Tag: hiroshima

It seems only logical to me that places such as Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, are designed to crush your soul in the face of indescribable cruelty and horror with the intention of getting their message across. I thought I knew this by now, and would be able to handle the Atom Bomb museum in Hiroshima, and yet again I found myself weeping before what I saw and learnt.

Hiroshima carries a far greater symbolic meaning in the Japanese psyche. Being the first location of an atom bomb being dropped on people, and with a far larger death toll (140,000 are thought to have died by the end of 1945), Hiroshima stands proudly today as a symbol of exactly what the Japanese way of life is about. Getting back on ones feet. Forgiving, but never forgetting. Rebuilding and reforming, with a mission and a purpose. The peace memorial with its simple grace represents not only the horrors of war and the sacrifice of thousands, but also as a worldwide flagship for peace and a gathering place for movements for the abolishing of nuclear weaponry. The museum is sobering, naturally, it does not hide the truth and is to the point. There are no frills here. Such a message has no time for frills.

It is also here that I learnt that the dropping of the bomb on the 6th of August 1945 also killed hundreds of non-Japanese; among the dead were also southeast asian exchange students, Korean and Chinese immigrants, and even American prisoners of war. The loss of the innocent in times is a result of the hideous nature of such indiscriminate mass murder. And while every day, innocent children, women and men still die every day in less fortunate places, the lessons still don’t seem to have sunk in. War seemed to be an adequate excuse for accidentally vaporising people who bravely bade their time in prisoner camps, only to die at the hands of the ones they serve alongside their enemies, and it still seems to be adequate today. It was all well and good to sentence Nazis to death in Nuremberg in the 50’s, but what is happily brushed under the carpet and excused by wartime circumstances is the unquestionable crime against humanity that is the birth of nuclear weapons.

The famous atom bomb dome on the banks of the Motoyasu river in Hiroshima should stand forever as a painful reminder of what these weapons of mass destruction do to families, cities and nations until nuclear warfare is outlawed and removed from the surface of this planet. If Prometheus was banished to infinite suffering for stealing the secrets of fire, then perhaps a nuclear holocaust is what humanity deserves for trying to meddle with things that they shouldn’t. 

A frail olive tree stands in the courtyard of the victim’s memorial, breaking its way through concrete towards the clouds with biblical determination.

The city of Hiroshima lives, just like Nagasaki, reborn and proud. Like every other Japanese city, the people of Hiroshima swamp the shopping streets, pile into pachinko parlours and crowd their local Okonomiyaki shops. This city lives for the future. I cheered myself up with a sushi lunch and followed it up by a trip to the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art – hidden on a forestry hill in the east of the city, where signs literally banned some entrances due to very real danger of the local hornet population.

And on the topic of Okonomiyaki, dinner that night at home greeted me with a portable flat iron sitting on the dinner table – Okonomiyaki, homestyle. I’d eaten enough Okomiyaki in my life and watched enough youtube videos to really impress my host family with my pancake flipping skills, but of course i didn’t admit that.

This is a long post. But it’s an important one. It’s also important to never forget who the real war criminals are, and important to remember that those people will never face trial for their crimes against humanity, and the thousands of innocents who have died in Japan at the hands of these monstrosities will never know justice, only pain and sombre remembrance.