We left early this morning to catch our shinkansen (bullet train) from Kyoto to Hiroshima. For most of us who are remotely aware of the atomic bombings that happened in Japan during World War II, we’d know that Hiroshima is the first city that the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on in an attempt to force Japan to surrender. The entire city was flattened almost instantly after the bomb was dropped that August morning of 1945. The city has since rebuilt itself, and has a large peace memorial park built to memorialize the victims of the first atom bomb devastation. It also has a well-known museum dedicated to this tragic event. Hiroshima has retained the one building left standing near the hypocenter where the bomb was dropped – or at least, its skeletal remains.

When I told a Japanese friend, who comes to Japan every year since she and her husband own a house in Hiroshima, that Hiroshima was on our Japan itinerary for this trip, she was very surprised. She said that of the people (very likely the majority of whom are American) she knows who have gone to Japan, few to none of them have visited Hiroshima. Tokyo and Kyoto are always on the list, though (for understandable reasons). “There’s really not much to do in Hiroshima,” she said to me, other than the obvious peace park and museum, so most tourists don’t actually go there of whom she is aware.

I was surprised to hear her opinion and experience on this speaking to other travelers to Japan, but when I thought about it, I realized of the people I know who have been to Japan, few had included Hiroshima on their list, too, other than Chris and his family, who are obviously huge travelers. To me, it seemed like a logical place, particularly as an American, to want to visit, given the history with the atom bomb dropping. But in that sense, why would Nagasaki not also be on the list, I suppose?

Tonight, we walked around the atom bomb dome to see the remains of the building left standing after the bomb dropped, and read the descriptions surrounding it. In the twilight, it was so eerie and seemed even more tragic. As I read the background on the city and the peace park before our trip, I got teary thinking about the devastation to families, many of whom were completely wiped out because of the atom bomb and its lingering ramifications on the survivors. Our parents generally teach us that when we do good things, good things will come to us; if we do bad things, bad things will happen to us. It’s clearly very simplistic and is even more painfully obvious that it’s just not true. None of these people did anything to deserve this level of devastation. And it was chilling to see the remains of the dome in person. Despite the heat and high humidity, I felt chills walking around the dome and thinking about all the people in it who died in seconds. Innocent lives were lost and multiple generations killed instantly.

As an American, I think it’s even more important for us to visit places like this. Our country is obsessed with stupid, inane concepts like American exceptionalism, the idea that we’re the best, the most developed and civilized, but we really should deal with the fact that we’ve done a lot of God-awful things to other countries that for some reason, most Americans just want to forget and ignore. We’re not the best. If we were truly the best, the gap between the richest and the poorest would not be so large, the infant mortality rate would not be so high, and there would actually be recognized and paid maternity and paternity leave at the national level. We would have trains that actually were on time, fast, and worked. We would truly and fully embrace other cultures and languages and not have so much ignorance about the rest of the world and how others live, breathe, and eat. Guns would not be as easy to get as a pair of shoes. We would recognize that the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” also means the right to proper and full healthcare coverage, because without health, you have absolutely no real life no matter what any moron says. These are the moments I get really angry and embarrassed about being American because these are the things that the rest of the world knows about us and laughs at us about, but somehow in our own country, we’re still blinded by our own delusions, thinking we are number 1.

It’s hard to have and want peace in the world when you live in a country where people are blindly pro-war no matter what it is and think that the U.S. has to get involved in every war possible. Let’s just hope we don’t forget how we screwed up Japan to end World War II and decide to drop another atomic bomb somewhere else in the world to try to prove our delusional superiority.