One of the places I knew would be most special and most difficult to visit on this trip was Hiroshima.

After checking into the hotel near Hiroshima station, we took a tram towards Peace Park, the center of the devastation of August 6, 1945. Almost immediately, a scene known from history books was right in front of us, the steel and concrete skeleton of what had been that day the Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall, known today as the “A-Bomb Dome”. 

Immediately the black-and-white picture from history springs to mind. It seems hard to believe you are standing in front of it in real life. We walked a couple blocks to the “hypocenter” where the bomb detonated about 2000 feet above the city. To be standing in the spot where the first and only one of two atomic bomb attacks took place was absolutely chilling. 

We proceeded to the Children’s memorial where we placed paper cranes, signifying Sadako Sasaki’s story of a girl who would survive the bombing but succumb almost 10 years later to radiation-induced leukemia. As we were standing at the memorial, a group of schoolchildren began singing. My eyes filled with emotion. 

We finished this visit at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I instantly recalled the holocaust museum I visited in Berlin as I walked past exhibits of the absolute horror of nuclear attack, including burned clothes and horrifying photographs of that day. The museum visit will stay with me for a long time. I don’t often sign museum guest logs but I felt compelled to write: “War is a failure of man. This must never happen again. Wishing peace, love and light to the world.”