In Hiroshima, the real story of Oppenheimer’s bomb is revealed
The graphic depiction of the moment of Hiroshima’s nuclear devastation leaves a deep impression. But as we move through the gallery it’s the personal stories that sear into the memory.
The light is starting to fade as we make our way to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Having arrived by train in the afternoon, we’d decided to pre-empt the next day’s outing with a night-time preview of the city’s most famous landmark.
Against the backdrop of the quiet park and modern cityscape, the sight of the eerily lit A-Bomb Dome comes as a shock.
We join a small group of tourists gathered in front of what was once the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the dome’s skeletal metal framework and stark concrete walls frozen at a moment in time – 8.15am, August 6, 1945 – when a nuclear bomb dropped by a US B29 Superfortress detonated at an altitude of 600m above the city’s unsuspecting citizens.
Our visit to Hiroshima had been partly prompted by a Hollywood blockbuster. The Christopher Nolan biopic Oppenheimer, released in July and in the running for 13 Oscars, tells the story of the physicist who led the top-secret project to develop the world’s first atomic bomb. But the director chose not to delve into the horrific consequences for the Japanese victims.
With a trip to Kyoto already planned, we decided on a detour to Hiroshima – an easy one hour 40 minutes by bullet train – to fill in for ourselves the side of the story that Hollywood didn’t tell.
The following morning we head straight back to the peace park. This area, we learn, is built over the flattened remains of the former Nakajima district, once a bustling shopping area lined with shops, houses, inns, theatres and temples. Our starting point is the Peace Memorial Museum, a low-set modernist building opened in 1955 to “inform people of all nations of the actual damage caused by the atomic bomb, and to contribute to the abolition of nuclear weapons as well as the realisation of lasting world peace”.
The entrance is crowded with schoolchildren as we make our way up to the first exhibition room, dominated by a vast panorama of the flattened city in smoking ruins. In the centre of the room, over an aerial view of the city, the bomb is depicted dramatically hurtling towards its target, the blinding flash instantaneously followed by raging firestorms and billowing clouds of ash.
About 80,000 people died instantly. By the end of 1945, an estimated 140,000 people had died from blast injuries and radiation sickness. Heat rays from the explosion raised ground temperatures near the hypocentre to 3000C-4000C, burning skin through to tissue and killing almost everyone within 1.2km.
The graphic depiction of the moment of Hiroshima’s nuclear devastation leaves a deep impression, but as we move through the gallery it’s the personal stories that sear into the memory: items of clothing shredded by the blast; photographs of a woman’s back incinerated through the patterns of her kimono, patients lying in agony at relief stations, and a man covered in thick keloid scars.
After the museum, I’m taken on a tour of the Peace Memorial Park by my volunteer guides, Atsuko and Kazuko. They lead me first to the Cenotaph, a simple concrete monument constructed in 1952 and positioned to frame the Flame of Peace and the A-Bomb Dome beneath its elegant arch. A register listing all the known victims of the atomic bombing is kept in a vault below the Cenotaph; updated annually, it now contains more than 330,000 names.
My guides politely correct me when I call the Flame of Peace eternal. It will be extinguished, they say, when all nuclear weapons are abolished – but with 12,512 nuclear warheads currently held by nine states, it’s a goal that remains more distant than ever.
Standing in the basement of a nearby reinforced concrete building, now a renovated tourist information centre known as the Rest House, I learn the story of Eizo Nomura. On the morning of August 6, 1945, he had gone downstairs at his workplace looking for documents when the bomb detonated. All of his 36 colleagues perished, but he miraculously lived – the person closest to the hypocentre to survive. In the park nearby, schoolchildren form into lines then kneel and bow their heads before a memorial topped with a statue of a girl holding a crane (a large bird, considered a holy creature in Japanese culture) in her outstretched arms. This is Sadako Sasaki, who contracted leukemia and died at the age of 12, having been exposed to the bomb’s radiation when she was two. In hospital, she had been told that according to an old tale from folklore, by folding 1000 paper cranes her wish to be well again would be granted.
Almost 70 years after her death, Sadako’s story – and the campaign it inspired to raise money to build a monument and raise awareness of all the children who died from the nuclear bombing – remains a powerful message of hope in Japan and around the world.
Near the Children’s Memorial, the ashes of about 70,000 people lie under the Atomic Bomb Memorial Burial Mound. This is the place where piles of bodies were cremated after the bombing.
At a newer addition to the park, the National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims, a descending, counter-clockwise walkway, leads to a circular Hall of Remembrance with a fountain at its centre. It’s a place for quiet contemplation, but also of record – survivor testimonies, a register of names and photographs of victims, exhibitions and documentary video screenings. A place for the safekeeping of memories.
On our way back from the park, on a nondescript street just around the corner from the A-Bomb Dome, we walk past a parking station and stop beside a low marble plinth on the narrow footpath. Commuters pass by, and the occasional tourist stops to read the inscription marking the spot where the bomb exploded directly above. After the solemn dignity of the peace park, the back-street memorial is surprisingly moving in its ordinariness.
Checklist
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is at 1-2 Nakajima-cho, Naka-ku, Hiroshima, Japan. Entry is 200Yen ($A2). hpmmuseum.jp
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