Hijiyama Park, Honkawa School – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

In the introduction to this morning’s post on Mitaki Temple, I said that I thought that post would be short. By the time I finished writing the entry, it was about twice as long as I expected. I think this post will be short because I took it easy and visited only Hijiyama Park and a school museum this afternoon. We’ll see if it really does end up short.

However long the narratives on Hijiyama Park and the Honkawa Elementary School Peace Museum end up being, this entry will be a little longer than that because I leave Hiroshima tomorrow for my next destination. Hence, you’re going to have to suffer through one of my excruciatingly boring summaries, this time about Hiroshima, at the end of this post.

Jeez, that was an incredibly stupid thing for me to say, wasn’t it? You might not consider my summaries to be something to be suffered through at all. You might, instead, skip them completely. If you don’t read them, you won’t suffer through them. Feel free, though, to thank me in the replies for the summary that you never read. I’ll never know that you didn’t read it.

Hijiyama Park

Hijiyama Park is atop a hill in Hiroshima. Not nearly a mountain, but still a high hill.

There is a moving sidewalk and escalators that will take you to the top. Or so I read.

The only sensible walking routes to Hijiyama Park from where I had lunch put me at the other side of the park from what they call the “Hijiyama Skywalk.” So, I hiked up some stairs.

Walking around up top, I saw the upper end of the Hijiyama Skywalk, but the only sensible walking routes from the park to the Honkawa Elementary School Peace Museum couldn’t make use of the Skywalk, so I took a different set of stairs down.

The large Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hiroshima City Manga Library are in the park, but I didn’t go into them. What a surprise, right? Some outdoor sculptures also dot the park, including the behemoth I posted a picture of here.

There are also lots of grass and trees in Hijiyama Park. And, because the park is situated atop a hill, there are some great views of Hiroshima and the surrounding mountains from up there.

After wandering around a bit, I came upon a circular observation platform that provided one of those vistas.

Just behind the observation platform, there’s a small plaza (public square, not a shopping plaza), and behind that is a larger parking lot. In the plaza, there are nine polished stone monoliths. Inset into the front of each is a plaque.

In June 2023, Hiroshima hosted the G7 summit. When they were there, the leaders of all of the G7 countries, along with the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission, wrote brief messages of peace in the Peace Memorial Museum guestbook.

The plaques on the stones display those messages printed in Japanese and English, one plaque for each leader, along with a picture of the leader. The plaques also display engraved copies of the leaders’ messages in their own handwriting (written, of course, in their own language).

The message from Justin Trudeau, the then Prime Minister of my country, Canada, said, “Canada pays solemn tribute to the many lives lost, the unspeakable grief of the Hibakusha, and the immense suffering of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Your stories will remain forever etched in our collective conscience.”

I read the messages from all of the leaders. One overarching thought eventually took over my mind: Thank goodness, or thank whatever god you believe in, that Joe Biden and not Donald Trump was President of the United States then. I shudder to think what words he would have recorded for history in that solemn place. They would probably have been something about the “fake news” and the crowd size at his Inauguration.

I’m not proud that thought pervaded my mind. But it did.

As I said, I left the park down a different staircase than the one I entered. The one I used as an exit climbed down through a dense forest. That was a beautiful way to cleanse my mind. But then I had to write this and be reminded of it. Harrumph.

Honkawa Elementary School Peace Museum

The Honkawa Elementary School was 460 metres away from the hypocentre of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Some of the buildings of the school were constructed of wood. They were destroyed by the bomb.

However, one wing was constructed of ferro-concrete. Windows were blown out, and doors were damaged, but the shell of the building remained reasonably intact and not in danger of collapsing. It didn’t take long to restart the school for the survivors, but in the meantime, the building was used as a first aid station for survivors.

When used as a first aid station, survivors came there and chalked messages on the wall saying where they expected to go next so their family and friends could find them. Some survivors came and chalked messages about loved ones who were missing and asking if anyone had any information about the missing to please let the writer of the message know.

Some of the messages were poignant and provided information that told stories about some of the survivors.

Soot covered the messages. And when the building was being prepared for regular use, the walls were plastered over, covering up the messages, but the messages were photographed first.

In, I think it was 2000, the school was going to be rebuilt. Officials knew the messages were under the plaster. So, they carefully removed the plaster and looked for them.

They found some of them. The messages were, by that point, too faint to read with the naked eye. But scientists used imaging tools and image enhancement technology to read them. The decision was made to keep a small portion of the original school as a museum. That’s now the Honkawa Elementary School Peace Museum.

Before you go inside the museum, you have to take off your shoes. There are cubbyholes with slippers in them. You take out a pair of slippers to wear in the museum and put your shoes in the cubby hole, reversing that on the way out.

It’s not a large museum. The original messages are not on display, not even in their heavily faded state. Or if they were, I didn’t see them. But there is a photograph of them. Plus, there are also a few objects from the school.

A 12-minute video in Japanese with English subtitles talks about the school, the aftermath of the bomb, the school’s use immediately after the bomb, the messages, the rediscovery of the messages, and the techniques used to enhance and interpret the faded text.

Hiroshima Summary

As I said in my first post about Hiroshima, when you think about Hiroshima, the first thing you think about is the atomic bomb. It is worth coming to the city just to see the Atomic Bomb Dome and all of the monuments, commemorations, and museums about that event and praying for peace. I think it’s important to see that and then feel whatever you feel about it.

But Hiroshima has been completely rebuilt long since then. There are beautiful gardens, shrines, temples and a castle to see and enjoy.

Plus, there is the glorious beauty of the scenery, shrines, and Mount Misen on Miyajima Island. It’s also worth a visit to Hiroshima just to see Miyajima, and the iconic O-torii Itsukushima Shrine there.

One element of Hiroshima that I don’t think I mentioned here is its rivers. If you were to walk across Hiroshima east to west or west to east, you’d cross bridges over anywhere from one to six or seven rivers. It’s not that I’m not certain of the number. It’s that I don’t know how to count them.

I think they’re really only one river, the Ota River, albeit with some tributaries that join it either in the northern part of the city, or possibly north of the city boundaries. I’m not sure.

But Hiroshima is built on the delta of the Ota River. There, the river splits into various channels. Some of those channels rejoin before flowing into the sea. How many channels you would cross bridges over when walking east-west depends on how far north of Hiroshima Bay you are.

All of the river channels I’ve seen here are tightly confined by concrete or stone walls that are either vertical or a slight angle off of vertical. I imagine the walls are there to keep the channels in their place. The disciplined walls make the channels look more like very urban canals than rivers. They are, however, quite attractive in places. (Not so much in others.)

I’m pretty sure the channels are tidal in Hiroshima. When I was walking back to my hotel this afternoon, a couple of the channels I passed had narrow sandbars at their edges and watermarks on the walls that were well above the water at that time. I don’t remember seeing that before.

And that, dear reader, was Hiroshima.

It’s worth coming to Hiroshima, but it’s not overloaded with sights that are well-noted enough to make it into the guidebooks and other sources of tourist information. My four nights here were probably sufficient. One less probably would have been insufficient.

And tomorrow, I move on.