Day Two: Hiroshima!

Hey everyone! I have arrived home safely from Japan! Now I will actually have time to post, since we had such delightfully packed days for the past two weeks! This post will be very long, since I will try to cover the entire second day we had in Hiroshima. I will warn you that there will be some sad content during this post, since we visited the Hiroshima museum following the dropping of the atomic bomb. Sometime in the next week or so, I will be posting a collection of educational materials that goes into more depth which can be read by anyone or used as teaching resources for anyone who is interested. There are also plenty of cool things and happy things from the city, and I think this speaks to the success the Japanese have had in rebuilding their city!

 Fish are a central component of Japanese culture and are often used as city "mascot" sort of.

 This bank was the only building that survived the bombing completely in 1945. This picture is the current photo and then the picture below is immediately following the bombing.

 Prior to the trip, my grandparents on my mom's side showed me a photo album of their trip to Japan, and there were a lot of boats in it, so I also took many pictures of boats while I was there! I love this picture!

 These roses are from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial rose garden.

 Here is a picture of all of the people who were on my trip! You will definitely be seeing a lot of them in upcoming posts! We are in front of part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

 And here is a picture of one of the main parts of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, called the Genbaku Dome. It was purposely left how it was after the bombing and not rebuilt, to serve as a reminder of what happened there, in the midst of other parts of the city that were rebuilt.

This post has way too many pictures, so click "read more" to access the rest of the post!

 This picture shows the original photo of the Genbaku Dome, on a plaque in front of the river.

 This was a powerful Peace Bell that visitors of the park could ring. Our group all went up in pairs to ring the bell. There will be footage of this in an upcoming video I make.

 This shows how the bell works from behind.

 As we were walking through one of the gardens, there was this man playing the shakuhachi, I believe, which is a beautiful Japanese instrument. It's soft, sweet, and sad melodies wafted through the park, and added to the atmosphere.

 Here is another group photo!

 This was a picture of the rice bowls we were given for lunch at the Rotary International Peace forum! Lots of new foods to try, except for some of the seafood I am mildly allergic to!

 Some of the members of our group were given "Peace begins with you T-shirts" to wear during the closing ceremonies when we danced with the children on stage. I posted the video about two weeks ago on my blog of the dance. Paritosh looks pretty excited about his shirt!

 This is the point where there will be some sad content. I urge you to continue reading, but if you are nervous it will be too much for you, you can scroll through the next twelve pictures of so.

This image was incredibly powerful as it was projected onto an entire wall. The photo was taken just a few days after the bombing.

 As a future social studies teacher, I found this exhibit to be very powerful, especially with hearing the Japanese perspective of why the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I went through this museum by myself, and I would have loved to have known what the Japanese people around me were thinking while they were reading it. There will be more of this in my educational post.

 After the dropping of the bomb, the impact was so severe that this concrete wall was severely damaged from flying window glass.

 There was a textbook display of different Asian countries and I was naturally interested. Here are a few.

 The red dot represents the epicenter of the bombing, and reveals the devastation in the surrounding area.

 They had a large exhibit of clothes from school children during the bombing. I will let the photographs speak for themselves.

 Following the bombing, peace education has been very important. We were at the park both on Friday and Saturday, and each day there were tons of students there. We were thinking that it must be a place students from all over the country come to see, since it is very important in their collective history, and is probably pretty accessible, given that Japan is approximately the size of California.

There was an art gallery in the museum from various survivors, who described what they felt from the bomb. This is just one of the examples.

One thing that was really cool to me, is immediately following the dropping of the bomb and once the smoke cleared, survivors began holding school in "open air" classrooms, as pictured below.

Following the museum visit, I had time alone, so I continued to walk around the park and take it all in.

While I was walking, I ran into Paritosh and Allie!

In the afternoon we gave our 1,000 paper cranes to the new president of Rotary International. We also gave him an Illinois hat as a token of our appreciation, and he kept it on for all of his pictures, even with the other Rotary leaders from other countries!

This is all of the collections in front of the monument for Sadako, the girl who had leukemia and made 1,000 paper cranes with hopes it would save her life. Although she did not survive, her actions and life are still remembered and valued today.

Our Honors Program Coordinator told Lauren and I to take a picture in front of all of the paper cranes so we can show our future students that we were there!

We did some more exploring around the city that evening, and found this really cool indoor market that takes up many streets.

Nothing like a good ole samurai costume! And a Starbucks in the background... globalization :)

It is very common for restaurants to make wax models of all of their foods to place in the windows, and the ice cream shops would always look especially tempting!

Some random art in front of a coffee shop!

They have some intense shoes in Japan, and a lot of high heels. I had personally never seen shoes like these before, so I had to take a picture!

We went up to the 7th floor of the mall we were in by escalator, and there were mirrors down the side! From left to right, it's Mallika, me, Carrie, and Kenny!

This was a silly notebook cover that I saw.

Shoutout to Jake! They had the new Fall Out Boy CD with text in Japanese! I got really excited!

We saw some random dresses too that I thought Lizzie might enjoy!

We went to dinner at a yummy okonomiyaki place! I had the fried lemon soba noodles! Yummy yummy!

We ended the evening in the best way possible... yummy ice cream and massage chairs! I decided to try some ice cream that was very "Japanese", aka green tea ice cream, red bean paste, and mochi! So yummy! This was the start of some green tea ice cream crazyness, which you will see over the upcoming posts!

Whew! Many hours later, this post is completed! I definitely didn't have this kind of time while I was there, so it is nice that I will get to sort of relive my adventures over these next few weeks as I share everything that happened during this incredible adventure! Next stop: Yanai!