January 13, 2004
History tends to repeat
Day 3 - Hiroshima
I'm sure the seitai meant my knee would be better after a few days of rest, but dammit, I had a holiday to attend!
Matt, bless him, carried my backpack for me and we spent the day in Hiroshima, mainly at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the lesser known (but more emotionally affecting) National Peace Memorial Hall for Atomic Bomb Victims.
A-Bomb Dome in quiet reflection
Peace Park, which used to be the downtown area of Hiroshima before the bomb, is quite lovely. The A-Bomb dome, one of the only buildings within a 2km radius that was not shat to bits, has been preserved as a poignant reminder of August 6th, 1945 and is also a convenient landmark when getting your head around the extent of Hiroshima's flattened pancake.
For me, the museum was definitely an education (at 50 yen a pop, you sure as hell can't beat it) and a well-balanced one at that. It articulated the horrors of the first atomic bomb used against a population without sublimating Japan's role in the chain of events leading to it.
What was particularly interesting was the commentary on the current status of world-wide nuclear testing. For some reason, it really hit home for me the reality of a (near) future nuclear war. I mean, I was always aware of the possibility in an abstract sense, but seeing the effects on Hiroshima, it became a truly viscerally horrifying thought.
The museum is enormous and the second building is the "bring it emotionally home to mama" part, with exhibits of charred school uniforms and the like. But we definitely reached saturation point. You can only look at so many burnt artefacts before crying, "Enough already! I get the point!"
Although I'd highly recommend the museum, I felt it did keep you at an arm's length. This is probably not the museum's fault - there was a policy imposed by the U.S after the bomb to suppress photos of the devastation (god forbid that the world discover that dropping the bomb may actually have been an atrocity) so whilst there were a few hands-on exhibits and plenty of reconstructions and harrowing eye-witness accounts, there was not much in the way of photographs or film depicting the aftermath.
Cityscape over Motoyasu River
As we ambled back to the shinkansen station, it was nearly dusk, and the cityscape of the river, A-bomb dome and T-bridge (which was the Little Boy's target) looked beautiful. Hard to imagine that 60 years ago, it was a wasteland of rubble and death.
Tomorrow - The Stormtroopers of Fukuoka
