Dear Elliot, Emmala, and Eliza,

Today we toured all around Hiroshima. We spend the morning at a memorial and peace park with a museum that has a lot of reminders of a terrible bomb that was dropped during a war that happened before your grandma and grandpa were born. We will tell you some of the stories about that place when we see you. We have some books that help to tell stories about the people who survived that war. Emmala, you will be interested that in the park there is a monument to people from Korea who were living in Hiroshima at the time. The monument is a large stone pillar that is being held up by a giant stone turtle. Here is a picture of the turtle statue.

We also saw the children's memorial. It has a statue of a young girl holding a paper crane. And all around the monument are thousands and thousands of folded paper cranes. I am sure there are more than a million paper cranes there, mostly in bright colors and all designed to remind people of how important it is to work for peace and to learn ways to be kind to one another.

In the afternoon we walked around a castle that has been around for hundreds of years. The original castle was destroyed, but the people have rebuilt parts of it to serve as a museum to the Samurai and the rulers who founded the city of Hiroshima. We climbed up to the top of the tower that is on the corner of the castle property. It was a lot of stairs, but we got a good view of the city from the top.

You might be interested to know that the city where we are visiting, Hiroshima, is where the Mazda car company was founded. Your family's big car was built in a factory here in Hiroshima and then traveled by boat from the port of Hiroshima to the United States.

We have just two more days in Japan, so we are starting to think about coming back to Washington to see you soon!