Hiroshima

It was a sunny day when we arrived in Hiroshima and on the surface it seemed like any other pleasant, modern Japanese city. It took about 20 minutes to walk across town from our hotel near the station to the Atomic Bomb Dome. This is the remains of the Industrial Promotion Hall and was near the hypocenter of the atomic bomb. Strangely some of the only buildings in Hiroshima to survive the bombing were near the hypocenter, as the explosion came almost directly from above, sparing the walls, though not the occupants of the buildings.

Across the river from the Atomic Bomb Dome is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial park. At the center of the park is the Memorial Cenotaph where all the names of people killed by the bomb are held inside a stone coffin. Also in the park is the Peace Memorial Museum which sets out the details of what happened in Hiroshima.

In the museum are two large scale models of Hiroshima before and after the atomic bomb. It was really strange to think that the whole of the city that we had walked through on our way to the park had been destroyed by the atomic bomb and rebuilt afterwards.

Generally I would say that most English people (and probably Americans too) are given the impression through the media and also to some extent through school history lessons that they were the good guys in WWII. The lesson of Hiroshima's museum, as we quickly realised, is that by the end of WWII there were no good guys.

The official reason given for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan is that the Japanese had decided to fight to the death, would not surrender under any circumstances and that therefore the overall number of casualties would have been much greater had atomic weapons not been used. To be honest it has always seemed unlikely to me that the best way to minimise casualties would be to drop bombs killing hundreds of thousands of people in an instant, and the facts really don't bear this theory out.

There was no attempt made to negotiate with the Japanese other than to call for their unconditional surrender. They were not warned that the Americans were in possession of a new and very powerful weapon that would be used if they didn't surrender. There was no warning of where the weapon would be used so that civilians could be evacuated. There was no 'demonstration' use on a mountainous or less populated area that could have resulted in surrender with a minimal lose of life. In fact there was no indication at all that the allies were anything other than criminally indifferent to the massive and indiscriminate loss of life that they knew the atomic bombs would cause.

For me however the clincher was the discovery that the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki only three days after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. For some reason I had thought that the Japanese had still refused to give in for weeks after Hiroshima and that for that reason it had been decided to drop another bomb.

It is depressingly obvious that the Americans had one hydrogen bomb and one plutonium bomb and that they wanted to try them both out. To add to the impression of the atomic bombings being a sick scientific experiment, Hiroshima was spared bombing before the attack so that it would be easier to measure the extent of the destruction from aerial photographs. The British government of course, was fully informed of and approved the American actions. The only people who come out with any credit are the scientists that invented the atomic bomb, who wrote a letter suggesting that a warning be given before it was used.

The first section of the Hiroshima museum looked at the background to the bombings, the destruction that occurred and the aftermath. There was then a section on nuclear weapons in the world today. After witnessing the extent of the destruction in Hiroshima it was really scary to think that the average nuclear weapon today has 1000 times the power of the bomb that exploded there.

The final section of the museum showed the victims of the bomb as people rather than just a sad statistic. It was all quite harrowing and included depressing exhibits like a charred pink dress that once belonged to a baby girl and photos of people suffering from radiation sickness. There were also videos in which eye witnesses described the horror they saw in Hiroshima, as badly charred people stumbled around and threw themselves into the river.

When we first arrived in Hiroshima, I had wondered a bit what we were doing there as a tragedy of this type obviously shouldn't be a tourist attraction or a form of entertainment. After visiting however it seemed to me that Hiroshima had tried to come to terms with what had happened by using the disaster to warn of the dangers of war and call for peace. We were certainly convinced. I think actually that it's a place that everybody should visit.

In the evening we went out to watch Japan play Australia in a bar in the town centre. Initially it was great fun. All the Japanese fans had their faces painted and were singing. However after leading most of the way Japan let in three goals in the last ten minutes leaving the whole bar thoroughly miserable.

The next day we caught the train down to Aso in Southern Japan to see the volcano. The main Aso volcano crater had been a bit ruined by stalls selling camera film and a very ugly cable car station. It was possible however to follow a footpath round to the neighboring Nakedake crater where the landscape was very beautiful and unspoiled.

We are now back in Tokyo after quickly popping into Nara for some more amazing gardens and temples on our way back. We are leaving Japan for China on Sunday and will be sad to go as we have really enjoyed it here. We have spent a fortune though so maybe it is time to move on!

Rumor has it that the Chinese government has blocked access to the web site that I use to write this blog so it may be some time before I get to post again.