Wednesday, 7 November 2012
Mention the the largest city in the Chūgoku region of western Honshu and capital of Hiroshima Prefecture and the first thing that will spring to mind is what happened at a quarter past eight on the morning of 6 August 1945.
And so it should, because when American B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the bomb they’d nicknamed Little Boy it didn’t just kill around eighty thousand people directly, a figure that rose to somewhere between ninety and one hundred and forty thousand as the effects of injury and radiation took their toll, it changed the world forever and made the world a very scary place indeed for the next quarter of a century or so.
We weren’t as concerned about these matters as the end of the twentieth century rolled around, with the Cold War a distant memory but for a small boy who went to bed each night as the Cuban Missile Crisis and surrounding events saw Soviet Russia and the United States engaged in nuclear brinkmanship the possibility of a global repetition of what happened that morning was terrifying.
It’s not as if I actually wanted to visit the city, it’s more a case of feeling that if the opportunity arose I had to. Here’s where it happened, here’s where things changed and we have to ensure that this never happens again. That’s my perspective, anyway, and I’m convinced that the spectre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a major factor in the mindset that shaped the culture of the fifties and early sixties.
But let’s leave that for a moment. Hiroshima has a long pre-atom bomb history and presents a remarkable story of recovery and hope for the future.
Provided, of course, we don’t allow it to happen again.
The city’s name means Wide Island and Hiroshima was founded on the delta formed by the Ota River, flowing out to the Seto Inland Sea in 1589. Mori Terumoto, a powerful warlord made it his capital after leaving Koriyama Castle in Aki Province, built Hiroshima Castle, moved there in 1593 but was on the losing side in the Battle of Sekigahara, which marked the start of the Tokugawa shogunate. Tokugawa Ieyasu gave control of the area to the Asano clan of samurai, who ruled the area until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Under their rule the city prospered and expanded and their descendants were strong supporters of modernization through the Meiji period, Hiroshima became a major industrial centre as the Japanese economy shifted from primarily rural to urban industries and a busy port.
The Sanyo Railway reached Hiroshima in 1894, and the city was a major military centre during the First Sino-Japanese War with the Japanese government temporarily based there during the war. Emperor Meiji made his headquarters at Hiroshima Castle from 15 September 1894 to 27 April 1895 and the first round of peace talks to end the war was held in Hiroshima in early February 1895. Hiroshima was a major supply base during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and a focal point of military activity when the Japanese government entered the First World War on the Allied side. The Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, constructed in 1915 as a centre for trade and the display of new products was the closest surviving building to the atomic detonation, designated the Genbaku or Atomic Dome, as part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.
The city was a major military base again during World War II, with large depots of military supplies, and was a key hub for shipping but while there was widespread destruction and hundreds of thousands died in Tokyo and other cities there were no air raids in Hiroshima although students aged eleven to fourteen were mobilized to demolish houses and create firebreaks to protect against potential firebombings.
Just over a month after the bombing the Makurazaki Typhoon (Typhoon Ida) killed and injured another three thousand, destroyed more than half the remaining bridges in the city and added further heavy damage to roads and railroads but Hiroshima was rebuilt with help from the national government that provided financial assistance and land donated previously used for military purposes.
There, in a nutshell, you have the Hiroshima story, and when you walk (or, in our case, travel by tram) through the downtown area on your way to the Atomic Dome you're seeing a remarkable recovery, proof that, if such an event were to happen again, on a small scale, and at the same intensity of blast, recovery might be possible.
On the other hand, as a guide addressing a tour group about ten metres to my left as I stood dabbing at my misty eyes and gazing at the Dome, today's nuclear weapons are much larger and infinitely more powerful. There's a mist over my eyes as I type this, and reflect on a time when a small boy lived in dread that Hiroshima was about to be repeated on a worldwide scale.
But it's a place that needs to be visited, an event that needs to be remembered, and a mid-city environment that has been shaped to deliver a serenity and quiet dignity that's impressive given the awful magnitude of the event it commemorates.
We could have gone further, and made our way into the Peace Museum, but chose instead to walk slowly through the parkland, reflecting on events and trying not to think about events on the other side of the world that will shape the way things go for the next four years.
We were booked on to the 10:51 Sakura 549 service that could have taken us all the way to the day's eventual destination in Kagoshima if we hadn't decided to break the journey in Kumamoto and take a walk around the Castle there, and, as it turned out, it was just as well we hadn't opted to visit the Peace Museum.
There were other places that could well have been worth a visit on a less crowded schedule, including Just north of the city, Fudoin Temple on the east bank of the Ota River is one of the few structures in the area to survive the atomic blast and the The kondo (main hall) is the only designated national treasure in Hiroshima City. It seems the kondo was originally built in Suo Province and moved to the present site, but based on statues of the Buddha of healing and medicine within the building, it is assumed a temple had already been built by on the site by the end of the Heian period. The kondo is the largest remaining structure in the medieval Kara style, brought from south China in the Kamakura era with Zen Buddhism, in Japan. It boasts beams spanning 7.3 metres and 5.5 metres, and irimoya (a combination of gable and hip roof) with mokoshi (an extra roof). Inside, the dedication in suggests Fudoin was built around 1540.
We could also have visited Shukkeien Garden (literally, shrunken-scenery garden), which dates back to 1620, was started just after the completion of Hiroshima Castle, and features a miniaturized representation of a variety of natural formations and scenic views, depicting valleys, mountains, and forests. There are a number of tea houses around the garden's main pond which offer visitors views of the surrounding scenery and a path which winds around the pond passes through all of Shukkeien's miniaturized scenes, it would probably have been an ideal place to destress after the atomic bomb sites, but we had other fish to fry down Kagoshima way
By the time we'd made our way back to the station, hoofed it back to the hotel, where the checkout time was a very convenient eleven o'clock, collected the backpacks and the Little Red Travelling Bag and made our way back to catch the train we had all of five minutes to spare before departure.
Once on board and under way I was tempted to leave the tapping and just enjoy the scenery, since we were on the left hand side and there were issues with solar glare coming into play, but frequent tunnels made the sightseeing bit difficult and by the time we'd passed through the intervening stops and had hit the tunnel that takes the Shinkansen line onto Kyushu I was well and truly in tap it out mode.
Once we'd made our way through Hakata, however, I was inclined to sit back and enjoy the scenery, which, once we were out of the urban sprawl at the top of the island, tended towards forest-clad ridges with the odd bit of residential and farming activity in the valleys and not much of anything in the steep-sided gorges.
We tend to think of Japan as a highly urbanised country, a teeming ants nest kind of place where they employ people to pack passengers into overcrowded commuter trains, forgetting that 73% is mountainous and therefore relatively safe from urban development and 70% is forest (and natural forest, as opposed to planted forests account for 50% of the country's surface area). Madam and I had spent much of the preceding week and a half working our way around that sort of landscape in the Deep North, the relatively recently colonized Hokkaido and the mountainous centre of the country around Nagano, but I'd expected Kyushu, being in the south and relatively warmer would have been fairly closely settled.
The Shinkansen line, of course, is going to avoid, or go over, urbanized areas, so the bullet train corridor might well be seen as the exception to the rule. Our experience the following day, however (he wrote, two days after the events he's chronicling) suggested that forested ridges are the rule rather than the exception in the centre of the southern part of the island.
The original plan had been to conclude the day's travels at Kumamoto, move on from there through the back blocks to Kagoshima on Thursday and do the big leg back to Osaka on the last day of the two week rail pass, but some sort of complication ruled that one out, and Plan B had a three and three-quarter hour stop in Kumamoto before we moved on to Kagoshima.
The main purpose of the stop was to take a look at Kumamoto Castle, and although only a few structures date back to the castle's construction in 1607, the reconstructed castle is one of the most impressive in Japan, rated alongside the white-walled Himeji and black-walled Matsumoto. With around eight hundred cherry trees, the castle is a popular sakura venue in late March and early April each year and although the keep and most other buildings are reconstructions, the work is high quality and new buildings are continually being added.
The original construction, designed and supervised by Kato Kiyomasa, the feudal lord (daimyo) who ruled the area, took seven years following the Battle of Sekigahara, though its foundations date back to 1467. Because of faithful service to Tokugawa Ieyasu, Kato had been awarded the whole of Kumamoto Prefecture, then known as Higo Province, and constructing Kumamoto Castle was part of his efforts to unify and develop the region.
Kato built fortifications highly regarded for their defensive capabilities, and a number of castles he designed in Korea during the Imjin War were able to repel much larger forces because of their effective design. Kumamoto Castle, was considered an almost impregnable fortress thanks to its defensive features, particularly the curved stone walls and wooden overhangs, designed as protection against the ninja.
Less than fifty years after it was completed the castle and surrounding area were given to the Hosokawa clan which ruled the area for the next two centuries. Following the Meiji Restoration (1868), the castle played a pivotal role during the Satsuma Rebellion when Saigo Takamori led an uprising against the new government. Kumamoto was the main garrison of government troops in Kyushu, and Saigo attacked the castle in early 1877. Despite being outnumbered government forces were able to withstand a two month siege, forcing the rebel forces to retreat.
The original castle keep burnt down just before the siege, but in 1960 a ferro-concrete reconstruction re-created the exterior and a recreation of the Honmaru Goten Palace, created to celebrate the castle's 400th anniversary opened to the public in 2008.
The original building was one of many destroyed during the Satsuma Rebellion but they’ve gone to great lengths to use original materials and methods in the reconstruction, and the result certainly looks like an accurate recreation of the opulent lacquered rooms in which the daimyo would receive guests.
I’m not generally a fan of reconstructions, but when they’re done this well…
And, apart from the walk through the interior reconstruction there was a highly choreographed samurai show, evidently designed to keep the younger set happy, but a pretty good time was had by all.
As far as the city itself is concerned, the other major attraction is Suizenji Koen, a landscape garden built in 1636 by Hosokawa Tadatoshi, the second lord of Kumamoto, as a private retreat. The garden is a network of traditional gardens spanning an area of sixty-five hectares that reproduces the fifty-three post stations of the Tokaido road, which connected Edo with Kyoto during the Edo Period, in miniature form.
Three and a quarter hours with most of them spent exploring the Castle ruled out a visit to the Garden this time around, but ongoing reconstruction at the Castle and the prospect of a walk through that landscape is the sort of thing that could well draw us back to Kumamoto.
Back on the Shinkansen it was a further hour and three-quarters to Kagoshima, where the night's accommodation was a bit further from the station than I would have preferred if we were still lugging the Black Monster, but with the Little Red Travelling Bag in hand we found our way to the tram stop, alighting three stops later to head off into the eating and drinking quarter in search of the Sunn Days Inn, which lay right in the heart of the quarter, a prime destination for the hungry and thirsty salary man.
Having checked in we were out again in fairly short order looking for a particular venue that deals in one of Kagoshima's specialities, black pork. Previous stops, having been fairly close to the station concerned, had mostly been away from prime eating and drinking areas, and when we'd ventured into such territory we were headed for a place where Madam had, more or less, a fair idea of the place's location.
Here we found ourselves wandering along a backstreet, down another, onto one of the city's major thoroughfares, and back a block before we located the place she was looking for. Given the fact that this was, apparently, a highly rated purveyor of prime pork you'd expect it to have been a bit easier to find.
Actually, tucked away at the back of a basement collection of eateries (two of them apparently French) on the edge of the Eating Quarter you'd have expected it to be doing things a little tough, but while we were there a steady stream of customers made their way through the door. Not bad, one would have thought, relatively early on a Wednesday night.
We ended up in a tatami mat cubicle, at the chef's suggestion, rather than seated at the bar, and I was glad we did, since we'd ordered the prime version of the pork, which was cut thicker and consequently took longer to cook.
I downed a substantial pitcher of beer while we were waiting, and I wanted to go another with the meal, a request that was overruled by the wait staff on the grounds that the meal was rather substantial and I wouldn't be able to manage both.
We'd learnt of Obama's re-election in the States on the last leg of the train trip, and I was in a mood to celebrate, so I was quite certain that I could, but Madam advised caution and the avoidance of scenes, so we had to do with the meal, which mightn't have been the largest I've ever tackled but was certainly in the running for the top five.A substantial piece of high quality pork had been crumbed and deep fried, then sliced into substantial chunks and came on a platter with a generous serve of sliced cabbage, a couple of slices of cucumber, a bowel of rice and the seemingly obligatory miso soup.
I'm not miso-friendly, so that was never going to enter calculations, but I made pretty fair work of the pork and my serve of rice. Around a third of the way through we were visited by the chef, who demonstrated the correct way of seasoning the pork.
He started with a healthy sprinkling of a sauce that wasn't too dissimilar to the one I'd disliked the night before and had been avoiding to date in the evening's proceedings, then added a fair dollop of hot English mustard, which I had been indulging in, not in the quantity seemingly required.
The combination worked rather well, and by the time my serve of pork and rice were gone there was only a skerrick of mustard left, which was a problem when Madam advised she'd been beaten by quantity.
There was about a third of her serve left, and a fair quantity of rice which the chef had described as a high quality product from Akita Prefecture in northern Honshu. Under those circumstances I felt obliged to finish both pork and rice, but there was no way I was going to manage the cabbage and still leave room for a celebratory ale or two.
Having completed the repast Madam wasn't inclined to hang around for pitchers of beer, and who could blame her, since she didn't have the capacity to join in the celebrations.
We wended our way back to the hotel, turned on the TV in search of updates on the Obama situation, found we were on the end of the relevant bulletin and settled back to watch a panel discussion about dieting as Hughesy downed a couple of Asahis to celebrate the Presidential result.
Predictably, by around nine-thirty the sawmill was in full production.
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