And now for the heavy...

If the previous post on Hiroshima was light-hearted, then this one will be heavy. I can't really put into words how intense it is visiting the Peace Park, the memorials, and the museum. Any possibility of commentary while you're visiting these sights is removed. You just sort of absorb it all and feel deeply sad. You can't speak, and you certainly can't even comprehend the magnitude of it all as an outsider living in a later time.

The A-Bomb Dome

The park itself is beautiful. Monuments abound: to unknown lost victims, to soldiers, to children, to future promises of peace. The main component of the park is a building from 1915 that withstood the blast even though it sat pretty much directly under the hypocenter. It burned out, everyone in the building was killed, but the walls remained. So it stands as the A-Bomb Dome and the major monument of the park. The building is powerful as a monument, but it's hard to attach the human devastation to that.

The Children's Memorial

The A-Bomb Museum at the head of the park (by Kenzo Tange) really put the effects of the bomb on Hiroshima's people into perspective. If you ever visit Hiroshima, you would be doing a disservice to yourself to skip this museum. The museum's first portion focuses on telling the story of the war and how Hiroshima came to be picked as a city for bombing. I guess it's describing the politics behind it. There are enormous comparison models of the city's buildings before and after the bombing that really illustrate the scope of the devastation. Literally, maybe 5 buildings withstood the blast in the city.

The A-Bomb Museum

But, it's the second portion of the building that makes you want to crawl under a rock and die with guilt that an A-bomb was ever used on anyone for any purpose. The sheer awfulness of the bomb's impact on the population of Hiroshima is horrific. You walk through all the artifacts, photos, and preserved relics (of buildings and body parts) that tell the story of the human casualties of the A-bomb. They have an amazing collection that visualizes it all from the heat of the blast as shown by melting steel girders to the intense radiation that caused people to have disfigurements and diseases for life (and their children's lives). They have iron shutters from buildings that were bent from the blast, the shadow of a human body left on the steps of a bank building, shreds of skin that were peeled from people's bodies, wax figures showing what a bombed victim looked like, children's bloody and tattered school uniforms, plaster walls saved from buildings that show the black rain stains, and watches that were stopped at the exact moment of the blast. It is totally horrific.

But somehow, both the park and the museum end on a note of hope. The final exhibits in the museum and phrases on the monuments always refer to the idea that peace should be a goal of humanity and that Hiroshima's past should serve to remind us of the importance of peace. So, that's where this will end, too, with the hope that we can make sure that something that tragic and horrible never happens again.