Baruto 11- Wald
Hiroshima city's only digital theatre with 11 screens.
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Chokotto-ya
This fantastic izakaya is the place if you want to get into Hiroshima jizake.
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Lopez okonomiyaki
Fantastic okonomiyaki shop in Yokogawa with a colorful latin flair.
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Tsukiakari Dining and Cafe
Japanese Charcoal Grill, Sweets and Drinks.
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Wünder Bar Stevie's
Super friendly funky bar in Ebisu-cho.
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9 year old Taiga Onitsuka is on tour to promote his debut CD and will be playing at Club Quattro on May 24.
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Bod Dylan, Joy Division, English, French, German, Romanian and, of course, Japanese on screen to choose from this week.
GetHiroshima is now on life streaming site Twitter. Don't worry, it's not all about when we go to the toilet or have a cup of coffee (that's over here), but we'll tweet stuff going on that we don't have time to post to the main website or this blog.
Follow us from here.
Link: http://twitter.com/gethiroshima
Last month I attended a very interesting UNITAR roundtable discussion on World Heritage Sites and Conservation For Peace (pdf). Outside, the sun was shining and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom. Peace Memorial Park was full of people enjoying the blossoms, beer and bbqs. During the Q&A an A-bomb surivor stood up and expressed her distress at such scenes on what she considered the site of a mass grave. On my way home I was full of mixed emotions about both pleasant days enjoyed in Peace Park and the role that GetHiroshima plays in tourism promotion. Later when relating the story to Joy I was taken by surprise when I became choked with tears.
When we look at the park, so peaceful and open, today, it's difficult to imagine that day and those that followed it in 1945. Until the few seconds after the bomb exploded, the site of the park, the museum and the area around the A-Bomb Dome were packed with houses. Most hitherto known pictures of the city after the bombing convey the scale of material destruction, but not the human. However, 10 recently released pictures taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, found in 1945 among rolls of undeveloped film in a cave outside Hiroshima a U.S. serviceman show the true horror of the toll on the populace.
I'm not going to embed any of the picturs in this post, but you can see all 10 with more background on their discovery and release here (be warned, they are very disturbing images).
I do still feel that Peace Park as a public space does have a multi-faceted role, but I have a new appreciation of the feelings of those who had to witness crowded bustling neighborhoods razed and carpeted with charred corpses as far as the eye can see.
Link to the pictures
UPDATE: As Keith points out in the comments below, as of May 13, the pictures have been removed. Sean Malloy has added this note
Since making these photographs publicly available, I have received reliable proof that at least two of these photos are actually of the 1923 Kanto earthquake. While I cannot speak for the entire collection, this evidence raises doubts about all of the photos and raises the strong possibility that the identification provided by the Hoover Archives is incorrect. I take full responsibility for my own failure to take additional steps to verify that the original archival designation was correct. I have removed the photographs until and unless their source can be verified by further research.
Here is a video of Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire's keynote speech at the Global Article 9 Campaign World Conference Hiroshima held at Aster Plaza on May 5. It is just over 33 minutes long, but is well worth viewing if you have time. Frustratingly, my video battery ran out right at the end of her final appeal to the youth of Japan. Apologies for that!
A glitch in the usually highly efficient machine - manned staffed by robots - that isn't GetHiroshima reulted in the Spoken Word Night at Cloud 5 being advertised as happening on May 9. It's not, it's on May 29. Thanks for the heads up and apologies for any inconvenience that may have or may still be caused.
