I agree. I had read and occasionally seen a documentary on the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I lived in Tokyo for a while and visited Hiroshima and the A-bomb museum. They had a "scaled" model of the entire city and the bomb hanging on the model with the proportional distance at the height it exploded (represented with red ball - size of billiards ball )
That picture/model is ingrained in my memory - it gave me an instant visual of the scale of horror. Pictures/movies don't come close to describing it. If you can go to the A-bomb museum in Hiroshima - do it.
I have not visited Hiroshima, or Japan at all for that matter, but I just recently came back from visiting the beaches of Normandy, the American cemetery, Arromanches, and other war memorials around there.
While obviously not the same thing, I recognize what you say about the scale of horror – it really is unfathomable from pictures, movies, and other representations. You simply have to visit to get a feel for just how big some of these key events of the war actually were, and it's absolutely mind boggling and horrific.
What really got me about visiting Normandy though was how real it all suddenly became. I'd like to think I'm a fairly well educated person when it comes to modern history, and particularly in terms of WW2. But since I grew up in a country that wasn't really pulled into it, everything just seemed so distant (even though it physically wasn't, I'm from Sweden) and in many ways unreal. That all changed with Normandy, and it was a very strange and mixed set of quite strong emotions involved. I can only imagine what it's like to visit Hiroshima, and hope I some day get the chance to do so.
I could recommend another, shorter trip, if you can spare a few days: get a Russian visa and drive to Haparanda - Kuhmo - Kostamuksha - Belomorsk. Nowadays, it's a one-day drive.
Look at Stalin's Canal there, and imagine that when it was built, the wasted humans were many enough to lay along the canal, buried there head to toe, to form a chain as long as the man-built parts of the canal itself.
The canal was never economically or militarily useful, it was just a project used to get rid of people.
Not quite as many people killed as in Hiroshima, but they were each one separately and individually starved, beaten or shot to death instead of being killed remotely by one big industrial bomb. The killing machinery was human and it worked slow and it worked eye to eye.
From Belomorsk you can take a boat trip to Solovetsk, which was the original development lab for how to starve people in concentration camps. Both Soviets and Nazis studied and developed their methods based on the findings there.
Notice also that you won't see memorials for those who were killed. The miserable swamps are their monument.
I have been to both and I actually liked the one in Nagasaki much better, it puts it in a proper perspective - Nagasaki was a military harbor. Hiroshima museum is more emotional "look at all the suffering". Plus Nagasaki is a much nicer town in a valley, with the Portuguese colonial houses and much less tourists
The Nagasaki History Museum is also very well done, and particularly interesting from a Westerner's point of view. For centuries it was the only city where Europeans were allowed to trade with Japan.
If anything I'd say it's a cliché. There are a lot of bad things that have happened in the world that are ignored by euro centric thinking. This is not one of them.
Because it's a good 800 km from Tokyo, and 4 hours one-way even by bullet train. And because, A-bomb sites and Miyajima aside, there's not all that much of interest in the city of nearby.
On the other side of the coin, I also find it a bit odd to describe Hiroshima as a cliché. Quite the opposite, it's near-unique: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only cities ever attacked with nuclear bombs, and you can't get the experience of visiting them anywhere else.
Just as a reminder for people interested in buying JR pass:
1) not all trains all included (fastest Shinkansen Nozomi is not for example)
2) can't be bought in Japan
3) valid for 7/14/21 days from the first use
I went to Japan for 2 weeks and didn't go. I went for the food, the onsen, the city life, nature etc. I wasn't interested enough in their role in WWII to make the trip all the way down to the southern tip.
I think if I had 4 more weeks in Japan I probably still wouldn't go. I'm much more interested in say exploring Hokkaido & The Japanese Alps than going to war museums.
