Oh dear/Oh deer

It’s difficult to know where to start with today. It is with some reluctance.

Today, we went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in the Peace Park.

We walked through the park,passing various memorials, including the children’s one.

We bought headphones that provided an added layer, personal stories behind the photographs and artefacts. Harrowing.
The museum started with images of what Hiroshima looked like before the bomb, a bustling urban landscape, which as we turned into the next room, showed the complete destruction.

We spent over two hours there, saw horrific images that I won’t share.

This was the first photograph taken in the aftermath of the bomb.

A young newspaper photographer told his story through the headphones. Getting there, he didn’t know what to do, take a photo or not. It took him 20 minutes to be able to put his finger on the camera to take. The image is of people running to a police box for help, only to have cooking oil administered to their wounds.
The stories told of the confusion and incomprehension at what had happened.

Photos from before the bomb of smiling schoolchildren, moved into the roll call of the dead, the scorched uniforms and toys left behind.
Narratives that told how buildings crumbled down, killing everyone inside and then those who survived for a day or two longer and endured horrific deaths.

The ones who took longer to die, the ones who recovered and then succumbed to cancer years later. The legacy going down the generations.

It was overwhelming and harrowing. Personal testaments of people’s lives before and after.

It then went onto the whys and wherefores of why and how to bomb was created. The subsequent cold War, the arms race and the number of nuclear weapons currently in the world.
Finally, a call for peace.

It’s so hard to see it again in black and white,that i won’t write much.

Having got a Hiroshima card, we had unlimited travel, including a ferry to the nearby island, Miyajima. I think that it was a good choice as it took about 50 minutes to get to the ferry port. It gave us time to decompress.

It was a short ferry over to the island. Miyajima is most famous for its giant torii gate, which at high tide seems to float on the water. The sight is ranked as one of Japan’s three best views. While officially named Itsukushima, the island is more commonly referred to as Miyajima, Japanese for “shrine island.”

0ff the ferry and ready to get some picnic food. Sitting under the trees deer roamed round us.

The deer are believed to be messengers of the gods in Shinto, and are protected on the island.

We were very vigilant when eating. However,they are very stealthy and we didn’t hear one approach from behind. Before we knew it, one had gone into Pete’s rucksack, grabbed a choux bun, in its wrapping. Broke it in half, spraying cream onto us, my phone, everywhere. Then, having a fight with another deer.

I jumped between them to get the plastic wrapping, so they didn’t choke.

One of them came back to pick the cream from the bench etc.

We had a walk round part of the island.

The Itsukushima Shrine Torii Gate is considered one of the best in Japan, also as the sanjoshin or “three female deities”, these Shinto deities are the goddesses of seas and storms.