{"id":11147,"date":"2025-04-13T03:49:07","date_gmt":"2025-04-13T09:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/?p=11147"},"modified":"2025-04-13T03:49:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-13T09:49:07","slug":"hiroshima","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/?p=11147","title":{"rendered":"Hiroshima"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cKnock, knock.\u201d  \u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d  \u201cAdam.\u201d  \u201cAdam who?\u201d  \u201cAtom Bomb.\u201d  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  \u201cEnola Gay\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An express train got us into Hiroshima before noon.  Since we weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

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View of the Dome from the Ota River<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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\u2019s location meant that it wasn\u2019t leveled by the concussive explosive waves which spread outwards and decimated the rest of the city.  <\/p>\n\n\n

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Epicenter of the blast<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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\u2019t think I quite understood the necessity.  Do people take selfies touring Auschwitz? <\/p>\n\n\n

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Haunted twist to the steel beams<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Near the Dome are some magnificent ginkgo trees.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Ginkgo by the Dome<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Minimal, simply designed monuments are spread throughout the park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
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In memory of the children killed by the bomb<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Shrine-like cenotaph<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Peace Memorial Museum behind the flame<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I only took one photograph.  The child was riding the tricycle when the bomb hit.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The boy and his tricycle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cKnock, knock.\u201d  \u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d  \u201cAdam.\u201d  \u201cAdam who?\u201d  \u201cAtom Bomb.\u201d  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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-silently-in-japan"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11147"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11165,"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11147\/revisions\/11165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grubbella.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}