Hiroshima

One of the trips I have been most looking forward to prior to coming on this voyage was a day trip to Hiroshima. While I feel odd saying that I was looking forward to going to a memorial for the 140,000 Hiroshima lives lost (a best estimate for the number of deaths through the end of 1945 and not including the unknown numbers of related radiation deaths) I was eager to hear the Japanese presentation of the Hiroshima bombing and its preceding events. Would the presentation of the events be entirely anti-American? How could such a memorial not be entirely depressing? What good would I take away from the experience? Buoyed by my belief that if society doesn’t learn from the mistakes of her past she is doomed to repeat them, as well as my desire to simply bear witness to Hiroshima’s history—to say, I came, I saw, and now I can never forget or deny my own responsibility in preventing such a similar tragedy no matter how uncomfortable or upsetting. At the same time I understand that with knowledge comes responsibility to act and perhaps part of that action is simply writing this blog to share with you.
Yesterday two coach buses of Semester at Sea students made their ways to Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial Museum. Upon arrival we saw the remains of what was once called the Industrial Promotion Hall, built by a Czech architect in 1915. It was one of the few buildings that retained some structural definition after the atomic blast annihilated this city at 8:15AM on August 6, 1945. There was a movement to completely demolish the building after the war, given the painful memories the building invoked for so many, but a schoolgirl persuaded the town to preserve the building. Today the building is known simply as the A-bomb Dome and is on the National Historic Registry. Not far from the building is a clock tower that always chimes at 8:15 in the morning in remembrance of those who lost their lives in the bombing.

The Children’s Peace Monument was the next part of our tour of the park. The stone monument is essentially a statue of a young girl holding a giant origami crane—which is the Japanese symbol of health and longevity. The base of the monument is encircled with garlands of hundreds of thousands of paper origami cranes in all different colors. These cranes are made by children from all over the world and until recently they were in the open air. However, they are now encased in glass because a Japanese college student burned all of the crane strings several years ago. In Japan elders worry that the younger generations don’t respect their country’s history, just like the reminders offered to America’s youngest generations by "those who have gone before."



Not far from this monument is the Flame of Peace, burning adjacent to a stone coffin bearing the names of all of the bomb’s victims—both direct and indirect victims. The flame will burn until the last nuclear weapon on earth is eradicated.

After snapping pictures of the oleanders in the trees, the first flowers to bloom in Hiroshima after the blast, we made our way to the museum. The museum entrance was backlogged with people; the entire building was crowded with people from all over the world, although the majority of the crowd was Japanese. The first half of the museum was a sterile look at the physics devoted behind atomic and hydrogen bombs, a chronological look at the significant economic, social, and political (ESP terms for you Mr. Riley graduates out there) events in Japan’s history. The bombing of Pearl Harbor, beginning of the “War in the Pacific” were also included, although the bombing of Pearl Harbor wasn’t discussed in proportion to its impact on the US. There were miniature models of the town prior and after the dropping of the bomb and mini-movies throughout the exhibits with news reel and cultural information about Japan prior to the bomb. They aftermath of the bomb was prevented in a straightforward way—the closest the exhibits came to an anti-American sentiment was stating that the Potsdam Declaration, which the US tried to get Japan to sign prior to the bombings, neither hinted at the possibility of America’s use of the bomb nor allowed for the continuation of an empire line in Japan, the latter a system of Japanese rule that had been instituted for centuries.
While the beginning of the museum wasn't particularly emotionally sirring for me, walking through the latter half was one of the most emotional experiences of my life. By far the most heart wrenching part of the tour were the rooms dedicated to accoutrements of the dead—melted watches, young children’s clothing, a lunch box, a water canteen, a tricycle, a shoe, even skin and nail clippings. Each display told the story of overwhelming grief and sorrow: the boy whose body was identified by his lunchbox containing food he told his mother that morning he couldn’t wait to eat, his body incinerated, his lunch turned to coal; the charred tricycle of a three-year old, who was buried with his beloved tricycle, only to have his body exhumed 12 years later for transportation to the family burial ground and his tricycle donated to the museum; the book of a child who never came home and whose body was never found, whose mother refused to let her stay home from work that morning when she complained of sickness, whose mother blamed herself until her death for her daughter’s passing; the left shoe of a child whose bones were never found, but whose shoes identified her to her parents given that she had sewn the sandals straps from an old kimono. Then there were the pictures of those who survived, but who bear horrible physical and emotional scars as a result. The entirety of these exhibits was just too emotionally intense for me to maintain my composure. City Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba called Hiroshima “a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead.” I handed my headset over, signed the visitors’ book, and quickly left the museum.

What I took away from my trip to the museum, which I did not initially anticipate was a hope for peace. The message of the entire museum is hope for world peace and the eradication of nuclear weapons; it is not a museum interested in casting blame. There’s a sense that the museum can’t afford to divert energy from its peace mission in throwing stones. Every time a nuclear weapon is tested, the mayor of Akiba travels to the United Nations to make an official protest. The mayors do this out of respect for the roughly 300,000 hibakusha (A-bomb survivors), 95,000, of whom still live in Hiroshima today; they do this so this history will not repeat itself.
Back on the ship, I talked with a faculty member’s husband who fought in the infantry in WWII. He was and didn’t want to have to go back to the infantry; he did not want to be sent to Japan. He recalled being relieved when the bomb was dropped knowing that his nineteen-year-old-self would no longer be in danger of heading to the front lives. Whose lives were more important? The lives of our service-men not sent to Asia because of the bomb? The lives of the Japanese civilians who perished because the US troops were not sent? What happens to peoples, civilizations, and nations when we make such a distinction—when we elevate certain lives above those of others? What does that say about our legacy for our children and our children’s children?

Thinking about this reminds me of one of my mother’s favorite movies, Scent of a Woman, starring Al Pacino and Chris O’Donnell. In the movie a blind war veteran, played by Pacino, recounts a story to O’Donnell where a friend said to him, “When I was your age, I...” Pacino responded with anger, “You were never my age.” The quote reminds me that in seeing Hiroshima and trying to make my own sense of it, I must acknowledge that the context surrounding the decision to drop the bomb is one I never experienced.