Hiroshima was not what I expected. I don’t know what I thought I’d find there, but I suppose I thought there would be more physical evidence of the devastation of the A-bomb, even though it was half a century ago, outside of the scope of my lifetime. Instead, the town was a bustling metropolis of tall buildings, streets in good repair and people bustling to and fro, going about their daily lives.
Locals were proudly cheering on their local baseball team – the Hiroshima Carp – who are featured on the city’s sewer grates (imagine if Toronto’s sewer grates had the Maple Leafs or Raptors logos on them?!?!) even though the team lost to the Osaka Tigers yesterday in what looked to me to be a big game. There were a large number of signs and t-shirts saying “Let Peace Prevail On Earthâ€, indicating the city’s vigorously anti-nuclear stance, but other than that it could have been any other medium-sized Japanese city.
I did very little exploration in the town, just walked and walked, from my (excellent) room at Hana Hostel near the train station, across the river, into the downtown and then out the other side and into the Peace Park, where I cried at the sight of the Atomic Dome and the Children’s Memorial and the thousands and thousands of paper cranes. I was quite surprised at how tall the trees across from the Peace Park were; they looked more than 50 years old and healthy, but perhaps being at the epicenter of the blast meant they were spared incineration, like the dome.
On a lighter note, I also sampled the local cuisine. On my way back from the emotional excesses of the Peace Park and memorials, I avoided the drinking quarter, amusingly marked on the map as being “A bit of a dodgy area“, and paused at a store simply named Okonomi Yaki, after the food it serves (like naming a pancake shop “Pancakesâ€) and went inside for supper.
I was given a selection of crazy filling options for my Japanese pancake, but chose the simplest one to see what the dish was like in its basic form. My Hiroshima okonomiyaki had a crepe-thin tortilla-esque base made of flour, then a filling of shredded cabbage, fatty bacon and skinny soba noodles (making it a “modern†yaki), then a fried egg as the topping. I passed on the local fillings which included octopus, squid and shrimp.
You can watch the video of it being grilled below. My favourite thing was watching the whole process happen right in front of me, with scientific precision, and eating it straight off the grill using a combination of a metal spatula and hachi (chopsticks). My least favourite thing was the brown sauce on top; it had an odd, sour-sweet flavour that my palate just couldn’t warm to. With a tad more tang it would have been HP Fruity sauce and the dish would have been yumtastic, but it was way too sugary for my taste buds.
