Hiroshima

Hiroshima - the city whose name is synonymous with the atomic bomb. It's so strange to think that it would be just another mid-sized industrial city had the events of August 6th, 1945, not taken place.

The day before, on the train out to Miyajima, I realized that all the middle-aged passengers around us had parents who had survived the bombing, if they had been Hiroshima residents at that time. I felt guilt, solidarity, and admiration all at once - honestly, it was just as powerful a moment for me as anything we'd see downtown.

After leaving Roku Hostel, Monica and I headed for Hiroshima's bus station to buy our $5 tickets to Matsue and to stash our bags. Then we headed for the Peace Park.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was more compact than I'd imagined. We overshot it at first and had to double back across the T-shaped bridge to reach its north entrance. Across the river was the infamous A-Bomb Dome, the building closest to the hypocenter that remains standing today.

 

The first thing we came across was the Peace Clock Tower, which rings every morning at 8:15. Next, we found the children's memorial, filled with a visiting school group. A few kids said hello to me. One little boy haltingly asked Monica where she was from. We both agreed later, it felt so complex to be an American at this site.

Finally, we saw the Memorial Cenotaph and eternal flame - lit from the flame on Mt. Misen which is said to have been lit by Kobo Daishi. The cenotaph is inscribed "Let all the souls here rest in peace for we shall not repeat the evil." Interestingly, there's an explanation that this is meant to be a universal "we". Nothing in Hiroshima seems to entirely assign blame to the United States, but seems to take a fairly nuanced approach to how the world arrived at the final horror of the atomic bomb.

From there, we headed into the museum. Like so much else in Japan, it's being refurbished, so all the exhibits were compressed into one wing. The first exhibit that we stopped at for a while was a map of the bombing - a large, circular table with a digital projection of Hiroshima as it looked that morning. As it replayed the dropping of the bomb, it zoomed in and out on ground zero, clearly illustrating what it looked like before and after. I noticed in the "before", they used the humming of cicadas - a sound of Japan in summer that we were now familiar with. Afterwards, of course, there was silence. It was a subtle, but effective, bit of design.

The next exhibit we stopped for was a video of survivor testimonies. The one I remember most vividly was a Korean guy who had been working in military manufacturing in Hiroshima and left soon after the bombing, as Koreans had been targeted after Hiroshima had been hit by air raids in the past. I think it's human nature to relate to what you know, and so even though there's really no connection aside from being a traumatic historic event, I found myself thinking about families of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent who were threatened with violence after 9/11.

I thought it was interesting that so much of the middle section of the museum was very clinically focused on the science behind and the history of the nuclear bomb - a lot of effort was made toward putting things in perspective. There were a few objects you could touch - roof tiles and glass bottles - to literally feel the before and after. I waited for a group of school kids to go through before touching the bottle and wondered how long objects took to become safe to handle.

The final exhibit was definitely the most brutal - articles of clothing and other personal effects, paired with stories of the people they had belonged to. They were usually written by a surviving family member, heartbreakingly. There was a woman's dress, pierced in a hundred places by glass shards, blood (I'm assuming) still staining it. There was also a corner on Sadako, of '1000 Paper Cranes' fame. They had a few of the cranes she'd folded, plus the geta her parents had bought to go with the kimono she loved wearing around the hospital.

Afterwards, we soberly checked out the gift shop - I bought a children's book called 'My Hiroshima', written and illustrated by Junko Morimoto. It's the tale of how she survived the bomb as a young girl and is beautifully crafted. I also took a moment to add my name to a petition cards calling for an end to nuclear proliferation. The world can be an ugly place, but the reflective quality of everything I saw in Hiroshima made me feel a little more hopeful.