Japan 2025 - Hiroshima

Welcome back to the second part of this blog post series! Here, I'll be talking about the Japan vacation that me and my friends went on in October 2025. This post specifically, will talk about the first experiences we've had in Japan, including the sights we've visited in Hiroshima.

The Travel

The day arrived: October 11th. The luggage has already been mostly sitting ready for the last few days, the last things are being thrown into the bags. Everything ready to go.

Two of us would travel by car, while one of us would desperately hope to not get Deutsche Bahned travel by train towards Frankfurt Airport. Luckily for us, the travel via plane was mostly uneventful. We were flying with China Eastern with an layover in Shanghai, the flight was fine, the staff was accomodating, although sometimes there were slight difficulties which I'd put down to the factor "language barrier" as not everyone's English was great.

Fun Fact: This post was released on the 1st Anniversary of our Japan trip. If you travelled exactly one year back in time, our plane would quite literally now be departing.

When we arrived in Shanghai, our first challenge arose. We had about two hours between our plane from Frankfurt arriving, and our plane to Hiroshima departing. Now, we knew this was coming, as this was exactly like we had scheduled. That said, when we arrived at security and discover a huge queue in front of us, some slight worry began setting in.

Turns out we were completely fine though, the security did go quicker than initially feared. On top of that, our plane to Hiroshima was actually delayed, so we were absolutely fine in the end. That said, none of us were able to sleep any meaningful amount, so sleep deprivation started to set in. After about an hour (or two) of delays, we were able to get onboard of our plane towards Hiroshima.

Hiroshima's airport is fairly small, compared to e.g. Tokyo's airports. Customs into Japan was easy, although we had to figure out how exactly it works. I do not know how this is handled in other airports, however in our case we've just simply had to:

• Fill out a tiny piece of paper, with e.g. where we will be staying (first), what our intention is etc.
• Hand it over to an officer, they may ask you an question or two to confirm
• Fill out a second, slightly larger piece of paper, about your belongings for customs

Once done, that was it!

The Arrival

If you're travelling from/to the Hiroshima Airport, you'll want to know that there is a Bus Shuttle towards Hiroshima Central Station. Simply take that and you'll be there in about 30-60 minutes. Once we arrived at Hiroshima's Central Station, the first challenge arose: Public Transport.

Hiroshima had plenty of busses and trains to get around the city and region, that wasn't the problem. However, on the public transport, you'd have to either pay by cash, or by an IC card. Notable exceptions are Shinkansen, those you can pay additionally by credit card.

What about those IC Cards?

To quickly summarize, IC cards are payment cards that you'd mostly use on public transport, but they could also be used with vending machines and regular payments in other stores. They are not to be confused with proper credit cards, meaning we couldn't just use our phones or regular cards.

From my knowledge, iPhones do support the functionality to effectively become virtual IC cards, but our Android phones actually lacked the ability to do so, meaning we'd have to get the physical cards. Not that I really cared, as I prefer phyiscal cards and it'd be another souvenir to take home. Still, we had to figure out how to get one.

Before arriving to Japan, we've been mostly told by friends to just get one at the airport. However, we had completely missed that option at Hiroshima's Airport, if there was one in the first place. This wouldn't be a problem though, as there was another opportunity to purchase one at Hiroshima's Central Station. Purchasing one there was actually quite helpful, as we were able to find an Tourist Center which pointed us towards what we had to do.

When getting your card, you'd first have to place a deposit for the card itself (¥500), and then perform an initial top-up of the card. This would have to be paid by cash, aswell as any future top-ups would have to be completed with cash aswell. None of us had cash with them (yet), so we'd first have to go to an ATM. Don't worry about that though, just go to your local Konbini and use their ATM. In our case, there was an 7-Eleven basically 50 meters down the hallway. While you will encounter fees, they were absolutely cheap, so just always stick to your nearby 7-Eleven, LAWSON, Family Mart etc.. Once we got the cash, we could get our IC card at a machine.

Closing off Day 1

In Hiroshima, we had been staying in an Aparthotel of sorts. The building itself had multiple apartments, several of which were clearly labeled as belonging to the same owner, but not every apartment had that sign on it. It was fairly centrally located, so we had quick access to pretty much everything Hiroshima had offered.

Even though none of us barely slept during the entire trip, we still wanted our first Japanese food experience, and went to an nearby Izakaya. While it was amazing, all of us quickly noticed tiredness setting in (we all were awake at least 30+ hours at this point), so we closed off Day 1 early in our apartment. Unfortunately no food pictures from here, although there'll plenty to go.

Day 2

Since we still had to get used to Japan, recover from our flights and the weather forecast was predicting occasional rain, we basically just decided to take it easy for the first day and just have a look around the City and check out a few stores.

First off though, we ate breakfast at a local bakery.

The bakery we went to, turned out to be a pretty infrequent chain called "Little Mermaid". We loved it, but unfortunately we hadn't run into it again beyond our stay in Hiroshima.

Our next stop was a nearby shopping center, mostly just to have a look around and waste some time as rain had been imminent. It was actually kinda fun, as we had a look around the book stores - none of which we could read, but it was pretty exciting to find mangas that we were able to recognize. I hadn't known that Japan actually has a fairly huge second hand scene, e.g. the book store actually had several entire series of maybe up to 30 mangas, for a price where in Germany, you'd maybe have to pay 5-10x as much (although they'd be new copies). We were also able to find second hand games and old consoles in that store. I don't know how the prices would compare to Germany, but the selection was certainly a lot bigger than what you might discover in german stores.

The first day mostly continued with us going into more stores, but as the day came to a close, the weather had cleared up again and since we were actually incredibly close to it, we decided to visit Hiroshima's Peace Park at the end of the day. The sun was about to set, so we couldn't really do much more than just have a look around.

Hiroshima is, of course, well known for being the place of the worlds's first nuclear bombing. The entirety of the Peace Park is dedicated to the huge number of deaths that had occured because of the bombings, reminding people of what had happened in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We would revisit the Peace Park the next day in order to visit the Museum.

Day 3

Our Japan itinerary is quite tight, so this would already be our last full day in Hiroshima. The first goal of today was to get to the Miyajima Island and the Itsukushima Shrine. It's a little distant from the city, but it is one of the most known sights either near Hiroshima, if not Japan itself.

Miyajima Island and the Itsukushima Shrine

If you're travelling from Hiroshima, there are two possible routes you could take. Either, you take the conventional train towards Miyajimaguchi, then take a public transport ferry to go to the Miyajima Island. Alternatively, you could also get a shortcut ferry that effectively goes directly from the Peace Park to/from Miyajima. The shortcut ferry is a lot more focused on Tourists, meaning it is more expensive, but it does save you time. It should be noted though, when we tried to use the shortcut ferry on our return trip, it had already sold out.

One fairly common sight, not just here but in the entirety of Japan, became Baden-Württemberg's "Nett hier." stickers. To explain for the non-germans: The german state "Baden-Württemberg" had released a marketing campaign at some point, aiming for increased tourism. This includes the slogan "Nett hier. Aber waren Sie schon mal in Baden-Württenberg?", you can see an translated version on the image below.

I was expecting to run into one at some point, but I was not expecting the frequency either, hence the mention.

Anyway, we continued to have a look at the surroundings and later climbed the hill behind the Shrine to get to an viewing spot. Luckily, at least parts of the journey was made easy with an cable car.

After descending the hill, we went back towards Hiroshima to visit Hiroshima's Peace Museum. I didn't take many pictures inside, mainly due to the sensitivity of the topic, but I would absolutely recommend going inside as it is an important reminder of Hiroshima's history.

We continued on to visit the somewhat nearby Hiroshima Castle.

We ended up closing our final Hiroshima day at a restaurant pretty close to our accomodation. It was a pretty small restaurant, basically just the cook with maybe a handful of sitting spots. The cook actually ended up asking if we wanted to take a picture of us and the food, so we took one!

Day 4: Leaving Hiroshima

And that was already our Hiroshima portion of our Japan vacation! At the beginning of Day 4, we repacked our suitcases and took our first Shinkansen towards Osaka!

With us departing from Hiroshima, that'll also be the end of this blog post. In the next few weeks, I'll release the next chapter, where I'll share our experiences from Osaka.