11 Days in Chūgoku & Kyushu – Day 08 – Hiroshima – Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

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The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was established in 1955 to document the atomic bombing of the city on 6 August 1945. In truth, and for decades now, I’ve had conflicted feelings about the Allied bombing campaign over occupied Nazi territory and also in Japan – largely on account of the amount of literature I have read about the ethics versus the necessities of the bombing campaigns.

Whichever one’s views of the war and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be, the Museum shows in clear, unrelenting fashion the Japanese perspective: that the bomb caused immense human suffering. There are numerous exhibits that show the effects of the bomb on materials that include steel, stone, everyday household items, and apparel worn by civilians and children; photographs of the effects of the blast and later radiation; and deeply moving testimonials from persons, some who died just days later, and others who survived – at least for a few years. There are also high-tech displays for visitors to interact with, with support for English translations.

I have a friend who also visited the Museum on her trip to Hiroshima in June this year, and she likewise said that the exhibits and testimonies were moving. However, she was less enamored by what she felt was the one-sided perspective of the history that was being foisted on young Japanese students who were on excursions on the weekday of her visit – that it was all suffering in their cities, and little told of the misery the Japanese had already inflicted on South-East Asia and China by that point in their violent invasion of Asia. The presence of a lopsided viewpoint might indeed have been true and perhaps representative of the larger problem of the Japanese tendency to whitewash their role as belligerents in the war. Nonetheless, if you can live with this Museum’s principal mission to document the effects of the atomic bomb, then it certainly does so very effectively.

Wall-mounted storyboards that explain the effects of the radiation on humans.
The immediate effects of the bomb in unrelenting visual detail.
The Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall before and after the blast.
A bicycle completely bent out of shape as a result of the intense heat caused by the explosion.
A selection of photos of the thousands of students killed that day and thereafter.
The tricycle that the 3 year 11 month old boy was riding, and the safety helmet he was wearing. He died later that day.
Sachiko Mitsutani. From her last words, I think she was a teacher.
The story of Yukiko Fujii. She miraculously survived the blast though just 1.2km from the blast center, but died later from cancer at the age of 42. Her identity from the picture on the left – taken on 9 Aug – was only discovered last year in 2018 by her son – 73 years after the photo was taken.
The picture that moved me the most: this was taken on 6 August when black rain – nuclear fallout – fell on the city and the human suffering that followed.
Interactive displays that explain numerous aspects of the city before and after the blast, and also atomic bombs in general.
The first floor of the Museum.
The Memorial Cenotaph and the Dome just further on.

Summary: Say what one will about the misery the perpetrators of the war caused on others, but there’s no denying that the city suffered unimaginably because of the bomb. If nothing else, visit to at least have a small sense of what it would have felt like at ground zero that day.

That’s a wrap for Day 08. Continued back in Fukuoka city for the next post!