Next morning we had to get up early. For the non-orchestra members, meeting to leave the hotel was at 7:45. And a breakfast with a wide variety of food was to be experineced before that. Plus we had to say goodbye and leave our son to the other group, the orchestra members. These took a plane shortly after we had left to Nagoya, where in the nearby town set, the partner school is located. For the around 20 “visitors”, a train from the airport took us to Tokyo Shinagawa station where we bought some food, the so called bento boxes and changed to the fast train Shinkansen.
Shinkansen made the around 800 km in less than 4 hours. So we arrived in the sunny, hot and humid Hiroshima still before 3 p.m. After a quick check-in in the hotel next to the train station and an hour of rest a guided tour from a German speaking tour guide was on.
The most important event in Hiroshima’s history took place on August 6th 1945, we were here just 5 days before its 80th anniversary. And of course it was number one on the list of things to visit. Indeed one part is visible even before any sightseeing. In the centre of Hiroshima, there is no “old” building. In a circle of more than 1.5 km from the center of the detonation nearly every building was damaged to the floor. An exception is the “dome” which reportedly lost its copper roof, through the heat wave before the pressure wave came, which allowed the pressure to “escape” through the roof instead of cracking the walls.
After getting impressions of unimaginable suffering in the museum, a dinner in town with some of the group ended the day for me.