Tuesday. Evening. Hiroshima.

After the Japanese breakfast at the hotel this morning, I walked over to the hysterically sprawling Osaka Station and eventually found my way to the Shinkansen train heading to Hiroshima. Hiroshima felt like a fitting destination after the new president’s fiery speech yesterday. The mood among those of us standing by “The Dome”, the only building in Hiroshima that survived the atomic bomb “Little Boy” when it was dropped on August 6, 1945, was, to say the least, somber.

Hiroshima has been in my consciousness since school, and I remember all too well the images of the devastated city in the history book chapters about World War II. I almost always travel with both my passports, and the American one felt particularly heavy in my pocket today as I walked around the UNESCO-protected Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. In total, 140,000 innocent civilians were killed in Hiroshima (80,000 died in Nagasaki when another atomic bomb was detonated three days later).

I enjoyed a delicious lunch at a hole-in-the-wall eatery (izakaya, 居酒屋) run by a slightly eccentric woman near the site where the bomb caused the most destruction in central Hiroshima. Halfway through my bento box, the suit-clad man beside me broke our silence and asked, in broken English, if I thought Trump would want to annex Okinawa after buying Greenland. We nervously laughed at the idea and toasted each other with a subdued “kanpai!”

I felt just as disheartened in Hiroshima as I did when visiting Chornobyl, Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, and Choeung Ek (Killing Fields in Cambodia). It’s so incomprehensible and surreal that we humans can consciously cause so much suffering to one another – especially to all those poor children. And now, a new era awaits, where macho men in power will mark their territory, compare lengths, and make the planet even more unstable.

A Few Observations:

• The sushi sold at Lawson and 7-Eleven convenience stores tastes light-years better than at 90% of Malmö’s “sushi” restaurants.
• The Shinkansen began running between Tokyo and Osaka as early as 1964. The trains still run on time, are super fast (300 km/h), clean, and quiet – the polar opposite of Swedish trains, which are unreliable, grimy, and almost always late. It’s embarrassing that we can’t get our train act together.
• I had forgotten how much I appreciate sitting on a heated toilet seat. I can’t understand why this hasn’t caught on in Sweden.
• I love the Japanese approach to aesthetics and how it permeates so much of public spaces. Always function over form, but almost nothing is left to chance or carelessness.
• I find it a bit hard to process the immense reverence the hotel staff shows me. They have more respect for me than I have for myself.
• I’m so inspired by how tidy the room is when I return in the evening that I now clean up before leaving in the morning.
• Having miso soup and wobbly tofu for breakfast is actually not bad at all.
• A hearty lunch or dinner in Osaka costs about 130 SEK, including a large Asahi/Sapporo/Orion beer.
• I met a Russian exchange student yesterday who informed me that it only takes two hours to fly from Osaka to Vladivostok. Unbelievable how vast Russia is – it even borders Norway in the west.
• Many of the interactions I have with the always kind, polite, and helpful Osakians remind me of Sofia Coppola’s delightful “Lost in Translation”. Sometimes that film seems more like a documentary than a fictional story.
  Tomorrow will include a visit to a hotel where some of the staff are robots – a nice assignment from Charlotte (for www.hotelladdict.se).