Heading Home

And so we reached the end of another quarter year in Japan, queuing at the post office to send our money home, dragging our suitcases back down the stairs, meeting up for final drinks, one last room inspection and a train ticket to Narita.

One way, of course.

Last Class

Peter finds out what his students can remember from three months of daily lessons. The answer is, "Not much."

Group photo. Men don't make Churchill-for-the-camera signs. Or smile, apparently.

My last class ponders a wall. Very Zen.

Japan's Year in Words

First among the top ten phrases of 2009 was 'change of government', an expression British people are likely to be using too in 2010. Further down the list were words more often used by my students: 'new type flu', 'soshoku danshi', or herbivorous men, after the growing numbers of young Japanese males with no discernible interest in sex, and 'reki-jyo' (history women), a reaction to this among pretty Japanese girls who now look back to the warring Samurai period in search of their ideal partners.

Leaving Hiroshima

As darkness came down the lights were on all the way along Peace Boulevard. Pirate ships and love hearts hanging from branches, long lovers' tunnels and a merry-go-round. I walked as far as the illuminated pyramid, working off the pork, noodle, egg, squid and prawn okonomiyaki I'd just eaten. Three santas came past, leading a horse and white Cinderella carriage along the main road. The clock struck six. It was time to go back.

Miyajima

Up and out of the hostel for 9am, I breakfasted on hot hash browns and a fried egg on toast before catching the tram to Miyajima-guchi. The tour groups were lined up like an army of invasion at the entrance to the ferry port, marched out in columns fifty-metres apart by tour guides holding flagpoles and providing non-stop commentary through microphones. Wild deer wandered about indifferently. The souvenir shops weren't doing any business, but the photographer in front of the floating Torii gate was seating twenty at a time on two low benches, cameras crowding the sides.

Daishin Temple was, by contrast, an oasis of peace. Water tumbled gently into rock pools, there was the slow tinkle of coins in a donation box, Koi swam in lazy circles around a pond completely still except for the movement of the light. From the highest point of the temple you could see right back across the bay.

I had lunch in a wooden pavilion a short way up Mount Misen, watching a ferry crossing and clouds drifting in over the mountaintops. From there it took an hour to the top, stone step after stone step, bending first this way then that until I came upon the summit. There were large, rounded boulders, an open-topped wooden building selling sweet sake and udon noodles. Someone was speaking French, a wild deer was grazing on the stone, there was a transistor radio and the Inland Sea. And then, 529-metres up, the snow began to fall.

The Symbolic Emperor

"The empty centre around which everything spins," the American journalist Patrick Smith called the institution of the Japanese Emperor. "Hollow vessels into which anything can be placed and so given meaning". We are now, going by the gengo calendar which still marks time according to imperial reigns on commuter cards, restaurant receipts and the mastiffs of newspapers, in the year of Heisei 30, yet mention of the Emperor's given name, Akihito, leaves every Japanese person I know completely bemused and even the title of his reign, which translates as Achieving Peace, brings only the mildest of recognition. "His father was Hirohito," I persist. "Showa. He married a diplomat called Michiko."

"Oh yeah, I think I know her," said one of my students eventually. "Didn't she go to Oxford University?"

Hiroshima Castle

I already knew that the main tower of the castle was gone, because I hadn't seen it from Hakushima the day before, but now I saw that the entire castle had disappeared without a trace. Not even the turrets or front gate survived. Only the moat and the stone foundation remained, presenting a pathetic sight.

Toyofumi Ogura - Letters from the End of the World.

As it got dark I walked over the moat to Hiroshima Castle, the five-storey concrete reconstruction of a fortification that had stood since 1599. There were stone ruins nearby which I took to be the remains of a feudal donjon but turned out to be the foundations of a military barracks, all that was left of the Imperial General Headquarters. A party of Australian teenagers stood by the door, debating the entrance fee.

I crossed what was the West Parade Ground. There was a gold embossed shrine and an A-bombed willow tree, split evenly at the base. An elderly man dressed all in white jogged slowly round the moat.

Shukkeien

Less than one and a half kilometres from the hypercenter, Shukkeien, laid out on the instructions of the Lord of Hirohsima 326 years previously, was almost completely levelled by the blast and resulting fires. The rainbow bridge spanning the centre of the pond, modelled, like the rest of the garden, on Hangzhou's West Lake, was the only structure to remain intact. Thousands of survivors sought refuge here after the bomb. Most died before they could receive medical attention.

It was very crowded, and to distinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for most of the people lay still, with their eyes open...The hurt ones were quiet; no-one wept, much less screamed in pain; no-one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily.

John Hersey - Hiroshima.

Hiyijima Hill

High on Hiyijima Hill, opposite the entrance to Hiroshima's Museum of Contemporary Art, a single Henry Moore scuplture, shaped like a pair of malformed legs twisted downwards at the hip, forms a kind of gateway to a lookout point over the flat land back towards the centre of destruction. A US Army photo shows the view in October 1945, two months after Toyofumi Ogura saw it on the day of the bombing:

All around me was a vast sea of smoking rubble and debris, with a few concrete buildings rising here and there like pale tombstones, many of them shrouded in smoke. That's all there was, as far as the eye could see.

The hills of Koi are still there. The Kyobashi River too. The rest of the city rises once more in innumerable steel and concrete spikes. Even the daffodils are almost in bloom.

The Atomic Bomb Dome

A dragonfly flitted in front of me and stopped on a fence. I stood up, took my cap in my hands, and was about to catch the dragonfly when...

Schoolboy's memoir from Children of the Atomic Bomb.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was playing softly as I came up from the underground shopping mall. It was shortly before nine in the morning, around half an hour and sixty-four years since the first atomic bomb exploded in a soundless, camera-flash burst six-hundred metres above my head. The whole of Surakagu, an amusement and commercial district at the hypocenter of the bomb, was instaneously obliterated.

A decorative metal fence, camphor trees and a riverside footpath circle what remains of the old Industrial Promotion Hall. Bits of twisted metal crown its top, balustrades hang like broken teeth, ending in mid-air. Weeds grow through the jumbled assortment of rubble on the ground, the shell of the building was stripped off like paper, leaving naked, bubbled, brick. A low wall marks the centre of the building. The sides are all caved in.

The hypocenter itself is 160-metres away, among an amime cafe, parking for Sogo Department Store and two dozen vending machines stacked with hot and cold drinks. A roadside sign marks the exact spot. A waist-high traffic cone stood to the right, next to a notice advertising thirty minutes parking for two-hundred yen.