Sunday 1st July Part One - Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

As promised, the next day dawned with more rain, so I took the opportunity to catch up with notes for my blog and social media while I breakfasted on the yoghurt and fruit I had picked up at the convenience store the night before.

Rather astonishingly, and completely unlike in the UK, the rain stopped at almost precisely the time that the weather report I found online said it would - around 10am - at which point I decided to brave the sweatbath outside and walk to the Peace Park, which was my first scheduled stop of the day.

Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park has been built on the area that used to be the city centre of  Hiroshima, and which was reduced to little more than a scorched piece of bare earth by the atom bomb. Today it houses a museum, many memorials and works of public art, and a number of other public buildings. There is also the remains of the old Industrial Promotion Hall - better known today as the A Bomb Dome - it is the building closest to the hypocentre of the blast that survived and has largely been left in its state from that day as a memorial to the victims.

Hiroshima Peace Park is not your average sightseeing day out - especially if you also go and look around the Museum, as I did. It is also not about blame - I found the Museum as it is today very even-handed in its discussion of WW2 and the events that led up to it. And to my mind it was a lot less graphic than it could have been about the aftermath of the atom bomb, although I know many people find it upsetting even as it is. But growing up as I did in the depth of the Cold War and surrounded by images of what would happen in the event of what felt then like an imminent nuclear war, my imagination is well able to conjure up more horrors than are on display here.  All that said, if you don't think you can face up to the results of the worst kind of violence mankind can perpetrate on itself in the name of victory, you might want to avoid the Museum entirely. On the other hand if you can steel yourself to look around, it might change your perspective on nuclear weaponry, war, and nuclear power in general. Or at the very least, it might make you think.

It felt especially meaningful to be visiting this year, a year after the Fukushima crisis laid to rest (again) the notion that nuclear power in its current form can ever be safe on a planet that is itself unpredictable, even apart from human intervention. The ghost of Fukushima and of the Tohoku 'quake/tsunami is everywhere in Japan - in the worries of people buying food to eat and wondering if it's safe; in the independent blogs of those who assiduously monitor the radiation levels in Tokyo; in reports from foreign journalists who talk to people displaced by the exclusion zone (or who remained behind to care for abandoned animals); in the promotional leaflets at the Tourist Information Centres encouraging visitors back to the Tohoku region; in every temple that has a display showing its relief work in the affected area; and in the protests that were going on in Hiroshima and elsewhere in Japan on the day I visited the Peace Park, in response to the switching on of one of Japan's nuclear reactors, closed down since 2011. This news, along with the flooding  (taking place in regions also housing nuclear reactors), was to dominate my days in Japan throughout, even if I could only understand a little of it on the TV, and even if the national broadcasting company NHK took care to avoid showing the extent of the actual protests.

But most of all, I think, the shadow of the tsunami and the attendant nuclear crisis (which is still going on, by the way), is most notable as The Thing Which No-one Talks About Directly. Even in Hiroshima. And I can understand it too - apart from those who were direct victims in some way, there were many, many more who experienced the disaster and its aftermath without knowing whether they would survive it either. What can you say, when you've looked into the abyss and truly believed you were going to die?

Not to say that I never spoke about it to anyone at all while I was over there, because I did - but it wasn't a topic I was very keen to raise myself either, for the most part - it feels too much like being a voyeur into a collective grief that I can only empathise with to a certain point. After all, as horrific as the pictures that everyone in the UK saw on the BBC in the immediate wake of the disaster, and however much money we may have donated to the relief funds, none of us felt that quake or heard the tsunami alarms. And it's been a long time since Chernobyl - long enough that we've stopped being reminded  about the dangers of radiation in the wind and in the rain, and the fact that Britain is contaminated from that crisis, just as Japan is now contaminated in the wake of this one. (That knowledge, by the way, is partly why I didn't have any major concerns about travelling there - I was around when the rains from Chernobyl fell on the fields of England, and I've read enough about the Windscale Fire to be quite certain that for me that horse has already bolted, big style).

Anyway, I have strayed off the topic here somewhat - except not really, since the raison d'etre of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is not only to mark the death and destruction from the atom bomb that exploded in the air above the city in 1945, but also to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons from the world. And personally, I think it's a good place to sit and consider what mankind has done with this power they have harnessed, and how many more lives have been ruined by it because of money and power. It is not the fault of the technology - I do believe that  something radical will have to be done to deal with the increasing energy demand of modern life, and if that radical thing isn't to curb it, then it'll have to be to provide it in a way that does not destroy the planet. And it's possible that solution will be based on nuclear technology. But we will have to move beyond what we have now and the laurels and money that the current nuclear industry rests on and has done for decades, just as the oil industry did before it, and still tries to do, despite dwindling resources.

All in all it was a sombre morning, and a thoughtful one for me - both about the past and about the current state of the world - a morning that would in some ways linger throughout the rest of my trip in terms of how I viewed Japan and the people I met there.

I passed the protest that was happening in the streets of Hiroshima as I travelled on the tram back to my hotel, and whatever the wrongs and rights of the issue, I was glad to see that there were people willing to turn out and speak their minds in a country that up to this point has rarely been noted for public, anti-establishment protest. if there is any legacy from last year's disaster that is positive, I hope it's this one.

• Pictures of  Hiroshima are on my Flickr here
• This morning's music was Ryuichi Sakamoto's War and Peace, in honour of a great man who has spoken out many times on the subject of nuclear weapons and nuclear power. It seemed fitting for the soundtrack to a walk to the Peace Park.