Last weekend, I had a two day trip to Hiroshima to meet up with my friend Kazuki.

We started off with a trip to the near by town of Takehara. This town has a small historic section of town with Edo-era buildings and lots of museums. It’s like a tiny slice of Kyoto, except not packed with people. That town has some history in sake making as well as the salt industry, and there are several museums in preserved historic houses that were very beautiful. On the evening of the day we went, there was a small event where candles were lit in bamboo stands all down the streets, however, due to the typhoon passing by, the weather was somewhere between ‘kind-of-raining’ and ‘miserable’ for most of the trip. In fact, it’s been raining for most of October, which is why you haven’t seen many updates here: I’ve had to cancel some plans due to weather.

After returning to Hiroshima, we had a fantastic dinner at a revolving sushi restaurant (video and picture in the link at the end of the post). Having previously only been to 100￥ per plate sushi, the more expensive stuff was a lot tastier, and also had way bigger pieces, so I still ended up spending a similar amount. I’ve got to go there again. We returned to his place and I was surprised that his sister, niece, and nephew were also over. It’s fun trying to interact with kids, their Japanese is way better than mine, I’m jealous.

As Kazuki is fond of telling me, Hiroshima doesn’t have a ton of tourist attractions. Besides the big two, the bomb museum/dome and Miyajima shrine, both of which I saw last year, there isn’t a whole ton of exciting tourist stuff. After researching for a while, I found that there was a shrine doing a fall festival, so we started the next day by going there. The shrine was tiny, standing next to some very tall buildings in a downtown area. There were lots of vendors with festival food and games, and a stage that had partially collapsed due to the rain. It was fun to see, but not too exciting.

We continued our trip by going into an old bank, which survived the A Bomb blast and was converted into a museum. There was a small art gallery in the lobby, but the bank mostly had rooms dedicated to bomb-related aftermath.

It was neat walking around there, and a little bit creepy. There were only a handful of people besides us there and its and old building where we went into the basement where there was drawings done buy people who were around at the time of the bombing. Definitely very sad. In retrospect, Hiroshima trip recommendation: You can see the sad stuff first and then cheer yourself up with going to Miyajima, or if you want to do the cool stuff first while you are in a good mood, you can do that before reading about people with skin peeling off due to radiation. Plan wisely.

As the day progressed, we actually saw some hints of blue sky, it was finally nice to not need the umbrellas. I left the station, where I ate Bakudan-ya Tsukemen for the second time that day. It’s really good, if you go to Hiroshima, try it! It was a fun trip, and great seeing my friend Kazuki again. Here’s looking forward to some trips with nice weather soon!

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