Hiroshima.
Everybody knows what happened here.
What you can never appreciate from afar, no matter how good your teachers or how comprehensive a documentary is the reality of what took place at 8.15am on August 6th, 1945. ‘Little Boy’ was smaller than the bomb which would fall on Nagasaki a few days later but in a second it reduced most of Hiroshima to rubble and many of its people to ash.
An enormous effort was made to identify those killed, and to provide, where possible, remains to families for burial. But they were reduced to ash. How do you identify a pile of ash?
At home we’re used to seeing historic buildings lovingly preserved or revealed through painstaking archaeology. Nobody has had to excavate the ruins in Hiroshima. History is not something beneath the ground or hidden away in museums. For the people of this city it remains part of their built environment and central to their identity.
The fireball which engulfed the city was almost 4,000 degrees Centigrade and although Hiroshima burned for three days those buildings made of concrete were left standing. Directly beneath the centre of the bomb (the hypocentre) were two of these buildings. On one side of the river an elementary school which has since been demolished, and on the other, the ‘Hiroshima A-Bomb Dome’, preserved as it was that morning.
The building is part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. It’s an incredibly moving place.
From the north you first encounter the A-Bomb Dome, a lasting reminder of the destruction wreaked upon the city.
Next you come to the Sadako Sasaki statue; despite being heart-wrenching, her story shouts hope in the face of the horrors she had experienced.
And then the cenotaph and the eternal flame of peace. This is the city’s focal point – the place where they gather to remember the victims and to restate their opposition to nuclear weapons.
Finally, at the south is the museum – Hiroshima’s attempt to make the world understand.
The museum gives an insight into the role of Hiroshima throughout Japanese history and provides some background into Japan’s entry into World War Two. It also provides some of the science behind nuclear weapons. Of course it also details, with a restraint that is characteristically Japanese, the horrors inflicted on the city.
Its presentation of facts, visual reconstructions, eyewitness accounts and recovered artefacts are often harrowing but an experience that neither of us wanted to avoid – this is such important history. And it’s important because of the response made by the people of Hiroshima: they are utterly determined that no-one else should have to tell the story they have told.
The legacy of Japan’s nuclear victims should be a global commitment to abandoning nuclear weaponry and the pursuit of world peace.
Unfortunately that’s a legacy we’re doing little to honour. Every time a nuclear weapon is tested the mayor of Hiroshima writes to the respective leader. It happens too often. And when it does, words are not minced.
‘…the UK purports to be leading the effort to find a peaceful resolution to the problem of Iran’s nuclear program, yet you conduct a subcritical nuclear test, a clear indication that you are developing new nuclear weapons…’
On another wall were the ten most recent letters. Nine of them to Barack Obama, one to Kim-Jong Un. And yet the world stands terrified about what Pyongyang might do and calls on that one crack-pot leader to lay down his weapons whilst we continue to come up with new, improved ways of turning one another to toast. That is a telling indictment about our true attitude towards nuclear weapons and the experiences of Hiroshima.
How many ardent supporters of nuclear arms have the courage to visit Hiroshima? Do their convictions in this form of slaughter extend to being able to spend some time at the Peace Memorial Park and the museum? Would they still, as witnesses to what happened in 1945, be convinced that nuclear weapons provide any sort of answer?
[Friday 26th April 2013]
