Japan, Land of the Shining Sun!

Part B: Horror of Hiroshima

Personal Photo Album Part 22

“After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.”

-       Ray Bradbury

"Hiroshima Shadows"

International Award Winner! Here, the photo from Hiroshima is in the public domain. When the atomic bomb exploded in 1945, shadows of people, animals, and objects were fused into walls and sidewalks by the intensity of the light. Here, the shadow of a little girl jumping rope, and the rope. Notice the valve on the street has two shadows: first, the shadow on the wall caused by the blast, and; second, the shadow on the sidewalk caused by the sun. Originally a black and white photo, the artist used the saturation feature in PS CS6 to draw out the purple hue. The yellow flowers were also added.

 “Japan learned from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the tragedy wrought by nuclear weapons must never be repeated and that humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”

- Daisaku Ikeda

 

“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”

-       John Hersey

 

[This is the second of my four-part travelogue on Japan. The first one on Part A: Tokyo has already appeared and the future two will be dealing with my experiences in Kyoto and Osaka, respectively]

 

When I planned the Japan visit, like most tourists might, I included Hiroshima in my itinerary to see for myself the relics of the historic nuclear holocaust on the city and its after effects.  I never anticipated how deeply the experience would affect me emotionally when I actually stood at the site of the destruction and contemplated it.  I will try to describe this in course of this narrative.

Arrival

On the morning of 7 June 2018, I left Tokyo Central for Hiroshima by a bullet train  to an intermediate station where I had to change over to another train.  A helpful railway official had given me precise directions about how to make the change over and had cautioned me not to get into a train that was due to leave the same platform in the same direction just three minutes before mine, because its destination was different! That was when I experienced first-hand what punctuality meant in Japan’s railway network.  That was also the first time I had the experience of travelling by an inter-city Shinkansen bullet train.  Below is the picture I took of the interior of my carriage, virtually empty and looking like the interior of any luxury aircraft.

I got out at the Hiroshima railway station (see picture of the interior below) and it felt like coming out of Zurich railway station, an experience I had barely a year before.  As I came out of it, I observed that the exterior was even more impressive, and vastly more extensive.

A part of the large exterior of the railway station, with an eye-catching row of trees, is captured in the following picture:

It was a short bus ride to my hotel, Hotel Yorishiro (see picture below) with its name in English and barely visible, actually within walking distance of the railway station as I later discovered.  With a façade more appealing than Smile Hotel in Tokyo, the interior looked a lot less so, and very much like a large house converted into a small hotel, with a small family actually running it.  It was drizzling outside and threatening to rain harder.  I was anxious to check in at the hotel and leave for Hiroshima’s historic ‘atom bomb site’ as soon as possible. But I was held up at the hotel because I was not expected to be there so soon, with the worsening weather compounding my woes.

Check-in

After a fairly long and irritating wait, a maintenance worker announced that my room was ready for occupation and I was escorted into it on the second floor.  It looked even smaller than the one at Smile hotel, but at first glance, no less comfortable. I was all too eager to get out and head for the bomb site.  On the way out, the hotel lady gave me some quick and clear instructions about how to get there. Accordingly, I walked up to the railway station holding an umbrella over my head, got into a local bus ready to leave for the iconic destination and reached there twenty minutes later, passing through some unbelievably modern thoroughfare, in sharp contrast to what I was to see soon.

A-Bomb site

The rain had mercifully reduced to just a drizzle when I reached the bomb site, adjacent to another highly developed locality in the city.  As on any other occasion, my hands went spontaneously for my camera and I started clicking even as I moved around the well preserved and enduring symbol of the first ever nuclear attack in human history.  Here are three of the numerous pictures I captured, and they speak for themselves:

Also reproduced below are three descriptions (English versions) displayed prominently at relevant points on the site:

My immediate purpose served, I got down to the more serious task of looking at all parts of the rather small site, preserved exactly as cleaned up immediately after the bombing, from the perspective of someone who has a master’s degree in Nuclear Physics, with a fair understanding of how nuclear weapons are designed and tested, and how the very first such weapon could have reigned in the destruction it actually did.  Putting aside the science and technology behind these weapons, I was very deeply concerned about the humanitarian issues involved and the compulsions, military, political, or otherwise, that led then US President Harry Truman to authorise the actual use of such a terrible weapon to achieve whatever objectives he had in mind.  Incidentally, Truman himself had this to say in his defence:

“As President of the United States, I had the fateful responsibility of deciding whether or not to use this weapon for the first time. It was the hardest decision I ever had to make. But the President cannot duck hard problems…… I decided that the bomb should be used to end the war quickly and save countless lives - Japanese as well as American.”

While the science and technology behind the weapon were easy to digest, the humanitarian aspects began to bother me, more than they had ever done, even as an informed though distant bystander in the annals of human conflict that led to the actual use of such a dreadful weapon. In saying that it was the hardest decision he ever had to make, Truman betrayed a sense of narrow mindedness in thinking about just his personal responsibility, ignoring that of his nation to the comity of other nations as a whole and to future generations of humanity that would be impacted by his action.  It is possibly the most momentous decision any leader has ever had to make in the whole history of human conflict and he could, and indeed should, have acted more benignly.

Before arriving at Hiroshima, I had a fair idea of the destruction the A-bomb had wrought, and the display panels at the bomb site as well as those at the adjacent Peace Park, reinforced my awareness.  Here are just a few of the terrifying facts:

• Ø  “Nothing remained except a few buildings of reinforced concrete… For acres and acres, the city was like a desert except for scattered piles of brick and roof tile.”
• Ø  Those who were close to the epicentre of the explosion were simply vaporized by the intensity of the heat. The others were luckier in simply being charred to death.
• Ø  Many objects and people in the path of the intense light and heat spreading out from the explosion absorbed the energy and only their ‘nuclear shadows’ on walls and pavements survived. The objects and people had disappeared into oblivion.
• Ø  “Doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of the dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells - caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls.”
• Ø  Some 70,000 - 80,000 people, around 30 percent of the population of Hiroshima at the time, were killed by the blast and resultant firestorm, and another 70,000 were injured.
• Ø  69 percent of Hiroshima's buildings were destroyed and another 6 to 7 percent damaged.
• Ø  Over 90 percent of the doctors and 93 percent of the nurses in Hiroshima were killed or injured - most had been in the downtown area which received the greatest damage. The hospitals were destroyed or heavily damaged.
• Ø  The plight of most survivors was worse than death. They suffered a slow, agonizing death caused mainly by the effects of gamma rays and neutrons, the main products of nuclear fission of the bomb material.

These facts don’t tell the individual tales of horror from thousands of survivors who were condemned to suffer all types of ailments from the nuclear radiation penetrating their bodies in deadly doses, all at once.

As I stood transfixed at the bomb site, completely lost in thought and oblivious to the surroundings, contemplating the terrible tragedy inflicted right there and in my own lifetime by one set of people on another, whatever the justification or circumstances may have been, a deep sense of sadness engulfed me, shook me to the roots, and I literally shed tears of uncontrollable sorrow for the inhuman sufferings of ordinary innocent people brought on by the high and the mighty.  I was one with the pious thoughts of Daisaku Ikeda that the tragedy wrought by nuclear weapons must never be repeated and that humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.

It took me quite some time to recover from the emotional impact of vicariously experiencing all the horror, and walk up to the adjacent Peace Park and its tranquil environment.

Peace Park

The Peace Memorial Park, on a large area adjacent to the A-bomb site, is dedicated to the legacy of Hiroshima as the first city in the world to suffer a nuclear attack, and to the memories of victims of the bomb, both direct and indirect. The park was built on an open field that was created by the explosion. It hosts a large number of memorials, monuments, museums, and lecture halls, visited by over a million people each year. The annual 6 August Peace Memorial Ceremony, sponsored by the city of Hiroshima, is also held in the park.  Here is a picture of the cenotaph in the park, with the A-bomb dome in the rear:

Here is a group of school students at the cenotaph, with the bomb dome in the background on the right against a threatening sky and a beautiful large clean lawn in the foreground: 

A portion of the peace park is dedicated to children, the most innocent victims of the tragedy. Below is a memorial for them, surrounded by some attractive displays. For once I can’t claim that everywhere I looked at was spotlessly clean!  Perhaps the lapse can be excused because of the rains.

Below is the Hiroshima Peace Bell within a protective curved enclosure.  Ringing the bell is considered a great way for children to participate and to think over something of the devastation wrought by war.

The following Tower of Peace was built in 1967 to commemorate the thousands of student victims of the war and the atomic bomb.  The memorial is 12 m tall and five stories high.

Peace Memorial Museum

The following eloquent statements appearing on their website summarise the intent of the large, superbly conceived, Hiroshima Peace memorial Museum, located close to the bomb site and the Peace Park:

The Museum has a large number of posters, pictures, artifacts and other memorabilia related to the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima.  Explanatory material is displayed in both Japanese and English, and in a clear and simple language, without any rancour or ill-feeling towards the American actions culminating in the bombing.

Here is a prominent self-explanatory message in front of the museum building at the time of my visit:

I spent the rest of the evening exploring the museum exhibits till it closed for the day. The picture below captures a large group of children viewing the superbly organized displays presenting pertinent information in graphic detail in a large part of the museum.

Among the numerous exhibits is a wrist watch that belonged to a victim of the blast, showing the exact time at which the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, stopping the watch, and wiping out a large part of the city too at the same time.

Late in the evening¸ I walked back to the comfort of my hotel, with my mind full of disturbing thoughts about how the city had once been nearly erased off the face of the Earth in one stroke, but rose like a phoenix from the ashes of destruction to the present-day glory.

Hiroshima Castle

The impressive building of stunning ancient Japanese architecture captured in the following picture is the Castle of Hiroshima, also called Carp Castle, as rebuilt in 1958, after the original in its place had been destroyed completely by the Atom bomb dropped on the city on 6 Aug 1945.

Here is the zoomed-in uppermost part of the castle from a slightly different angle, to which I climbed floor by floor, looking at all the displayed exhibits in the process:

The Castle is just about a km away from the A-bomb site, and commands a view of the whole city.  Here is one such view, in very dark cloudy skies:

Here is a super-zoom picture of the A-bomb dome I also captured from the top floor of the castle:

Shukkei-en Garden

My next visit was to one of the most famous gardens in Japan, the Shukkei-en Garden, located adjacent to the large building housing the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum.  I first went inside the museum whose impressive lobby is seen in the picture below:

When I went up to the information desk to purchase a ticket, I was told that admission was free for senior citizens, and all I needed to do was to show my passport.  I was also told that photography was not allowed inside the museum halls but, more importantly for me, there was no such restriction in the garden, which I could enter through this building.

I first went through the museum halls which housed a stunning collection of traditional and modern Japanese art objects, and felt sorry that no photography was allowed inside.  It was then time to enter the garden through a side gate of the museum building pictured below:

I spent the next two hours in the serene and soothing atmosphere of Shukkein garden which too had been destroyed by the A-bomb and later rebuilt on the same landscape.  The story of this celebrated garden is best told in pictures and I do so here with just five of them from the scores that I shot, in damp cloudy conditions, with intermittent drizzle.

Incidentally, while there should be no doubt about the flower bunch being real, I assure the viewer that the turtle too is real!

Epilogue

Under normal circumstances, my last visit for the day and the final one before bidding goodbye to the tragic city would have been to the famous Itsukushima shrine on an island in Hiroshima Bay approached through the great Torii Gate that is partially submerged under water in high tide.  Unfortunately, the inclement weather made it impossible.  I spent some time in the evening getting a problem with my SIM card attended to, something that took an inordinately and surprisingly long time! On my way back to the hotel I came across this curious looking entrance to what appeared to be a luxury Hotel, perhaps emblematic of the twentyfirst century Hiroshima!