fingering their way between the myriad of islands, steeping the scene in an azure mist. A large ugly concrete tower in the distance was transformed into a sun-stroked mediaeval castle. The Chugoku mountains soared bluely, fold upon fold, and it was possible, briefly, to forget Hiroshima’s terrible legacy and see it as the jewel of western Japan, glistening in the late evening sun.
Ironically, it was these very mountains that contributed to the choice of Hiroshima as a target. Along with Hiroshima’s military and port installations, its situation nestled in a ring of mountains meant that the force of the bomb was contained, thus increasing the level of destruction. Over 69 per cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed over a two-to-three mile radius.
THE PEACEMemorial Museum is near the epicentre of the explosion, now a natural parkland where once the city's entertainment district lay. The museum is divided into two wings – the east and west, a sort of before and after – showing first the vibrant life of Hiroshima with its proud naval and military tradition and its reputation as a centre of learning, followed by the devastation that August 6th, 1945, brought. The decision not to rebuild here gives the city a green heart, bounded by two of the city's rivers.
The wide open space dotted with memorials – the burial mound for thousands of unnamed victims, the eternal flame, the huge Peace bell, the children’s monument, the Peace Memorial Hall, where thousands of heartbreaking testimonies of survivors are held – is marked out in blocks that mirror the former thriving streets emphasising the calamity that took place here. But perhaps the most eloquent testament is the A-bomb dome, once the Prefectural Industrial Hall, the only building that was left standing after the blast. It has been left as it was, a doomed skeleton, its dome still intact, scarred yet oddly defiant.
Words fail when it comes to describe the effects of a visit to the museum which will take the visitor the best part of a day – it really has to be experienced. A volunteer guide, a native of Hiroshima, who adopted me and took me around deflected all queries about bitterness. “There’s no point,” she said in her flawless English.
Then, brightening, she told me I must try Hiroshima’s trademark dish before I left. The okonomiyaki is a flour pancake fried with cabbage, bean sprouts and pork, sitting on a bed of buckwheat noodles and topped off with spring onions and a fried egg. It was no surprise to learn that even this bears the shadow of war, developing its pride of place in Hiroshima’s cuisine during the 1940s when rice was scarce.
IT IS HARD FORa visit to Hiroshima not to be dominated by the nuclear bomb but there are many other sights – the imposing Ri-jo Castle, the exquisite Shukkeien Gardens, and perhaps the most beautifully situated shrine in all Japan (and believe me, I saw enough of them!). The Itsukushima shrine is on the island of Miyajima in Hiroshima's inland sea, overlooked by the towering Mount Misen.
Reached by ferry, the entire shrine containing a five-tier pagoda, a prayer hall and a Noh theatre stage, is built on pilings driven into the sea-bed. At high tide, its distinctive torii gate, painted a luminous orange, rises up out of the water and seems to float.
There’s the distinct feeling, on leaving, that if you looked over your shoulder it might well have disappeared, yet another shimmering mirage in this most ethereal of cities.
- Mary Morrissey is a novelist. She was on a visiting lectureship at Senshu University, Tokyo