There’s a tension here that I want to acknowledge right up front. I also want to admit that I’m not sure I’ll be able to fully articulate what’s on my mind here with these images and the telling of my experience. With that I hope that you, the reader, will lend me some measure of grace as I navigate this. Also, as an aside, I didn’t intend to end my stories of Japan on this note. My plan was originally to share this two weeks ago, which worked out to be Memorial Day. Given the meaning of the weekend, I didn’t want to potentially pollute the waters with reflections on a trip I had.
All that said, I’ve done this a little out of order. In January of 2022, Holly and I got to visit Pearl Harbor and explore it’s many memorials and museums. Then in February of this year I visited Hiroshima, followed by a stop in Los Alamos while I was in New Mexico just last month (May ’23). All of the sites are extremely interesting and, I thought, well done, however my knee jerk reaction was that none of them really tells a complete story. Perhaps Pearl Harbor comes closest. Somewhat expectedly, the museums are all limited in scope, based on the site. Pearl Harbor tells the story of the attack, the lives lost (on both sides) and the response. Los Alamos is limited to the science of the bombs and the timeline of events, along with a discussion on the place, both before and after the US Government took it over for the purpose of the lab.
The museum at Hiroshima, on the other hand, is a telling of the aftermath of the bomb. It was horrifying. The first room you enter is wrapped 360 degrees in massive images of what the town looked like before the bomb. The next room was identical, except with images of after the bomb. A couple of surviving citizens had picked up their cameras a few days after the bombing and began to document the scenes, and the museum leans heavily on their work, along with twisted remains from the area to explore the years that followed.
Prior to visiting the city, I was slow to tell people I was going to Hiroshima because I frankly just wasn’t sure what the average Japanese sentiment was towards Americans being there. At the end of one meeting, however, I was riding in a car with someone I felt I had a pretty good rapport with and so I asked him if it was okay that I went there. He smiled thoughtfully and said, yes, I think everyone should go there, because we all have something to learn from those events. While that was comforting to hear, it did little to curb my own feelings as I stood looking at pictures and artifacts of the destruction – an obvious outsider – among hundreds of Japanese people. I suspect it’s similar to what a Middle-Easterner may feel when visiting the 9/11 memorials, though to be fair, perhaps that’s overstating it, given the time that has passed since WWII. Regardless, it was humbling and many other things I fail to be able to put to words.
In one corner of the museum was a small explanation as to what led up to the events described at length elsewhere in the museum. Again, perhaps expectantly, the museum took no stance on whether or not the bombing was warranted, nor did it recognize at much length that it brought to a close most of the fighting in the Pacific Theater. Maybe I should chalk it up to my own need to feel justified, given the entirety of the situation, but it seemed to me like an error of omission, in much the same way that it seemed to me that the museums at Los Alamos failed to properly discuss the true, long-term impact of the bombs.
Now, on to the pictures. Above is a picture of the memorial to the lives lost in Hiroshima. Through the arch can be seen an eternal flame burning above a reflecting pool, and then the atomic bomb building in the far background (more below). Visitors quietly formed a line as they approached the flowers pictured above and practitioners of various faiths stopped to reflect and pray. Before taking a picture, I removed my hat and offered my own prayer. It felt awkward for me to be here as well, so I didn’t stay but just a second. Later it started to rain and the place emptied. It was then that I felt comfortable to approach again and spend some time there considering how to capture such a place.
Below are some pictures of the atomic bomb dome building. The building had previously been a city official building that was quite grand from the pictures around. The dome had been made of copper, which melted away from the steel structure after the blast. As you can see from the pictures, much of the building is gone and the remaining walls are now supported by beams. Seeing this remnant was, for me, just as moving as the museum, for here was a very shocking illustration of the power unleashed here.
And that’s really the “it”, for me. After visiting many sites associated with the events that took place during WWII, I’m left with the feeling of shock. Shock of what humans are willing and able to do to one another. To their credit, the museums at Hiroshima and Los Alamos do offer the view that we should not use that kind of force again, and at the end of the day, perhaps that is the best lesson to take away from any of these sites. Wars are necessarily gruesome and complicated – always have been – despite our attempts to put rules around them. That does not mean, however, that we should ever overlook the cost at which we fight them.
–Dan Thompson
