Dammit Jim!

After a few days touring Beijing and seeing the normal Great, Forbidden and Heavenly sights, I noticed the guidebook mentioned the Peking Man Site in Zhoukoudian as being reasonably nearby. After several days of temples and castles and with the Chinese National Holiday promising to swamp every tourist location in Beijing, I thought it might be nice to take a trip out to see Peking Man’s cave.

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Watching Letters from Iwo Jima reminded me that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was 62 years ago today. I think Orac covers the moral and historical perspective of the bombings pretty well. What I wanted to talk about was the current city of Hiroshima.

I spent a year as an exchange student in Hiroshima University. I still get some odd questions when I say I stayed in Hiroshima. It seems some people think it’s something like the abandoned quarantine zone of Chernobyl (perhaps with added Godzilla). But in fact, by the time Americans entered Hiroshima less than two months after the bomb, radiation levels were barely above the US health guidelines for acceptable radiation exposure (well below the guidelines for occupational exposure). In any case, current radiation levels are indistinguishable from anywhere else in the world and the city is home to more than 1,100,000 people.

So now that that’s covered, I thought I’d list a few things worth doing and seeing in Hiroshima (it’s been a few years now so my apologies if anything has changed):

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