Hiroshima
Today is the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In commemoration, I thought I'd share a 2007 journal entry I wrote after visiting the city during my study abroad program. Though lightly edited, the entry portrays my first reaction to what I saw and the people I met.
After a short seven hours of sleep I showered and ate a hard-boiled egg as my complementary breakfast in the hotel lobby. Like everyone had been split up for the Shinkansen, half the group would be going to the A-Bomb Dome while the other half took the day trip to Miyajima Island. The places would be switched the next day.
Our group was headed to the A-Bomb dome and surrounding park. While the other group had to take a forty minute bus ride, we took a fifteen-minute cable car. It’s just like San Francisco but it seems like a much more ordinary form of transportation. About half looked brand new while the other cars looked right out of the 1930s with mat green paint and rounder edges. We had had to walk through the station again to get to the streetcar stop. Like Tokyo, posters and ads were everywhere. Many were for the Hiroshima Carp, the city’s baseball team. Others had to do with that weekend’s summer Matsuri festival. Yet during the ride out to this most solemn of places I heard two great jokes worth repeating:
1)A: “How’s the voice of the people this morning?”
B: “Hung Over.”
2) If you catch a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you’ve lost your market base.
The dome/park was right next to the cable car stop we got off at. It’s hard to describe standing in front of the dome for the first time considering all the research I have done on the subject. The half that faced the hypocenter is gone while newly installed steel girders support the remaining inner structure. It’s like a Roman ruin at first glance: stacks of decaying stone that barely give hint at a former purpose.
It was the Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall. Designed by a Czech architect, it was the first European-style building in western Japan (1915). The dome, green copper, was visible from a fairly far distance since most buildings were two stories or less. The inside showcased products the prefecture produced, mostly agricultural related. Art exhibits were also held within it. The Hall was a symbol of Japan’s technological and cultural progress.
It’s strange, maybe even ironic that now everything that surrounds the A-Bomb Dome represents what that building was intended for. The Dome gives a different impression of destruction at every angle. Rebar is sticking outside of the concrete at the back, the windows at the front have their brick exposed under the stone shell. It’s like terrifying sculpture. Next to the dome was the monument to the over six thousand middle school students who died during the blast as they helped create firebreaks in the city center. Later on I would meet one of the survivors (now 74). More on that later, though.
Though the dome is part of the Peace Park, the majority of the monuments along with the museum were across a small bridge on the next island. Hiroshima means ‘wide islands’ that extend south into the Pacific. We visited the memorial to Sadoko Sasaki, who was exposed to the bomb as a two year old and died of leukemia at the age of twelve after growing up normally. On the top of a large curving piece of stone is a stone girl holding a large folded crane. Sadoko folded over a thousand in the wish to live (an old legend says a wish will be granted with 1,000 cranes) but still died. Today over 10,000,000 are donated to the memorial every year. Many were on display in nearby cases with one open so visitors to the park could leave their own. There was a long string of cranes from a school in Michigan that stood out.
Outside of the museum is the cenotaph. It’s a stone coffin covered by an arc. Inside are the names of the 200,000 people (including the 100,000 from the day of the bombing) who died due to the bomb by the end of 1945. Included every year are the names of the survivors who have passed away no matter the cause of death. Surrounding the monument was a pool of water in memorial to the thousands who died begging for water in the hours and days after the bombing because of their burns. The bomb had vaporized all the surrounding rivers' water and it took hours for them to refill.
We only had an hour at the museum. Something interesting to note that it only costs fifty yen to enter. The layout is spread between two wings. The first one contains two stories pertaining to the bombing in an academic sense: why did the US build the bomb, the history of the war…etc. Two large models of the city were laid out on the first floor, before and after shots. It was moving to see among the simulated destruction a tiny sign that read both in English and Japanese: The Location of This Museum. I headed up the stairs to the second floor, coming eye level to the 73/100 scale model of the A-bomb dome that hangs over the first floor like a chandelier. What strikes my memory about the second floor is the display of a wall. At first glance it looks like it was shot up with a machine gun. The small display next to it explained that it had come from inside a building where the opposite wall’s window had been facing the blast. The glass had burrowed up to two inches deep in solid stone.
What left an even deeper impression on that floor was a picture of a few days after the bombing of the only standing hospital left in the city. A bombed out ruin in its own right (all the medical equipment had been destroyed and only two doctors hadn’t been injured or killed) a white flag bearing the Red Cross insignia was draped over the building. Later on in the other wing is a display praising the head of the International Red Cross (a Swiss man whose name alludes me) as he came to Japan by himself in September 1945 with fifteen tons of medical supplies and personally treated the victims. A proper memorial exists to him in the park as well.
It’s hard to believe, but the second wing of the museum is much more of an emotional experience that I have described up until now. The first display is a small full scale model of horribly wounded survivors walking through the rubble at dusk, their hands held out in front because their skin is hanging off their arms. Large images of burn victims were displayed on the walls with various medical remains including a cross section of a spinal column of a victim who died of leukemia (the tumor was the size of a marble), the removed keloid scars of victims, and finally the finger nails and surrounding skin of a middle school age boy who had died the morning after the blast in his mothers arms. He had been so thirsty that he had tried to suck the puss from his fingers. I couldn't help but look at my hands for a long time after that.
In another room was a set of steps with the imprint of a man’s shadow. Behind it were girders of the Aioi Bridge right under the explosion. The two inch thick iron was bent at various twenty-degree angles. In a hallway between two of the rooms were displays visitors could touch: fused roof tiles. What felt like sand on the otherwise smooth surface was actually where the stone had begun to boil before cooling in place. In one of the last rooms was a section of wall stained with black rain. The rain(infused with radioactive material pulled up by the blast) covered an area roughly thirty times the destroyed area.
At the end of the exhibit is a long hall on the second floor that connects to the two wings. The left wall is a large window that looks over the park and A-bomb dome in the distance. On the other wall are pictures drawn by survivors. I had kept myself relatively collected until then. It was then I passed by a drawing about the size of a of a normal 8”x11” page. Though it was crudely drawn, the picture of was the badly burned walking towards the viewer. If I had not known a word of Japanese I wouldn’t have had a second thought about it. In the word bubbles drawn above the victims was written 助けてHelp me! 水下さいWater, please お母さんMother…
I turned around almost immediately and walked to the other side of the hall. I walked as close to the window as I could to keep my face hidden from the people walking by. The words didn’t even register in English in as I had read them. The words reverberated in my head only in the language they were yelled out sixty-two years ago. It was a moment I can only describe as uncompromising empathy that simultaneously registered on multiple levels of my mind. As I stood at the window collecting myself I looked at the Oleander trees; there are hundreds of them in the park. After the bombing people thought it would take seventy years for trees to grow again. It only took six months for the surviving trees’ flowers to bloom.
I checked my watch when I finally got outside. I was surprised to see that only fifty minutes had gone by. I stood around by myself for a few minutes since my friends were still inside. A few other students were already talking in a group, something about school.
Afterwards from 11:00-12:00 was a presentation in a classroom by a local professor who also worked at the Peace Museum. He had a slide show (I still have the printed out power point of it) about the morality of the bomb and the issue of what is a victim in the case of Hiroshima. It a pretty standard, nearly boring lecture until he commented "Do you realize that the current majority view in the United States saying that dropping the bomb would have saved lives stems from one document." He, a man with a Ph.d, gave the speech that would have summed up my paper I wrote in Fall, 2005, for my History 200 seminar. I could predict nearly ever word as he spoke about Sec. of War Henry Stimpson’s 1947 article for Harpers Magazine justifying the A-bomb by claiming the saving of 1,000,000 US lives form injury or death while Army estimates were 300,000-400,000 tops. It’s funny how this one article allowed the U.S. public to wash its hands of responsibility and put faith back in the government. After hearing him reach the same conclusion I had found after two months of research I couldn’t help but put stock in his claim that Japan would have surrendered to the United States without the use of the bomb when The Soviet Union declared war on Aug 9th. I had heard the claim before, but it had a lot more impact considering.
We had lunch in the park, bento boxes with green tea. It was the first time I had eaten momiji, a famous pastry of Hiroshima.
From 1:00-2:00PM was a lecture by a survivor, Ms. Matsubara. She had taught herself English to tell her story to as many people as possible. Like I mentioned above, she was twelve years old when the bombing happened, working with other middle school students in the city center making firebreaks. The dark coat she was wearing (everyone in the city was told to do dye their clothes to make themselves less obvious to American planes) was vaporized instantly and the only thing that kept her torso unburned was her white undergarments. Yet as I looked at her I could see that her arms had been burnt rather badly. It was heartbreaking the way she talked. It was a surprise to realize that it was just from speaking English that made her sound sad. When she spoke in Japanese it sounded normal as ever.
She had pictures to show us. She drew them three years ago and we got to see them on the overhead television display. The first was of how the city center looked before the bombing. From what I was told by the earlier lecture, it was the city’s commerce district that contained restaurants, shops, and movie theaters. It looked like a lively place. The second was of school children helping to make the firebreaks by taking away debris from torn down houses. The third was the students looking up at the Enola Gay as it flew over them.
The last picture was the most moving. After the blast she had helped her friend back to their school: a pile of burning rubble. She hadn’t been able to find anyone else from her class. Both were terribly burned. She had to leave her friend alone to find help as the other girl had no strength to keep walking. I’m sure that her friend died, but the question of when and where was never answered.
Ms. Matsubara never married. The scars on her face and arms (later improved by surgery) made her an outcast in Japanese society who feared her disfigurement and the possibility that they might catch radiation poisoning by being in her presence. She told us that she had been telling her story for 46 years and that we should tell her story to many people as possible. At the end she read us a poem in English she had composed. In fact, less than 100 feet from the room we were hearing it the same words are written in black onyx on a small monument. Incomplete paraphrasing: “Give me back my mother, give me back my father, give me back my brothers and sisters, give me back my life.”
It was an emotional day, but did end on a happier note. In the evening some friends and I went out on the town and gorged ourselves on okonomiyaki and beer. Later on we wandered into a wild Matsuri festival.
The next morning was Sunday, and we awoke early to get ready to leave for a tour of nearby Miyajima. Just outside our window was the Genbaku Dome. At precisely 8:15 bells rang throughout the park. It was at that moment we stopped what we doing, looked outside...
and wondered.