Every year on the week of August 6th, thousands flock to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Like so many others, that’s where we went.
Attendees are given an audio guide associated with each exhibit. The halls of the museum were chocked full of people in quiet reverie. It was doing its job well.
The United States government worked diligently to suppress dissent and information about the atomic bombings in the immediate post-war period. This is well described in the film “Atomic Cover-Up”. Because of this, most of the images we have are of rubble and people in treatment in the weeks and months after the attacks. Because of this, the most striking images to me come in the form of art created by the survivors. These pictures show swollen people pink with burns. People with melted eyes. People with melted bodies that look like ghosts. And always the rivers, full of dead and dying A-bomb victims desperate for water and relief.
Given my profession, there were naturally many images I’d seen before. Being there was different. Looking at the melted rubble, the tattered children’s clothes, the human shadows etched into stone- this was something you felt, not just saw.
There is a place after the main exhibit where you leave the darkened halls and look out into the sun over the restored city of Hiroshima. I sat there for a long time. There’s a notebook guests can write in there. I wrote a bit about what we do in Washington state, and why. I told people to take action, and gave some ideas how. I don’t know if anyone will read it.
The following exhibits describe the Japanese Peace movement, and international movements to abolish nuclear weapons. This is where one can understand the importance of the organizer Barbara Reynolds and the tiny organization that is the World Friendship Center, bringing Hibakusha directly to the US and USSR to tell their stories.
It was interesting for me to learn that the pivotal moment in the Japanese Peace Movement had to do with nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, something we talk a lot about in Washington. Surprisingly, Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t the catalysts one might think, thanks in large part to guilt over Japanese imperialism and US information suppression. During the creation of the “Pacific Proving Grounds”, Japanese fisherman from the Lucky Dragon No. 5 were exposed to radiation from these detonations, and when they returned there was an enormous public outcry. Japan was home to mass demonstrations and a lively movement there on out, which unfortunately broke up like so many around the world in the 1980s and 90s. Now we rebuild.
After the museum we visited a basement, where the closest survivor to the hypocenter survived the blast. People still don’t know why the radiation didn’t kill him, but killed people miles away. We then visited Fukuromachi Elementary School Peace Museum, one of the many schools destroyed by the atomic bomb. The school held an incredible miniature replica of the destroyed city that showed the handful of buildings left standing.
My thoughts on international travel were often plagued with ideas of selfishness and my carbon footprint. If you were to ask me a year ago whether I’d like to go to Hiroshima, I probably would have responded that way. If you were to ask me now whether you should go to Hiroshima, I will tell you yes. You will make it worth it.
I will make it worth it.