I’ll admit it now: we didn’t have much of a plan. I packed a few nights worth of clothes in a carry-on, my passport, 60,000 JPY, and a roundtrip plane ticket. That was the gameplan.
“Fine. But just make sure you have a place to stay for the first night,” was the advice we were given. Sounded fair enough. Thanks, Airbnb.
With a vague outline of the cities we wanted to see, we hit the town. We had ten days to see everything in Japan we would ever want to see and that was it. Poof. Gone. Trips like this don’t come twice in a lifetime. I have other places I want to see within this Blue Marble before I see anything twice.
Part of what makes the idea of traveling fascinating to me is seeing the American reputation abroad. Part of why I love New York City is because it’s the cultural epicenter of the world. New Yorkers still treat people like shit, but you get to see the interaction of every conceivable group of people interwoven with one another. The Japanese-American dynamic was interesting to me: we’ve caused them so much harm, yet they seemed to like and respect Americans.
I hadn’t considered traveling to Hiroshima initially. Not until a few beers in a Kyoto bar the night before did an Australian dude convince us to go. (It’s always the Australian dude.) So there we are at 10 AM the next morning on a Shinkansen bullet-train, bound for Hiroshima.
This moment was the most ignorant I’ve ever felt: here I am, an American, just showing up on Hiroshima’s doorstep. Am I allowed to do this? That’s the American bravado, right? Bomb a country and then show up to inspect the remains? Can you drink the water? Do they have old people? Old buildings? Am I an idiot for even asking these questions?
It was cold. It was raining. The air tasted… not bad necessarily, just different. Like sulfur, almost. Placebo effect? Probably. Every river is green. That’s an effect of moss growing on the riverbed, not radiation. But, you wonder…
Before going anywhere, we needed to eat. And of course, we sat down next to this guy: a native of Hiroshima, who had way too much to drink for noon o’clock on a Tuesday.
“Is my English okay? Are you American? Do you like Barack Obama?”
Yep. Yes, and yeeeeah, close enough.
“America is number ONE!” he starts screaming. That is not what I wanted to hear in a crowded restaurant in the middle of Hiroshima. This place is going to kill me.
Eventually the waitress shuttles him out of the restaurant and I immediately feel my face turn back to its natural color. Once we left the restaurant, we found that the people of Hiroshima kept the same values the rest of Japan did: strength, unity, and resilience. It didn’t matter who we were, or where we were from. All that mattered to them is that we were people… and we were there.
I worked in the Financial District of New York City for three years — you’re damn right 9/11 crossed my mind everyday. Its in the 1,776 foot tower rising from its ashes, its in the skyline as you approach from the East River on a crisp and clear morning, its in the variance of police presence on any given day.
But it doesn’t work like that in Japan. It’s easy to forget that your country killed some 250,000 people when it’s not so visible everyday (or ever). There’s no skyscrapers, no extravagant memorials, no militarization of densely populated (and rich) areas of the cities. Individualism and exceptionalism aren’t celebrated there. Facts are just facts. People died here. A lot of people. Everything you see now is a result of that. It’s so low-key that we were back on a Shinkansen train to Tokyo just four hours after arriving.
Hiroshima is a beautiful city. The city has been (mostly) rebuilt. Rebuilt with gray buildings, and with walls and sidewalks outlined in bright, colorful messages of peace. If Hiroshima can pull it off 250,000 people later, maybe eventually we can, too.
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