“Knock, knock.” “Who’s there?” “Adam.” “Adam who?” “Atom Bomb.” I remember I was around four or five when my mother told me this joke. Later, when I was growing up in Los Alamos, my friends used to kid around about living in a city of bomb makers. But Oppenheimer and the scientists who built the atomic bomb left a weird legacy of pride mixed with regret. There were a lot of churches in Los Alamos, a lot of guilt being dealt with. In my playwright incarnation I wrote a performance piece entitled “Enola Gay” where the mother of the bomb pilot who nuked Hiroshima relates the conflicting emotions of having the plane named after her. So making the visit to Hiroshima is important to me.
An express train got us into Hiroshima before noon. Since we weren’t supposed to check into our AirBnB until 4 PM, we stored our luggage in the entry where we are supposed to leave our shoes and walked over to the Peace Memorial Park. Our AirBnB is only about five blocks from where the Ota River divides between the Park and the A-bomb Dome.
The Dome is famous for being at the epicenter of the blast. Although everyone inside the Hiroshima Exposition Center was instantly killed by the blinding radioactive heat, the building’s location meant that it wasn’t leveled by the concussive explosive waves which spread outwards and decimated the rest of the city.
So the landmark Dome looks like it was gutted by an intense fire that twisted structural steel beams. It was hard to get a thoughtful look at the hauntingly empty ruin because so many people were intent on taking selfies with the building in the background. I don’t think I quite understood the necessity. Do people take selfies touring Auschwitz?
Near the Dome are some magnificent ginkgo trees.
Minimal, simply designed monuments are spread throughout the park.
We took a break to have eel for lunch at a traditionally styled Japanese restaurant that had the kitchen facing the street and the low tables and tatami mats where we ate in rooms off a narrow stone path in the back. After lunch we went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum at the south end of the park.
It reminded me of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. The slow lines of people pausing before enlarged horrific photographs. Snapshots of school children who were wiped out. Testimonials from the survivors. If at the Holocaust Museum the sickening sight of skeletal concentration camp victims was never to be forgotten, here it was closeup after closeup of radioactive burns. That said, the image that was most troubling, in fact one that is notorious for capturing the insanity of the nuclear age, is on the stone steps of a bank (preserved in a glass display case) where the shadow a man who was sitting there remains, having been inscribed by the blast.
I only took one photograph. The child was riding the tricycle when the bomb hit.
This must have been a sad visit, full of reflection and emotions. I had many of the same thoughts and feelings during my visits to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Photography was strictly prohibited, so no selfies. I was credentialed, but found it tough to cover the visit of the Maccabia athletes who I was embedded with.
What an intense experience you had. It’s difficult enough to be in a place like Hiroshima many years after the event but to experience something while it’s happening like you did, wow.
There is a restricted area around Chernobyl where nobody is allowed to live. Hiroshima has rebuilt itself, while memorializing its (nearly [Nagasaki]) unique past. I’m wondering: are there elevated instances of cancer among those living in Hiroshima today?
Short answer, yes. I didn’t look up the half life but I’m guessing 80 years isn’t nearly long enough.
A friend of mine who is a nuclear health physicist and did restoration work at Eniwetok (H-bombed atoll) said that thirty years after the blast the cancer rates in Hiroshima were less than that of New York City. Forty years later I don’t know what the data shows.