I just came back from my second trip to Hiroshima. Admittedly, this time I had a fun reason to go (Sting did a concert there on Sunday the 16th), but I made time to visit the Peace Park once again.
The first time I went to the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, I was struck by how even-handed their description of events was. The first exhibit hall candidly displays how around the time of the Meiji Restoration, Hiroshima went from being a castle town to a military staging point for the Russo-Japanese and Sino-Japanese conflicts. The displays include pictures of railways and dams built by prisoner-of-war labor. They also include brief, dispassionate descriptions of how the atomic bomb came to be, and how Hiroshima was chosen as a target.
The English-speaking volunteers are also quick to mention that Japan did some horrible things during those years. The ones I spoke to did not hesitate to admit these things. They don’t dwell on blame, or correctness…they just tell it as it happened.
Next was a brief history of the reconstruction of Hiroshima, and an exhibit hall that shows the current state of the proliferation of nuclear weaponry. After that, I walked into the central building of the museum, where they describe the immediate effects of the atomic bomb, and the long-term human suffering that ensued.
It was at this point in my first visit that I actually lost it, and rushed out of the museum. My mind couldn’t comprehend the incredible, horrific events that they were documenting. An entire city laid to waste in the briefest of moments. Lives destroyed in an instant; unfortunate souls who had the ill luck to survive the blast with horrific injuries; people struck down years afterwards, when they had thought they had survived without harm.
This time, I was able to spend more time in this part of the exhibit. I was again struck by how much pain and suffering that the people of Hiroshima went through. But what was more striking was how, after the people of Hiroshima began to rebuild, they consciously chose to embrace peace. It would have been understandable if these people would have been angry, or demanded revenge somehow, yet instead, they rebuilt Hiroshima to be a city of peace, in the hopes that their message would spread around the world. Not just Hiroshima, either; the fact that many Japanese are loath to change Article 9 of the United States-written Japanese constitution – the article that says in part, “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes” – speaks much to this point.
I’m not trying to debate the rightness or wrongness of what happened at the end of World War II. For what it’s worth, I think that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped to bring about a quick end to the war, avoiding a long drawn-out, extremely difficult invasion of the Japan home islands. I also think that my opinion in this case is too simplistic – I am not a student of history, sadly.
Yet, seeing the results of war is unsettling, to say the least. The volunteer I spoke with in the museum pointed out to me that at the end of the war, all of Japan was already a battlefield, and that, more than anything, was why the Japanese people embraced peace. (And why so many Japanese are upset over the JSDF being deployed to a war zone.) She wondered how American public opinion might be different if more people knew what living in a war zone was like. I had no answers for her.
Near the exit of the Museum, they have placed notebooks in which visitors can record their thoughts. Many people write many things, some sympathetic; some saying that Japan got what it deserved. All I could write was, “No more.”
I left the museum, walking through the mostly empty park on a cool winter’s afternoon. I stood before the cenotaph where the record of names of people lost to the bomb is kept. It is inscribed with the words, “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.” I rang the bell at the Children’s Memorial, where the statue of Sadako and her golden crane stand. I saw a statue of a teacher holding the body of an elementary school student, on the spot where the ashes and bones of a teacher and her class were found.
I stood at the point directly beneath where the atomic bomb exploded, just to the northeast of the Peace Memorial Park.
I looked up.
And I thought to myself, Must it take extraordinary suffering to drive people to sue for peace?
I hope not. I hope that more people can be brought around to this point of view, without having to experience war as more than an abstract concept. “No more,” indeed.
I apologize for the length of this piece. I’m not sure if there was any real point to it, but I had to let it out.
Thank you for your time.
Robert