HOTRODDING HIROSHIMA

Last time I wrote about missed photos of automotive oddities (see above... the website is posting these two out of order because I started creating this post earlier). Below are some shots I'm really glad I got. We are back in Hiroshima this issue. I stayed in a complex meant for students, but if you have a foreign passport they allow you to stay there. The room you get is basically a hotel room, half price. Sweet! It's also on the same delta between 2 rivers as the A-bomb peace park, so it's only a short walk away. I went out in search of dinner when I happened upon some beautiful creatures sitting kerbside...

A ratrod 1935 Ford Pickup and a 1929 Ford 2Door. Incredible. How cool is the slanted front grill, covering the number plate?

Works of art. The shop they come from is called Pumpkin Sally in Kanagawa. This thing has been pieced together from all sorts of makes and models. The body was sourced from the US, and then chopped and dropped into the stance you see here - a one-of-a-kind nostalgic speed machine. If you want to see pictures of it being made, check out the flash slideshow on the shop's site: www.pumpkinsally.com . They were were en route to a meet in Kyushu - the southernmost of the 4 main islands.

I was picking my jaw off the footpath. Nice pipes - who needs mufflers? How sexy are whitewall tyres!? And semi-gloss black paint! Ah!!! This one is called Heaven's Door.

This is the kat responsible. Tsuyoshi Sato. When I tried to speak to him in Japanese he said "Ah, English, please". When he asked me how long I'd been in Japan and I replied 1 year he agreed that I needed to study harder! haha. I mentioned my favourite magazines here and Sato-san said that they would soon feature the black Ford 2door. Lo and behold, next issues, there they were. And there were pictures of them at the Kyushu Hot Rides meet too. Earlier in the month, Heaven's Door ran a 14.65 second quarter mile at a speed trial - not bad for a car made from scratch using old tech know-how. These guys were looking for a place to stay, so not long after I spoke to them I heard the rods start up and drive past - awesome sounding cars - so raw.

(Click here if you want to hear what they sound like: http://www.vanpeltsales.com/FH_web/flathead_home.htm )

I continued on after having some ramen (Chinese style noodles) and into the peace park. I crossed one of the rivers and stood before a familiar landmark, although it was presented anew in the eerie wash of night lights...

It is strange to think that had you been there 62 years before, on August 6 at 8:15am, that you would have been vaporised in an instant. The museum gives you a very gritty picture of how it was at that terrible moment - the science of it and then the horror of what immediately and much later followed it. Some stories are heartrending. In less than a second from a nucleus of a single atom a reaction caused a fireball hotter than the surface of the sun to engulf everything within hundreds of metres. Beyond that was the shockwave, the violent wind resulting from air rushing back into the vacuum left by the blast, radiation and secondary fires. Standing there I couldn't imagine it and still can't. It's the sort of thing that you expect to feel when you're there, but it's too much to try and process. I somehow found it more surreal to see a street-car stop called Genbaku Domu-mae (A-bomb dome).

Hiroshima Prefectural Products Exhibition Hall, it's former name, was the only thing left standing at Ground Zero, and for hundreds and hundreds of metres around. The bomb went off 580 metres up in the sky to increase the effect of devastation, but because this building was beneath the blast the force was mainly downward, so many of its walls survived. The dome did too, but you can see the deformity of the metal braces, resulting from the intense heat of the blast.

The building, built in 1915, must have been quite grand in its day.

At night it takes on a more tomblike appearance, although even at 11:30pm there's life around it. It's a peaceful place - I recorded the sounds of people passing by, a couple of friends practising a song with a guitar, the river flowing idly by.

Below ground in the park is a memorial hall - kind of an ecumenical shrine, I guess. The image on the walls is a 360 degree panorama of Hiroshima just after the blast, made up of 140,000 tiles - roughly one tile for each life taken.

An impressively explicit context is given for the dropping of the bomb in this memorial. You won't find such things expressed in Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, that's for sure!

Well said.

A wall of screens show the images of those claimed by the bomb. It was a very hard task to work out who was killed as government records were, along with everything else around, obliterated. Above are just some of those killed with the family name Takeda.

This mound contains the ashes of 70,000 unidentified people.

Life and death for those on the outskirts of the blast were miserable. Many must have wished they had been at the centre of it, rather than endure the pain of burns, radiation sickness and disfigurement.

Bottles melted by the bomb.

Sorry for the morbid details. Life goes on in Hiroshima. It's a beautiful city - I like it a lot.

Is it ironic that it was just near the hypocentre of the bomb blast that I should meet some prime Japanese examples of American kar kulture fanaticism? Nah! (Nice touch with the Rising Sun battleflag on the Pickup. I think Sato-san knew what he was doing there).

Japan, on the whole, looks to America with loving eyes.

The local baseball heroes are called Hiroshima Carp! I caught these guys (just with my camera, that is) in a pond downtown.

This would have to be the wackiest location I've seen for a shrine so far! Not exactly one for the travel brochures. Yes, the city has been rebuilt!

Okay, that's it for Hiroshima from me. What next? Hmmm...