Above: Hiroshima at dusk, as seen from my room in the Rihga Royal Hotel

I recently spent a long weekend in Hiroshima prefecture, which is less than two hours by bullet train southwest of Kyoto. As I mentioned in my last post, I stayed for a night on the stunning island of Miyajima. I also stayed one night in Hiroshima city, the modern, bustling-but-not-too-crowded capital of Hiroshima prefecture.

After checking into our hotel around noon, my friend and I got right to the point, which was to eat lunch. We ate Hiroshima-yaki in Okonomi-mura, a collection of three floors of Hiroshima-yaki restaurants in the city center.

Hiroshima-yaki is Hiroshima's version of okonomiyaki, a kind of cross between a pancake and a crepe. The kind of okonomiyaki that I usually eat is Osaka-style okonomiyaki,—a mixture of an egg-and-flour-batter, with lettuce and other ingredients mixed in by preference (such as shrimp, mochi, and fatty slices of pork), poured onto a table-top grill and cooked into a thick, savory pancake. After it’s grilled, you add toppings to it, including okonomiyaki sauce (a tangy, savory, clearish-brown sauce), bonito flakes (smoked fish shavings), and seaweed powder.

Hiroshima-yaki contains a generous batch of noodles (with a little bit of batter), with seafood or other ingredients added by preference. Unlike Osaka-style okonomiyaki, the ingredients for Hiroshima-yaki are piled on top of each other instead of mixed together.

The kind we tried had egg noodles, sliced cabbage, and bean sprouts, with a thin wafer of fried dough on top, and strips of fatty pork, egg, and fresh shrimp mixed in. Hiroshima-yaki is typically cooked for you (instead of you cooking it at your own table-top grill, as is often the case with Osaka-style okonomiyaki).

The Hiroshima-yaki was very filling and tasted quite good, but was more greasy than Osaka-style okonomiyaki, which I decided I prefer more. I like the chewy richness of the Osaka-style okonomiyaki, while the Hiroshima-yaki tasted more oily and was also harder to eat—since the ingredients were just piled on top of each other, each slice of okonomiyaki kept falling apart while I was trying to eat it.

After lunch, we walked over to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which is traversed by a series of bridges and the river.

It really does feel peaceful there, and the most surprising thing to me was how much the design of the park reminded me of Paris. The curve of the river, the curve of the bridges, the walking paths that paralleled the river, even the overcast sky that day—they all reminded me of walking along the Seine in autumn or winter.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the designers of the Peace Memorial Park deliberately imitated Paris in their design—Japan seems to be quite a nation of Francophiles, judging by the many French-inspired bakeries and French-inspired knickknacks they sell in stores around here.

The famous Atomic Dome building is also in the Peace Memorial Park. It has been left as is since the 1945 atomic bombing, and is a UNESCO world heritage site.

At the Peace Memorial Park, we visited the Children’s Peace Monument, which displays paper cranes made by schoolchildren around Japan. The monument is dedicated to the memory of Sadako Sasaki, a young girl who developed leukemia after the bombing of Hiroshima.

After her diagnosis, she decided to fold 1,000 paper cranes, which, according to Japanese tradition, can grant you one wish. Although she reached her goal of 1,000 cranes, young Sadako died at the age of twelve. Today, schoolchildren from around the world fold paper cranes and send them to Hiroshima to display at the memorial. The cranes are housed in display cases behind the monument.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is located at the southern end of the park. It contains displays about not just the Hiroshima bombing, but Japan’s involvement in wars leading up to World War II. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far in the museum, because shortly after I went there, my stomach decided it wasn’t very happy with the Hiroshima-yaki, and I spent most of my time for the rest of my visit in the very peaceful restroom of the museum.

But with every stumble springs hope. After I got my stomach in order, we headed over to Hiroshima-jo, Hiroshima’s very own castle.

The castle itself wasn’t particularly impressive—it’s mostly an open-air structure that was partly rebuilt in 1958 after the bombing (with other parts left as they were, showing the ruins to the castle’s original foundation).

At the castle, though, was the first sign of spring—cherry blossoms!