Hiroshima is quite a famous city due to its dark history on the second world war. We included Hiroshima in our itinerary, which was quite off the usual Tokyo-Kyoto-Osaka route for two reasons. First is because I am quite curious to see what does the city that have recovered from a nuclear explosion look like. And the second reason is because due to its location, Hiroshima is the most efficient base camp if you wanted to visit Okunoshima a.k.a the Rabbit Island.
Getting to Hiroshima is relatively easy, because the city was in the shinkansen main line, and it’s about 3 hours westbound journey from Osaka. Our actual itinerary included Okunoshima side trip on the second morning, but the rabbit island deserves its own blog post, which I will post after this article. In this article I will cover the city of Hiroshima itself and the side trip to Miyajima on the next day. (actual Miyajima timing was after Okunoshima)
We arrived from Koyasan (via Osaka) on the afternoon. Our hotel was Hiroshima Kokusai Hotel, with a Japanese-style room again. This hotel is very conveniently located near the Peace Memorial Park and the Hondori Street, the two main attractions in the city.
From our hotel it was a short walk away to Peace Memorial Park area. You will be able to see how beautiful the city is today, especially at that time when the sakura was blossoming.
The Peace Memorial Park complex was vast, beautiful, and peaceful. It felt like a sacred place (for me), considering that this area was the ground zero of the explosion. People without a history background will definitely think that this park is a really nice park, with children running around chasing each other happily, couples enjoying the scenery, and tourists snapping photographs of the view.
You should not miss visiting the Peace Museum where all the dark past of the city was presented in the spirit of making a peaceful world. Only there you will appreciate and understand the extent of destruction caused by a nuclear explosion. The museum displayed various relics, ruins and all the silent witness of that deadly explosion and described all the pains and sorrow of the people. It was very powerful, and needless to say it got me pretty emotional. I did not take any photographs of the relics, but I definitely will not ever forget the charred lunch box and the charred tricycle…
After learning about the destruction from the museum, going back to see the beautiful city restored 70 years later was very impressive. Not only the rebuilding of the physical state, but also the mental state. Hiroshima was reborn as the City of Peace, after they had suffered so much. They wanted their city to be the center of world peace. It took a great courage, hope, perseverance, and forgiveness to do just that. And I have to say, they have succeeded!
The next morning we went to the Rabbit Island, which will be covered in the next post. After Rabbit Island we went straight away to Miyajima, which was conveniently served by JR line too! You can also take the Hiroden to get to Miyajimaguchi station though.
There will be two boat companies operating ferries to Miyajima, one is a private company and the other is JR. Of course if you hold a JR Pass, the journey was covered. Sweet!
Itsukushima Shrine was only one part of Miyajima (which was the most famous), but the island itself still has a lot to explore. So we went on one hiking trail and these were what we found:
That concludes our Hiroshima trip as we departed to Kyoto the next day. I would recommend visiting Hiroshima if you want something different from your trip to Japan. I will continue the next post with the detailed journal from the beautiful rabbit island. Stay tuned!
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