Unforgettable

I was lucky enough to go up the Twin Towers in New York and have since visited Ground Zero. An emotional affair which brought many tears.

Visiting the museum of occupation once in Riga, Latvia, I saw a wall of children’s crayon pictures of trains. The trains they thought were taking them to a new life. Pictures of the trains to the concentration camps. I wept.

An early bullet train from Kyoto, today includes a stop for a couple of hours in Hiroshima. The site of the dropping of the atomic bomb.

I was horrified to learn that as late as July 1945, the list of targets for the American atomic bombs was headed by neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki, but Kyoto – not an industrial site, but the city of the Golden and Silver Pavilions, and the Nijo Castle with its Nightingale Floor – a city that has just given me three days of joy. Japan’s ancient capital was spared only because the American secretary of war, Henry L Stimson, and his wife had visited it.

Leaving my cases at the station, I head into town to the peace park and the bomb dome. It’s peaceful. Evocative. Something hangs in the air. The ruined frame of the building at the centre of the blast.

I wander through the park and look at the Cenotaph which has over 140,000 victims name is etched onto it. The Sun is shining but there is an air of quiet.

Nothing prepares me however for a visit to the memorial museum. A slow shuffle of international visitors make their way in stony silence through darkened corridors . Pictures, pieces of clothing, pieces of buildings, a computer simulation of the blaster over a huge model of the city. The tears streaming down my face. I’m glad of the darkness. Although I’m not the only person who has been affected. I can hear the sobs of other visitors standing by me as we read the stories of people who were in the streets of the city on that fateful day in 1945. The story of the small two-year-old girl who was rescued, but then at the age of 15 was diagnosed with leukaemia and ao every day made an origami model of a crane bird. Every day until she died in 1958.

Deaths from the blast went on till the late 70s. The memory of what happened on that day should last forever. I emerged into the light and had to sit and spend some time thinking. How much we hurt each other. How the moment we cease to acknowledge, each other’s humanity is the moment we die.

I decide to clear my head by walking back through the new city to the station. The Phoenix is regarded as an auspicious bird in Japanese culture and Hiroshima, a Phoenix of a city that has risen from the ashes.

A quick train journey and a short ferry bring me to the island of Miyajima.

I asked the travel agents for variety on this trip and I’m certainly getting it.

After the elegance of the Gate hotel in Kyoto, I’m spending two nights in a small inn that wouldn't look out a place in a 1970s BBC sitcom. “I’ve got a Yen”

The welcome is enormous. The room is not.

Miyajima seems to be a sort of Skegness, except as I walk through its streets in the afternoon sunshine of a Sunday afternoon I notice that this is a Skegness for the Japanese. There are not that many international visitors. I stand out both by height and tone.

I suspect that this evening and tomorrow will involve more walking around the island, and I know that in the early afternoon tomorrow I have a tea ceremony and a calligraphy class. My mother, Florence, will be clapping her hands with joy at the thought. She spent hours and many shillings on copy books for me to use to improve my handwriting. She failed at every level. I really should’ve been a doctor, but the level of incomprehensibility of my notes has often raised laughter at the end of a rehearsal.

Tomorrow night in Sheffield The Full Monty will premiere while I am over 10,000 km away.

I’m going to try and produce something in my calligraphy class that is about luck and send it to the boys as our work is released to the public.

Dinner is included at the inn and the food is gorgeous. Less so are Americans at both tables either side who eat and pick fault.

I hope they’ve been to the city up the road that has to rebuild itself.

And if not, perhaps they could go now and make the dining room slightly fucking quieter.