I had been looking forward to visiting the Hiroshima Peace Gardens ever since Liz and I started planning this trip, but I never expected that they would challenge all that I knew about the dropping of the nuclear bomb

I was born 9 years after the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. I knew men who had survived the horrors of the war prisons in Japan. Some of them were still suffering, just as my grandfather was still suffering from his time in the Middle East and New Guinea. They were often spoken of in hushed voices. I grew up absolutely sure in the knowledge that the dropping of the nuclear bombs to end the war was the right thing to do. It is very hard to reconcile the gentle, friendly, helpful people that I have met on this trip with those who carried out the atrocities in the prison camps.

I had seen the pictures of the people ravished by the explosion and the absolute devestation it caused to the landscape. But in the museum  there are stories of parents searching through the rubble of school buildings and finding the bodies of their children, or finding them alive and taking them home and nursing them until their inevitable and agonising death, children with names and school photos, artefacts – bits of clothing, school bags, lunch boxes, exercise books that somehow survived, all these things made you realise how many innocent people suffered to end the war.

  

   

     

 A cenotaph is a monument in honor of someone whose remains are in another location. The Memorial Cenotaph’s shape represents a shelter for the souls of the victims of the bomb.

Within the monument is a stone chest that contains a listing of all the people who died as a result of the atomic bomb tragedy, regardless of nationality. Names are still added to the list as people pass away from diseases that may have been caused by the radiation given off by the explosion. 

       

    

    

My trekking shoes saw me through the Camino and some of the temples of Shikoku. They have served me well but their time has come so rather than take them home to sit up on a shelf I decided to leave them in the Peace Gardens. 

        
The gardens are beautiful, a monument to all the innocent people who lost their lives, a plea to the world to never let this happen again and a celebration of mankind’s spirit to survive  Hiroshima, just 70 years on is a beautiful, vibrant, bustling city.