Day 10: Hiroshima and Miyajima

Breakfast of champions

We have another excellent breakfast at the ryokan, beautifully prepared with a bewildering array of different dishes.

Wandering deer

  The deer are wandering around outside our room this morning.















We catch the ferry back to the mainland then a train to Hiroshima, followed by a tram into the city centre, buying day passes on the tram itself.

Our stop is the infamous A-bomb dome (600m above which "fat boy" exploded over Hiroshima on that terrible day in 1945), followed by reading the booklets left by survivors in the peace park, the moving memorial to the students who perished having come into the city to help and Cenotaph with its non-eternal Peace Flame (it will be extinguished when all of the nuclear weapons on the planet are destroyed). We decide to give the no doubt excellent peace museum a miss - too many horrors for one day; what is most striking is the attitude of the survivors - "first to forgive, and then to forget".

The A-Bomb Dome

We head towards the huge Fukuya department store so that everyone can stock up on reading matter for the remainder of the holiday (some Murakami for Alan) in the large and very comprehensive English-language section of the whole floor dedicated to books - why don't British department stores contain bookshops? - then grab some lunch (green tea smoothies, waffles etc.) from the bookstore cafe overlooking Hiroshima and its many building projects.

While we're here we decide that this might be the right time to order some Japanese crockery; we find another floor of Fukuya dedicated to dishes, bowls and the like and sure enough, there are lots of sets of 5 as we'd hoped. Via some hand waving and the enthusiastic and delightful help of some half dozen shop assistants, we eventually make our wishes clear - can we have this shipped back to England? The answer is yes, so in a two weeks' time we have a great reminder of our time in Japan (sets of 5 elegant bowls, plates and chopstick rests) turning up on our Derbyshire doorstep.

Smoothie

Then it's time to head back to Miyajima for our last night there. Tonight it's supper at a homely okonomiyaki a few doors down from the ryokan, with bar seating for about 10 and a TV burbling quietly in the background. The proprietess makes them while we watch; Imogen is a bit despondent as it looks like bacon is going into hers, but she does very well and fishes out the offending pieces to donate to the various carnivores in her party; even so the quantity proves too much for her, so Samuel steps in as the trencherman. James is somewhat taken aback by the sheer quantity of spring onions added as garnish (about four good sized handfuls).