Let me say this now; Japan’s bullet train is amazing. Super fast, super high-tech, and moving like an airplane attached to the ground. We took a shinkansen up to Hiroshima, passing through Osaka and Kyoto. What would have taken over 5 hours by car took only 2 hours by bullet train. One of those things that you absolutely have to experience in Japan. Check!

The biggest purpose of our trip was to visit the various peace and war memorials in Hiroshima. That included the Peace Memorial Museum, the A-Bomb Dome, the Children’s memorial, the eternal flame, and various memorials dedicated to others affected by the bomb dropped on the city years ago.

It was a devastating day. We all walked quietly in the rain to the museum. I walked the exhibits alone, and was brought to tears twice. Seeing watches stopped on 8:15 AM, rusted tricycles, pictures of burnt bodies, maps of an utterly destroyed and torn apart city, tattered and scorched clothes, a lunch box with the un-eaten, charred food still inside. Seeing the tiny paper cranes made from cellophane folded by Sadako, who died of leukemia early in life. Visiting the huge urn filled with ashes of unidentified people who died in the blast.

It was appalling. To see how so many people suffered needlessly, to see the sick, cruel reasonings behind why Hiroshima was chosen over other cities in Japan, how its fate was sealed when the day Enola Gay flew was bright, sunny, and cloudless. And over everything, letters of Hiroshima mayors to countries still testing nuclear weapons, calling for peace, calling for the destruction of the weapons.

I’ve never been in a place like this museum before. Even after visiting war sites, after going to the DC Holocaust museum, nothing could have prepared me for the utter grief that Hiroshima held. You can feel the sorrow of the Japanese people within the very walls, you can hear the pleading for peace, and the very strength of their calls for reform and a need to spread the word sinks into your skin and stays there after you leave.

You don’t just hear about the masses that died. You meet individuals that suffered at the hands of a single destructive force. You are put into their tattered clothes and made to walk the burning streets and feel the heat of radiation.

That museum made me feel something I have never truly been made to feel before, and in a way, I am grateful for it. But I do not think I could enter that place ever again.

We had 2 hours of free time after the museum, but no one in the group had strength or heart to explore Hiroshima, feeling rather sick to our stomachs and depressed. We went back to our hotel to wait until dinner instead.

Not exactly an ideal way to start a trip, but it was a place that, in my opinion, needed to be visited, and an event that needed to be understood more properly, especially from the viewpoint of the people who had suffered the most.

Location: Hiroshima, Japan