I wasn't able to get my Geisha make-over the next day so I decided to switch my plans around and go to Hiroshima the next day instead and hopefully be able to get the Geisha make-over on the following day.
I don't really know what I was expecting from Hiroshima. I've been to Dachau, which was excruciating, and I just finished a big essay on the Bhopal Union Carbide Disaster, which left me wanting to go over to Warren Anderson's house and release MIC into the air intake of his furnace or airconditioner and see how he likes it.
It was raining when I left the hotel in the morning and I bought an umbrella from the nifty umbrella vending machine in the lobby of the hotel. I bought some curry buns at the bakery in the train station, found my train and headed out.
When I got to Hiroshima, I thought I was pretty clever when I got the taxi driver to circle me around the peace park so I could take some zoom lens pictures of the statues from the cab window without getting wet. I went in to the museum and it starts with some pretty dull background stuff about Japan in the run up to WW2 and how Hiroshima was among other things a gathering point for the army before heading out to war, seemed like a pretty even handed treatment of the whole situation to me - I don't really claim to know a whole lot about the subject - but it didn't seem all that anti-American. Then I got around to the part where the bomb was dropped and the watch that had stopped at 8:15 in the morning on the day of the bomb blast, the hands and the watch glass were melted to the watch face. Dioramas of Hiroshima immediately before and after the bomb hit, there were letters from within the American government regarding the Manhattan project that were just so matter of fact about the whole thing (including one from Albert Einstein urging the government to fund a program to develop nuclear weapons).
The most chilling part was the incredible amount of preparation and scientific research they did. This was not an act of desperation on the part of the Americans, they were already negotiating for Japan's surrender when they dropped the bomb and they sent so many planes full of research equipment to document the whole thing and film it. Then afterwards during the occupation, the Americans, instead of treating the survivors would bring them in, examine them and not treat them. Isn't that something that everyone gets upset about from the Holocaust, that the Nazis did medical and scientific experiments on the Jews in concentration camps - well, what about this? This was more recent and on a much, much larger scale, but the Americans won the war so they get to write the history and they get to be the good-guys and the Japanese get to be the bad-guys, right?
The other thing that just broke my heart was the number of stories of people who survived the blast but couldn't get treatment for their injuries and died slow agonizing deaths over weeks and months, the pictures of people walking around after the bomb with their skin hanging off in shreds from their arms and faces. One mother saved the skin hanging from her son's hands including a complete finger tip, when he died, to show his father who was still away at war.
People had to drink the black rain that fell from clouds contaminated by radioactive ash and debris, because there was nothing else to drink. The dark parts of people's clothes absorbed more heat than the light parts and so the patterns of their clothes were tattooed to their bodies in burns. And for years during the occupation the Americans told them there was nothing wrong, nothing to worry about, and examined them and didn't treat them and censored any report or publication about long term damage for the survivors.
But you'd be surprised that the museum doesn't focus that much on the horror of the bomb and a large portion of the exhibits are about how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and rebuilt and dedicated themselves as a city to opposing nuclear armament. They have a whole wall of telegrams and letters that every mayor of Hiroshima has ever written to a head of state, begging them to stop testing nuclear weapons and disarm their nuclear arsenal. The chilling part his how recent a lot of them are. Dan said that when he was there with his mother, that there was one from only a couple of weeks previous to George W. Bush.
You know, the Germans have been forced to apologize for the Holocaust, how about every Canadian, American or other citizen of an allied country apologizes for this by sending a letter, every time the mayor of Hiroshima writes a letter.
I'm going to bring this subject up, every single time I hear some whining B.S. about the world trade centre. Number one, the US was lucky that they didn't drop a nuke on New York and not just a plane, and number two, those dirty bombs y'all are using in I-raq are also called mini-nukes and it's not just a name. Right after visiting the museum I was sad, but now I'm disgusted.
I had been planning to eat okonomyake, a Hiroshima specialty, for lunch while I was there, but between not wanting to eat anything grown there and the images of people with their skin hanging off, I just got back on the train. I stopped on the way back at a castle called Himeiji-jo, but it was still raining, and it didn't cheer me up, so I just went back to the hotel and watched TV and went to bed.
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