April 2007
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David Mitchell celebrates the monuments, street culture, music arcades and mountain-reflected sunlight of his adopted home
Cities are living organisms: they are born, grow, consume, age and die; and, via their monuments, archives and museums, they remember. Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, a neck of land between the Otagawa and Motoyasugawa rivers, enshrines the memory of 6 August 1945, when the world’s first atomic strike transformed a thriving city into a radioactive wasteland, claimed the lives of about 140,000 people and gave the name “Hiroshima” the apocalyptic significance it still bears today.
For eight years, I was one of many residents of the city who never crossed the park without involuntarily projecting the flash onto the calm sky above the stores and radio masts. The park’s Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum ( pcf.city.hiroshima.jp ) is, then, more harrowing than entrancing, but it is justly the city’s number-one draw. The video testaments of survivors and everyday objects altered by the explosion (a watch stopped at 8.15, the shadow of an incinerated person on a stone slab, melted glass bottles) remind visitors that we cannot refer to our species as civilised until we stop doing this to each other.
Elsewhere, Peace Park is populated by further symbols: the Cenotaph, whose flame will be extinguished when the last nuclear weapon is decommissioned; the Hall of Remembrance, a meditative underground womb walled by a panorama of the post-blast cityscape in 140,000 tiles; and the UNESCO-listed Atom Bomb Dome, a preserved ruin, whose mangled girders and blind windows bear witness to the force of the explosion. Homeless men play chess by the International Centre, schoolchildren on trips scoot around and, on the riverside walkway, teenagers perform their three-chord repertoire for select audiences of two or three admiring girls.
Hondori is Hiroshima’s pedestrian artery, connecting Peace Park to Nagarekawa, the city’s grungy red-light district. The arcade is more 2007 than 1945 and, although covered shopping streets are in all Japanese cities, it’s my favourite. It is airy, it pipes out-of-body muzak, it extends nearly to the vanishing point, and its shops vary in size and attitude. Strolling around Hondori, in fashions a season or two behind Tokyo, is the closest the citizenry come to an Italian passagiata; especially around the Alice Garden, a public square behind the Parco department store. It’s a fine place to wait for friends or eat an ice cream watching the (often Latin American) street performers work their crowds. With its mobile-phone outlets, illuminated pachinko (gaming) parlours, internet cafés, junk-food and coffee-shop franchises, games arcades; with its salarymen, OLs (“office-ladies” who photocopy and make tea for the former before marrying them), chanelahs (native fashionistas), wardens telling cyclists to dismount, sharp-dressed youths trying to lure women into “host-bars” and marines on leave from Iwakuni base, Hondori is a catalogue of Japanese street culture.
Shukkeien Garden is an oasis of that wood-block print Japan which some tourists expect to find at every turn. Shukkeien is not one of the Big Three gardens of Japan, and its sky is shrinking by the year as developers encircle it with buildings, but its shabbiness is elegant, its dimensions tardis-like, and it works on me like an eyebath. There’s a pavilion on the shore of the green lake: after taking off your shoes, go in, close your eyes and soak up the sounds of the tiny waterfall, crows and pigeons, cicadas and frogs, splashing carp, wind in the bamboo, newlyweds being photographed on the Chinese bridge, the burr of road and river traffic and, on certain magical weeks in July, the shrieks of unsuspecting seekers of nature on whom drowsy snakes drop from overhanging branches.
There’s a ballsy facet to Hiroshima, one that has no truck with its identity as the world’s atomic martyr. This down-to-earthness can be heard in Hiroshima’s vowel-munching dialect. You rub shoulders with it in the Tokasan street festival, at Hiroshima Carp Baseball Stadium. You should try the layered pan-fried dish okonomiyaki, a one-time austerity-food, and now a staple of Japanese cuisine. It is available in most inexpensive restaurants, but Okonomiyaki-Mura near Hondori shopping arcade is the most fun. This six-floor building off Alice Garden houses dozens of restaurants where you can eat your lunch off the hot-plate and watch Hiroshima Carp getting hammered.
The tram to Ujina, Hiroshima’s port, passes through a rickety manufacturing zone, and housing projects whose 1960s and 1970s architecture is almost redeemed by the marine and mountain-reflected sunlight. There’s no reason to come here, which is why I like to. Ujina’s eminence as a naval base and shipbuilding centre was a major reason why American military planners selected Hiroshima in 1945 but, these days, most of the traffic consists of ferries serving the islands of Ninoshima, Etajima, Miyajima, or the city of Matsuyama, over the Inland Sea on Shikoku.The port faces west, so towards evening, the sea turns gold and the island-mountains sort of drift loose. If cities are allowed to have souls to go with hearts and memories, then I think Hiroshima’s soul hovers in the vicinity of Ujina.
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Hodder & Stoughton, £7.99) is out now.
