escapewindow | Hiroshima: Monday, November 29 - Tuesday, November 30 (Reply)

Originally, we were going to stay in Matsue for three nights, and travel from there to Miyajima on Tuesday. While researching what I wanted to see during the trip, I saw how close Miyajima was to Hiroshima, and that the A-Bomb Dome still stood in Hiroshima today. (Also, normal radiation levels.)

Since I didn't really see how we'd spend two and a half days in Matsue, and since I wanted to see the A-Bomb Dome, I suggested we spend some time in Hiroshima. And got my wish.

[atom bomb dome]

This was a famous green-domed building, the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, and wasn't completely destroyed because it was almost directly beneath the hypocenter of the blast.

This became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, though not without some controversy. Japan was far from blameless in World War II; quite the opposite, in fact. But the site, plus Peace Park across the river, are part of a movement to eradicate nuclear weapons around the world.

There were a number of school groups here on field trips, all wearing these yellow caps.

A flame + reflecting pool + stone arch framing the dome.
Paraphrased, the stone says "Rest peacefully, for this mistake will never be repeated."

[hiroshima peace memorial museum]

I went to the museum alone; my parents were already tearing up and couldn't handle going inside again. It was a surprisingly cheap ¥50 to enter (~ $0.58 USD) and 300 more for the audio guide.

The museum covered the history of the city, the history of the bomb, the decision to bomb Hiroshima, the effects and aftereffects of the bomb, and the efforts since to protest all nuclear weapons tests globally. There were no real descriptions of the horrors that Japan caused during its imperialist expansion, or a prediction of how bloody island-to-island fighting might have been. I kept these in mind for context.

However, the decision to bomb Hiroshima seemed very calculated and cold blooded to me, in how:

The US needed to justify the massive expense of the Manhattan Project.
Japan was already weakened and attempting to negotiate a conditional surrender to the Soviet Union, and how the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, arguably, shows of force for the Soviet Union's benefit, not Japan's.
The plans to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, not Germany, were in the works since 1943, two years before the Manhattan Project's completion.
They systematically narrowed down the potential bombing sites to best study and display the effects of the bomb on real cities, real humans. The cities had to be at least 3 miles in diameter to measure the full area of effect. They called off conventional bombing of the cities on the short list, so damage could be attributed to the a-bomb rather than pre-existing conventional bomb damage.
(Kyoto was on that short list, briefly, which helped preserve its many temples and shrines and castles from destruction, while Tokyo, bombed with intense regularity, has been almost entirely rebuilt since the war. Luckily, someone (Henry L Stimson, Secretary of War) prevented the bombing of Kyoto, and it was off the list by early summer. My parents knew Kyoto was preserved from bombing due to cultural significance and lack of strategic importance; they, and I, were unaware that it was ever on the a-bomb short list.)
They bombed Hiroshima without giving warning, so the city couldn't be evacuated. This makes strategic and tactical sense, in that warmaking materiel could be evacuated along with civilians; in that the utter destruction of an unsuspecting city would be a stronger deterrent in the minds of both the Japanese and the Soviets; in that bombing a city full of unsuspecting civilians and soldiers would give more scientific data for the effects and aftereffects of the bomb than a mostly empty and prepared city.

It makes sense, in a cold and calculating way.

(My father said that as a child, he was taught that Americans were demons: not metaphorically, but actual demons. It's hard to refute that, when all you know of Americans are the B-29s flying overhead, raining destruction on your home town. After the war, he said he was surprised to find that American soldiers were so friendly, so nice: how was he to know, when the untruth is that pervasive?
American WWII propaganda mirrors that sentiment on the other side. Perhaps the globalization of communication could have improved things. As the opening of governments could have helped each participant country understand how their governments were manipulating them.)

Timeline (times in JST):

August 2, 1945: my father's eighth birthday.
August 6, 1945: at 8:15 am, the US dropped a uranium-based atomic bomb named Little Boy on Hiroshima.
August 9, 1945: at 12:02 am, the Soviet Union ends the Japanese-Soviet Nonaggression Pact by declaring war on Japan and invading Manchuria.
August 9, 1945: at 11:01 am, the US dropped a plutonium-based atomic bomb named Fat Man on Nagasaki.
August 10, 1945: my father watched his home burn down after one of the many B-29 conventional bombings of Tokyo.
August 15, 1945: Japan surrenders.

Maps of Hiroshima before the bomb.

A map of Hiroshima after the bomb.

The Atomic Bomb Dome, before.

There was a small-scale Atomic Bomb Dome inside the museum.

A map of Hiroshima, with the bomb's hypocenter marked by a red sphere.
If I recall correctly, the mushroom cloud, to scale, would be 15 meters high above this map.

The hypocenter in relation to the Atomic Bomb Dome and Hiroshima Castle.

Stopped watch: 8:15

A tricycle and soldier's helmet.
The museum wasn't above tugging on heartstrings, which they did, effectively.

A portion of the [teeny, tiny] 1000 origami cranes that Sadako Sasaki folded during her hospital stay.
She developed, and died from, leukemia ten years after surviving the bomb as a 2 year old.
(Heartstrings)

Some of the original art by the survivors, depicting black rain.

There was also plenty of imagery and reports of the aftereffects of the bomb. I didn't photograph the 1-1 scale 3d model of a burnt cityscape, with people shambling through, their skin melting off the tips of their fingers; I had no real way of telling how over- or under-dramatized that scene was (though I saw similar scenes in Barefoot Gen). A photographer that went back into the city after the bomb only managed to take 5 photographs, due to being overcome by what he saw.

[hiroshima castle]

After leaving the museum, it was already dark and the castle wasn't lit up, so we walked back home. We picked up bento and oden at a convenience store and had dinner at the hotel; I finally finished the bowl of instant ramen I had bought earlier, in Kyoto. Then, I took advantage of having a separate room, and stayed up past midnight processing the rest of the photos I had up to that point.

In the morning, after a quick breakfast of our leftover bentos from the night before, we walked to Hiroshima Castle.

The castle was destroyed completely by the atomic bomb, but the keep was rebuilt (using photos and paintings for reference) in the 1950s, with concrete infrastructure.

The rest of the castle's buildings were left in ruins.

On the walk back, I scoured the park for the trees marked on the map as atom bomb trees -- those trees that survived the bombing. There was one in Peace Park (that I missed) that was scorched on one side. The holly and eucalyptus by the castle looked fine; the willow was split down the middle and needed a bit of gardening magic.