Hiroshima

Hiroshima is one of the places I have most looked forward to visiting. There’s a number of reasons for this; I’ve always been interested in World War II, but beyond that, I’m interested in differences in perspective… and I expected to learn something in Hiroshima that is very different from what I read in my textbooks. We got that, and it was as fascinating as I had anticipated. But it wasn’t what was most affecting.

Despite Hiroshima’s complete turn-around (it’s a fully modern city, and you can barely tell that it was rubble a little more than 60 years ago), they have done an incredible job preserving the memory of August 6th, 1945. Beyond designating the area around the bomb hypocenter as a large park (Peace Memorial Park), complete with a museum and several tasteful memorials, they also interviewed countless survivors, the recordings of which have been translated into several languages and are readily available to the public. The museum is meticulously detailed, and avoids turning the whole thing into a sideshow for tourists, or letting emotions guide its presentation. It explains the background, the day, the immediate and lasting physical and emotional impact on the people, the science, and the politics all clearly and frankly. This is a story that needs no embellishment, no dressing up, to have profound impact.

Then, after you leave these sites with an abstract picture in your head of the horror and misery, you walk into this. It’s called the A-Bomb Dome (wiki); the bomb exploded almost directly above it, and it was one of the very few structures left standing in the immediate aftermath. It has been preserved exactly as it was following the drop of the bomb, and with all of the information I had since walking out of the museum and the memorials, it brought everything home.

When I travel to important cultural sites, I do my best to try and imagine real life at the time that the site was most historically significant. That’s not easy to do, always. But when I looked at that dome, I honestly could feel the desolate, bombed-out wasteland, full of dead and dying, that the survivors called “hell on earth.” I’m at a loss to explain the feeling any further, but this needs to be taught… it’s at the core of what war really is. Not just a collection of numbers of the dead and wounded, or dates and names… it’s experiencing the time and the place through those who witnessed it… hearing the stories and understanding how we can never really disassociate or distance ourselves from this type of cruelty. Maybe then we couldn’t take war so lightly.