Here we are again, waiting at the train station for the Shinkansen to arrive.
Standing behind the yellow line, I cannot help but notice the people around me. Perfectly formed queues, enormous crowds rushing through the station in the early morning, and yet, somehow, almost complete silence.
No one seems to be talking.
I try to enjoy the sushi I bought at 7-Eleven, but I am still so lost and confused by everything around me.
Is this world real? Is this really happening?
Suddenly, my hair begins to fly. A rush of air brushes against my face.
The train is finally here.
Once aboard, we try to take in everything around us. The scenery flashes past the windows, and yet, inside, everything feels remarkably calm. Travelling at extraordinary speed, we barely have time to comprehend the distance we are covering.
Before I know it, we have arrived in Hiroshima.
Here I am, standing in front of a portrait.
The beginning of it all.
The entrance to the museum.
A large portrait of a young girl.
No words. Although, perhaps, none are needed.
Just her, staring back at us. And somehow, that is more than enough.
I was struck by the way this museum tells one of the most heartbreaking stories in human history.
It takes you along with it, through portraits, real faces, families, and children. Through lives that once existed just as ours do today.
Short sentences carrying the weight of a hundred pages.
You find yourself reading every single story, following each life, hoping to discover what happened to the people whose faces are looking back at you.
And, boy, on those rare occasions when the words “he survived” or “she survived” appear, tears of joy begin to form.
A moment of relief.
A moment of hope.
But I keep walking.
I keep reading.
One story after another.
At some point, I find myself searching for the exit.
I cannot do this anymore.
I repeat those words to myself.
And then, suddenly, I stop.
There she is again.
The same girl whose portrait greeted me at the beginning.
The girl whose eyes I had passed without yet knowing her story.
It was finally time to learn who she was.
Her name was Sadako Sasaki.
Sadako was only two years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. She survived the initial blast, but years later, she developed leukemia as a result of radiation exposure.
She became known for folding paper cranes, inspired by the Japanese tradition that says that anyone who folds one thousand origami cranes may have a wish granted.
She folded them with hope.
Hope for recovery.
Hope for life.
But Sadako's story did not have the ending I had been quietly hoping for.
She died at the age of twelve.
And yet, somehow, her story did not end there.
Her cranes became a symbol of peace. Her story travelled far beyond Hiroshima, across Japan and eventually across the world. A little girl, who had become one of the countless victims of a war she was too young to understand, became a reminder of what happens when we forget the human lives behind history.
Standing there, looking at her portrait for the second time, I felt something I had not expected.
At the beginning of the museum, she was simply a girl in a photograph.
Now, she had a story.
And somehow, knowing her story made it impossible to look at that photograph in the same way again.
Before leaving, I bought a book about Sadako's story.
I read it later, from beginning to end.
And perhaps that is why I wanted to write about this day in this way. Not simply as another place I visited, or another destination to add to my travels, but as a story I wanted to carry with me and share.
Because sometimes, travelling is not about the places you see.
Sometimes, it is about the stories you bring home.
I walked out of the museum quietly.
Hiroshima outside was still alive. People were walking, trains were arriving, restaurants were opening, children were laughing.
Life was continuing.
And perhaps that was the strangest part of all.
Earlier that morning, I had been standing on a platform, watching the Shinkansen arrive at incredible speed, wondering whether everything around me was real.
Now, after everything I had seen, I realized something.
The world was real.
The people were real.
The faces in those photographs were real.
And the stories were real.
I had arrived in Hiroshima as a traveller, curious to see a city I had only known through history books.
I left carrying stories I knew I would never forget.