Understanding the Bomb, Hiroshima, Japan (Feb 2006)

I have planned an excruciatingly timed and precise itinerary for our trip to Japan, with train schedules mapped out weeks in advance and hotel reservations in place, there is no wiggle room. All of this information, web printouts, excel charts, confirmation numbers, directions, and train schedules has been painstakingly pasted into my travel notebook, so that all I need to at any given time is consult The Book to know where we are headed next and when we have to be there. Today is slated for a day trip from Osaka to Hiroshima to visit the Memorial Museum, just an afternoon and then we train back to Kyoto to spend the night, there is no time allotted for an overnight stay in Hiroshima.

The trains in Japan are amazing, they arrive precisely on time at the appointed track and these schedules are mapped out months in advance, the obsessive precision of Japanese transit meshes perfectly with my obsessive need for advance planning. We arrive in Hiroshima laden with backpacks, we will deposit them at a train station locker while we wander about, who wants to carry that crap around town and into the museum. We find the lockers, they take 100 yen coins which is about a dollar, perfect. Perfect, except we can’t manage to decode the mechanism, it takes several attempts of depositing coins and then trying to take the key only to get it stuck and then popping the locker back open and down yet another 100 yen coin; by the time we have successfully conquered the seemingly Byzantine but likely quite simple lock mechanism we are down about fifteen bucks, and I have forgotten to put my day bag with my computer in the locker but we are done fucking around with this thing, if I pop it open to stash my computer bag it is probably going to cost us another twenty bucks to get it locked again so I resign myself to carrying my computer, we have spent too much time here anyway we need to get moving.

Out of the train station and consulting The Book, we are to take a tram and Japanese precision, the tram pulls up right on time and we board, hoping that we will be able to figure out where to get off, that it will be obvious. The Japanese schoolgirls in their stereotypical pleated skirts and knee socks are openly staring at us, giggling and whispering behind their hands, and I wonder what they think of us on the tram with them in the city where our country annihilated their cousins and parents.

It’s obvious where we get off after all, step off the tram with my awkward bag bumping under my arm, it wasn’t designed as a computer bag it’s actually modeled on a bowling bag and I’ve probably overstuffed the thing. The first thing we see is the A-bomb Dome, a skeletal structure of rebar by the side of the river, the only structure remaining after the bomb leveled the city. It’s stark and ugly, it lacks all the beauty of traditional Japanese architecture, architecture that was too delicate to survive the blast. We contemplate, uncomfortably, and take tourist pictures, also uncomfortably, we are here to contemplate and take tourist pictures but it seems a little shallow and trite while our feet are stepping on ground that was covered in human ashes.

We walk along the river bank, stopping at various peace statues and memorials, there is one to all the children who died and then another huge structure with a stylized human figure on top crowned by an origami crane, the base of the sculpture is covered in long chains of delicately folded origami cranes. This memorial is for a little girl that survived the first blast, and as she slowly died of radiation poisoning she made origami cranes nonstop, there is a legend that anyone who completes 10,000 cranes will have their wish granted and she was wishing not to die, folding tiny pieces of paper over and over trying not to die, trying to have faith in a legend of 10,000 paper cranes.

She had reached something like 7,000 when she died. People from around the world send their folded paper to this monument to honor her determination and optimism, and there are tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of cranes piled up here and none of them made her wish come true.

We are somber approaching the Memorial Museum but I am still trying to maintain a critical distance, I do not want to be overwhelmed with the cheap emotional kneejerk reaction, not to say that its cheap that this girl died folding cranes after my country dropped a poisonous bomb on her city but the picture is bigger than one person and I am here to see the whole picture, that is why we came here. We take pictures of the eternal flame in front of the museum, it will burn until all nuclear weapons have been eradicated from the face of the planet, and then we go in.

The museum is a long, low U-shaped structure, its construction screams 1950s America. The first exhibit in the main entry hall consists of multiple dioramas of Hiroshima, before and immediately after the bomb. In the after diorama, there is only the A-bomb Dome and a tram snaking across a wasteland of ash. I am staring at this silently when I am approached by a smiling docent, he offers me a small paper crane. I’m not sure if I should accept, I’m not sure what’s going on here, he asks me where I’m from and I flinch a little inside when I say “America,” we are the ones we did this to them.

He welcomes me, and explains that he is one of many volunteers at the museum, they are very happy when Americans come here, and that his role is to explain the exhibits. The crane is a hospitality offering representing the desire for peace for all people. He tells me that the people of Hiroshima are very fond of their tram, it was the only thing other than the dome that made it through the blast and in the aftermath, the sight of the tram chugging across the city gave people hope that they could rebuild. We walk through the first hall together, he shows me the letters from Einstein begging the American president not to use the bomb he built, the military memos detailing potential target cities. I find it really interesting that Kyoto was stricken from the list, because someone pointed out that as the center of thousands of years of cultural history, if we bombed it the Japanese would never forgive us, there would never be peace. So Kyoto was spared, and the list narrowed down to three locations, three places less important and who makes these decisions, who decides which city will be spared and which will be obliterated. Until the actual day of the bombing it was still uncertain which city would be targeted, and a clear beautiful day sealed Hiroshima’s fate. Think of it, a day of clear skies and sunshine, when everyone is a little happier to see such crisp weather when they roll out of bed, smiling up at the sky and knowing it will be a good day or at least a little better than it would have been if it were raining.

We move on and my guide shows me other documents, he is explaining that while the bomb was an abomination that it also stopped the war, a war that would have involved a invasion of the Japanese mainland with a huge attrition factor. I knew this already but I certainly wasn’t going to say it out loud, not here, and I’m not sure if I’m comforted or saddened to see that the people here can have enough critical distance to understand that this horror visited upon them out of clear sky had its benefits, he says that yes, the Japanese culture had created a situation where the A-Bomb was the only way to end the war without a greater loss of human life, it took a nuclear blast to bring the Empire of the Sun into the reality of 20^th century warfare, the reality too that they would lose this war one way or another, that the Emperor and the Empire were mortal after all.

I thank my guide, he will stay in the main hall and I very carefully pocket my crane. He has said over and over that they are happy to see Americans who want to be educated about the bomb, Americans who want to understand the consequences of our country’s actions and its reasons, and I guess they have had 50 years or so to get here but I would hate us if I were him.

I continue through the museum, Debi, Chris and I have separated and we are moving alone and each at our own pace. I move through halls of information about nuclear proliferation and the science of an atomic nuclear explosion, a reproduction of the plane used to drop the bomb, films about all of these topics showing all the different aspects of this story, the how, the why, the when, the where, the who, the what. There are answers to all of these questions, even the why question, that’s what my volunteer guide was telling me about, there is an answer to why but I am not sure walking these halls if any why is ever going to be good enough, I guess that is the point of this museum and I am still keeping my critical distance I am not going to let this get to me.

There is a huge reproduction of a photo of crying bomb victims with their skin peeling off from the burns. Another volunteer steps forward to tell me that the Japanese people treasure this photo, it is one of only two photos taken on the ground in the immediate aftermath of the blast. The photographer was away from the main center of the blast and rushed to the site to try and help, and stopped to take two photographs of the victims before putting the camera down to try and treat the burning children. “We are very proud of him,” the volunteer says, “Because if not for him we would not have this memory,” this a place not about judgement but about memory and remembering and they will never forget this and that flame will burn for eternity until all the weapons are gone and the world can finally forget the atrocity that humans rendered on its surface.

I am not going to cry.

Into the next hall and it’s shadowy somehow, the lights are dimmer and I see the famous wall fragment with the shadows burned into it, and there are scorched and melted clothes and other small household items, this is what an atomic blast does to a pocketwatch. A lunch tin. The food inside the lunch tin. A belt. A knife. A plastic bowl. The next few cases of charred remnants puzzle me, but then. This is what an atomic blast does to skin. To fingernails. To hair.

The next hall goes beyond the blast to the aftermath, the survivors who weren’t liquidated leaving only shadows behind. Here there are pictures and relics of radiation sickness victims, an alcove exhibit about that little girl with her cranes. The cancers and mutant growths are pictured in all their anatomical detail. And here, in another alcove, there are drawings, stark crayon sketches. I move closer to one of them, it confuses me, the stick figures are dancing, they look happy or as happy as a stick figure can look. There are black puddles on the ground, some stick figures are kneeling by them and some are raising their hands to the black drops coming out of the sky, what is that blackness anyway, ash? If it’s ash, why are they so happy?

The plaque on the wall: this is a drawing from a child who survived the blast, a picture of what happened after, these people are happy because it is raining and all the water has been blown away and evaporated and they are so thirsty and now there is rain again.

The rain is black because it is poisonous with radiation and the ashes of the dead.

There is no more critical distance left in me, I am crying helplessly and I can’t take any more of this I can’t look at any more, I’m sorry so sorry and the docent told me that it was our duty to look, our duty to learn and see and not look away so that this can never happen again so that every person who leaves this museum leaves determined that this will never happen again never never never that we will always find another solution to our problems and our wars and our fights and that people will die yes its inevitable but they will never die like this again, they will never dance in the rain that is poisoning them and drink water that is filtered through the ashes of their families and be grateful for it.

I am not quite running but walking as fast as I can, head down through the rest of the museum and then outside in the clear, beautiful sunny day. Chris and Debi are still inside, I will wait here for them I can’t go back in. I am sitting on the wall by myself for about 15 minutes, and I calm down, the tears dry up, and I am composed when they emerge. We are all somber now, for the first time for all of us we are unable to be flippant. We don’t say much, we move slowly from the museum courtyard.

As we are walking back through the park, we cross paths with a couple of Japanese men. They stop us, smiling hugely, can they take our picture? Sure, that’s fine, so they snap several shots of the three Americans. They ask us where we’re from, New York and Seattle, how exciting, Ichiro and Matsui! They ask me if I am an artist, or a rock star, I am tall and blonde and wearing big boots and aviators I guess this is what they think artists and rock stars from New York look like. No, I’m not a rock star, they don’t believe me can they take another picture just with me, the incognito American rock star?

We are no more than 100 meters from where the bomb hit when they demand my autograph.