City Centre

In the last two days, I have been to Hiroshima city centre twice. This is partly due to bad timing on my part - I organised a trip to say goodbye to a good friend who's going abroad, not realising that another friend was having a birthday party the next evening.

Anyway, on the first trip we met up with a Japanese friend of ours who is going to New Zealand for a year, and therefore won't be back in time to see us again. After dinner, he suggested we go and see the atomic bomb dome, which a couple of us had never been to before. I didn't realise exactly how close to the main shopping street it is - we walked for only five minutes to get there. It was already dark, but the dome is slightly lit up from inside at night, and it really does leave an impression. Pictures don't do this thing justice. It's not that it's huge, in fact it was smaller than I expected, but the level of destruction you see before your eyes is quite shocking, and they did really leave it completely as it was, with rubble lying around.

Then, when you walk over to the peace memorial park, you can see it from over the river, and it's eerily beautiful. I wish I'd taken some photos, now, but I imagine there's enough of them on the internet already. The park seems to have become a sleeping place for homeless people, in and amongst the monuments scattered about, which include a fire that never goes out, and a stone arc which is perfectly placed so you can see the dome through it. At the other end of the park are some huge perspex boxes with thousands of paper cranes inside, strung together to make long, colourful strings, all made by children from various schools. The place does make you think, but I don't regret going for a second.

The day afterwards, we went for okonomiyaki before heading to a bar. Before I came to Japan, everyone who heard I was going to Hiroshima said "try okonomiyaki!" and it really is fantastic, but I'd never been to a place like this before. There's a whole building, five floors, which is full of small, mostly family-run okonomiyaki joints, with seating for maybe ten people in each. The one we ended up in was run by a husband and wife, both around 60, who had obviously been doing the same thing for years and years, and had paper stuck up all around the walls with signatures of famous people who had been there. The food was delicious, naturally.

But what interested me the most was the fact that in the middle of a big city centre, there are still little family-run outlets doing business. In London, even in Sheffield, the city centres are full of massive chain stores - even in small English towns nowadays the family-run businesses are disappearing because of the big stores. But in Hiroshima, which is bigger than Sheffield, little husband-and-wife run okonomiyaki outlets are still there and still doing business. I love that.