Week Sixteen

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I know this report is very late but I will do my best to try and remember it and report as much as I can in detail. Sorry guys

1) So I think it was laaaast...Tuesday I took part in the Hidaka Shoogakoo school trip (thats Hidaka Jnr school). I have become a kinda of big sister/international wonder/cheap ALT for the school and go every week on wednesdays to help 'bring an International presense' to the school and to also teach english. The kids are great, most of the time, and I love it when so many of them are so eager to learn english like its the food and air of their world. Its very cute.
So yeah, on tuesday I got at the unthinkable hour of FOUR AM to make the 5:30am departure time at the school. I mean for a 18 year old, 4am is practically torture but amazingly everyone was quite awake and cheerful at the school. Too cheerful. So as Jane tried to catch some Zzzs on the bus as we careered towards Hiroshima Prefecture everyone was happily (and noisily) buzzing around the bus playing guessing games and *shudder* singing. And they were wondering why I was so quiet in the corner there with my headfones on tightly.
When we finally made it to Hiroshima City at 8am we were greeted by groups of children GOING TO SCHOOL. I mean, how much punishment should one take when you are wide awake and expecting lunch soon and people are just beginning their day around you.

Not long after that we arrived at the Hiroshima Peace Park. Just as a note so that people will understand what I was feeling there, I have been an avid subscriber to National Geographic Magazine since the tender age of 7 (thanks Daddy) and so have read many articles about the war. One in particular however struck me as it included pictures of the Peace Park and more importantly pictures of the museum. Since then it has been a childhood dream of mine to go to Hiroshima and lay cranes at the monument, pay my respects then see the museum. I will not delude you however, it was particularly the gory pictures of the scorched, wandering victims that caught my attention so long ago and being a lover of cool anatomical things since I could read and later on CSI I couldn't wait to gawk at the reconstructions and graphic pictures.
But as we rounded the garden and the famous Hiroshima Dome came into view I was overwelmed by the sheer real-ness of it, this thing I had only seen in books. The dome stands at one end of the park and when seen, as I did, from across the river, it has a certain ability to dissolve everything you thought you knew and felt about the disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I could only stare. The kids were running madly around me taking photots but a certain something had taken hold inside me and was growing rapidly.

Shame.


It was shame and it was starting to well up. As we walked around the various monuments it became stronger and stronger until finally after seeing the Mound of 1000 (were all the unidentified people parts were buried) and then hearing the mournful tolling of the Peace Bell I began to feel real tears well in my eyes. The kids were all running around crazily, taking pictures and ringing the bell with the abandone of childhood. The just didn't understand.
But then, how could I? I would never know the real horror.

The kids had been working on folding cranes for months in advance so they had brought their amazingly colourful strands along with them to lay at the monument. After a minutes silence to honour the dead we hung them in the plastic rooms along with so many others, some from as far away as Canada, and quietly departed.

We then walked down to the other end of the park towards the museum and the famous arch. This is the arch that you see in all the postcards where you look through it and you can see the dome all the way down the other end and the flame burning in the giant stone hands. Of course I didn't miss the photo opportunity but it was still amazing to find myself standing at one of the most important places in the modern world.

We then went on and entered the museum. This was the momment I had been waiting all this time for and I was finally here. The Principal of the school shouted me an English ear-set guide so I could understand what was happening but sometimes I think it would have been less painful if I hadn't. The commentary was possibly the most moving thing I have ever heard.
Before the war Hiroshima was a major city in Japan, serving as a base for learning with several Universities, as well as a large military facility. Even in Japan's past, the Meiji Era, during the Manchurian Incident, The Boxer Rebellion and earlier in the very war that The Bomb ended, Hiroshima was used a place to amass troops before sending them off to combat. Indeed it was also the home of the Fifth division, one of a number of large army divisions spread out around the country. This would prove to be the very reason that Hiroshima was chosen at a possible site for dropping the bomb. Several cities were in fact chosen, Hiroshima and Nagasaki only two of them but in the end it was decideded that they would be the final two cities. At 8:15 one August morning, bombers dropped the famous 'Little Boy' bomb right above the museum and surrounding area where I now stood creating a fire ball that completely incinerated everything within the immediate vicinity and showering poisonous radiation as far as the next several cities along. It was horrendous. The things I saw in the museum made my stomach turn violently, me a vetren of years of veterinary surgery, dinner in front of CSI and graphic books about anatomy and mummies. Nothing I had ever seen could have prepared me for what I saw and felt in that building.
Of course I saw the horrible reconstruction that I read about and fell in love with so long ago but honestly it just did not move me as the other displays did. I saw pocket watches, stopped at exactly 8:15, school uniforms torn, burnt and smeared with 60 year old blood. They belonged to children so badly burned and disfigured that their parents could only identify them from the name tags on their pants. A tricyle all crusted in rust from being buried with its owner, barely a toddler. I saw a section of some stairs from bank in the city where the shadow of a man who had been sitting on that same spot so long ago had been burned there by the intense thermal radiation of the blast. He undoubtably died on the spot. In fact, the heat was so intense that all around the city, shadows of objects, leaves, wagons, people, had been burned into the stone behind them as it was turned white by the rays. I even saw some of the cranes made by the girl in that famous story of a 1000 cranes. They were as tiny as your thumb nail. I saw pictures too. So many pictures. The injuries that those people suffered. One lady had the pattern of her kimono burned into her skin. Another man was completely scorched all over but for a strip around his waist were he had wound cloth for a waist-band. He died. Another ghastly picture. A soldier. He hadn't been burned but not long after the blast he had broken out in purple spots all over his body, even his teeth and had died in agony, coughing blood. Another man had been in a western style building and the shards from the glass windows had been blown into his eyes. A child, only in junior school, lying silently in a crowded hospital ward, terribly burned, waiting quietly to die. All this I saw.
When I finally emerged from the museum I was emotionally empty. A shell. I felt like everything that I had a felt inside of me had been burned away. As I walked along the corridor in a daze I noticed a guestbook. Not wanting to forget I tried to write something. All I could manage was:

"11/05/04 Jane Furnas Australia
My God."


I wasn't the only one affected this way. On the bus home one boy told me he had cried. I realised that I hadn't cried at all. This suprised me. However after that one emotion remained inside of me long after Hiroshima disappeared behind us. Shame. So much shame. Shame at what people had done to others with full knowledge and full responsibility. I didn't make the decision. I didn't fly the plane that dropped the bombs. I am barely even American. But I felt the shame of mankind's horrible cruelty and it hurts me even now.

2) So after that very (very) moving experience in Hiroshima we then bus-ed to this great place in Kyushu (yes, Kyushu again). It was a reconstruction of an ancient Japanese village. The place itself has been transformed into this VAST (well vast for Japan) park with old-style wooden pike fences, huts (with thatch roofs, sunk about 2 feet into the ground)(very cool inside but a bit musty), watch towers that you could climb and what would have been the chieften/king/dude-in-charge's house complete with feasting room and balcony (you gotta live in style). The whole place is set out on what was originally the sit of the ancient village but after excavation the whole thing on filled in and the reconstruction built on top. I don't think they intended to have a burnt rubble mass in one part of the central village area but I think that one of the thatch houses caught alight and burned down. Which would explain the fire-extinguisher in every hut (a very ancient touch). The day was absolutely stifling which meant as a North Queenslander I was in my element. So while everyone was complaining about how hot it was I was calmly walking around in my jeans and t-shirt. Oh! to be a North Queenslander and happy!

After that we finally made it to the hotel. No time for resting though because it was immediately off to the Game. The Yakyu Game. (Durr, thats baseball). The Japanese are crazy about baseball. Its so ingrained in their culture that they even have a kanji (chinese character) for it. (Just a bit of trivia...I thought it was cool). The game itself was the Deiei Hawks (Fukuoka and the home side) Vs the Seibu Lions. It was decided that we were supporting the Lions but in Fukuoka Dome with the home team playing it meant that us and just one other small patch of supporters were surrounded but an entire dome of Deiei fanatics. I kept my head down and just concentrated on watching the game. In the end the Lions won but we won't scoff about that. (ahem, har dee har har)
The atmosphere in that place was amazing. Everyone had these kind of elongated megaphones that they banged together. Each area of the Dome had their own bangy-megaphone dance so it was amazing to watch hundreds of people yelling and waving these things around to the music of the bands in the grandstand. Then at certain moments in the night everyone blew up these long balloons (each with special mouth piece) and let them go into the air. The effect is kind of like standing in a multi-coloured anenome and then watching it let go of all its arms into the air. Really festive. I wanted to jump up and down and go crazy like everyone else but after getting up at 4am and a whole day watching kids and bus-ing around I just didn't have the energy. When we got back to the hotel I just collapsed on the bed and didn't wake up til morning.

Actually it was a friend back in Shikoku who woke me up with a mobile message at 6:15am. He was also on a school trip and his room mates had woken him up at 5am so he though that if he should suffer then so should I. Thanks Alex. *grumbles*
Day two saw us bus-ing (what a shock) to the biggest steel manafacturing plant in Japan, Nippon Steel, Fukuoka. After watching a *very interesting* video about how they make steel (I gave up trying to understand halfway through and went to sleep, head proped up on my hard hat) we went into the actual plant to watch a steel girder being made. It was amazing. That bar must have been about 30 meters below me but I still had to shield my face from the red hot heat as we walked by. Yay, then after this it was back on the bus to...SPACE WORLD!!!

This was the thing that all the kids had been waiting for. After lunch (where the fast eaters egged on the slower ones because they were eager to get out and have fun)(I must admit I yelled OSOI!! - you're slow! - a few times) I got put in a group and off we went to ride the roller coasters til we puked. Of course that never happened, being a hardened vetren on Dreamworld (and motion-sickness tablets taken for the bus) but it was great watching the kids ask me if I was ok then have them chicken out at the entrance to the coaster. Well, proved to them that I could hold it up with the rest of them anyway. Ate some great new food including a banana-split icecream crepe. The Japanese do a mean icecream crepe. Basically its whatever the filling is wrapped in a really soft sweet crepe that you each like a enchilada (spelling?). Mmmm, resisted urge to eat two as am currently having an all-out battle with the diet monster.
Then after Omiyage buying (Omiyage - homecoming gift, sort of a "thankyou for letting me go" gift, usually the famous thing/food of the place that you went)(Mine was ULTRAMAN *heroic music* cookies) We got on the bus and set off home. I must admit I don't remember that part having slept the whole way back but I do know that we arrived home at 9pm that night...a bit too late for me.

*yawn! Streeetches...* So that was my trip with Hidaka Junior School. Now you know why it too me so long just write it being so action-packed and all. If you want photos you can go to the Hidaka Photo Page and check it out for yourself. Sorry it was so late in coming. Smilies ^-^ - Jane The (exhausted) Japwonder

PS: I took the photo too. Its some of the cranes at the Hiroshima Monument. What do ya think?

Email: talk_to_jane@hotmail.com