Last Tuesday, I went from Nagasaki to Hiroshima. A three-hour trip, including three trains. Total time on platforms (according to the tickets) between the trains: eleven minutes. In Sweden I would have been nervous. In Japan that meant I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

Two cities with a shared past, forever linking them together. This, of course, goes back to August of 1945, when the US dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima and, three days later, Fat Man on Nagasaki.

The history teacher in me has been very pleased with the way the cities have presented their common history. For foreigners, the bombs will probably always define the two cities. But the cities are keeping their past and present separate. History is kept in the park, Ground Zero in Nagasaki (that bomb actually hit the ground), museums and statues of remembrance. Outside of that, there is no sign of what happened. Visiting them back to back turned out to be as good of a decision as I had hoped. I have walked around in the Peace Parks and visited the museums. When visiting Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum there were written statements on the wall, stories from the days following after the bomb was dropped.

“Death seemed literally to be fanning out in concentric circles with each passing day. Today people living in houses up to that point died. Seeing this, I would be correct to assume that the people living another 100 meters up the hillside would die the following day. The ripples of death that expanded from the hypocenter soon began to consume people who had suffered only mild injuries or who seemed to have escaped unharmed.” – Dr Akizuki, quoted in the Nagasaki Bomb Museum.

These concentric circles showed up in Hiroshima as well. All the maps of impact and of diseases that spread were illustrated with the same concentric circles. The Memorial Museum in Hiroshima was nothing short of getting hit in the gut. No censored images, 3D-videos on the blast impact and the background to the decision of making Hiroshima a target. The lack of empathy of the people in charge, deciding the faith of two cities is still striking to this day. Nagasaki, by the way, wasn´t even thought of as a target until a few weeks prior to the bombing.

I got stuck in Hiroshima for a week. “Typhoon number 10” to the Japanese – “Shanshan” to the rest of the world – killed seven people in the south just a couple of days after I left. The state closed down the train service. Hiroshima closed down as well, anticipating six to ten inches of rain in under 24 hours. No trams, no buses, hardly anything was open. But Number 10 missed us. Instead, I walked the empty streets of a city in a normal drizzling rain. It was a throwback to the start of the pandemic.

But it is nice to have some time and just linger. When traveling it is easy to get caught up in having things to do (laundry, buying tickets and what not) and having things you want to see or do. But taking time off from travelling once in a while is pure luxury.