A Walk Around the A-Dome

Amidst all the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear chaos, my mother and I had the opportunity to stop in Hiroshima. As the bullet train from Kyoto to my mother's home city Tamana passed through city, we both decided that we had to stop, especially with the fear of nuclear disaster in northern Japan. The experience was one that I will never forget, and woke me up to the realities - and atrocities of war. 

The building's original name was the Industrial Promotion Hall, and it was considerably larger than the remains left after the explosion. It was one of the few buildings left standing within a two kilometer (one and a quarter mile) radius of the explosion, which in this photo is about a hundred meters directly beyond the dome itself.   It's remarkable that anything of the building survived at all, because it's estimated that the shock wave from the bomb created a pressure of 35 tons per square meter at the hypo-center.

The Ota River which flows through the city of Hiroshima. It runs right next to the A-Dome and runs through the Memorial Park. Although it looks peaceful now, hundreds if not thousands of people, drowned at this exact location. As ground temperatures soared following the explosion, people came to wade in the water to cool off or treat their severely burnt flesh. Many died due to their wounds, and witnesses claim the water was tinted red with their blood.

A volunteer tour guide was standing near by and noticed that I was reading the English translation of the memorial stone. We got talking, in Japanese (her English was rather broken) and she explained that she was an "in-utero survivor". Her mother, 22 at the time of the bombing, was 2 months pregnant with her. Five years ago, her mother succumbed to radiation related cancer. She now volunteers her time to spread the message against nuclear warheads.

The Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound. This humble, knobbly hill is the final resting place of the cremated bodies of over 700,000 unidentified victims of the atomic disaster. Rest in peace.

Nearby the Memorial Mound are dozens of plastic cases filled with thousands of folded paper cranes, sent in from all over Japan and the world. Traditionally, 1000 paper cranes are folded as a wedding blessing, but the meaning was reinvented in the famous true story of Sadako Sasakii. She  was diagnosed with leukemia, due to the radiation, and spent her time in a nursing home folding cranes. She was inspired to do so by the Japanese saying that one who created a thousand paper cranes would then be granted a wish. Her wish was simply to live. However, she managed to fold only 644 cranes before she became too weak to fold any more, and died shortly after.

Burnt and charred clothing of child victims of the bombing. In the background are pictured of the effects of radiation sickness, caused by drinking the contaminated rain water.

Inside the museum, I read about the political and economic setting of Japan throughout the duration of WWII. The facts were laid out scientifically, statistics, timelines and models surrounded me. I could handle that. But as we moved towards the second floor of the exhibition, it all got far too real. Case stories of children, real life accounts, pictures and mementos of loved ones... It was devastating. Most were about school children who attended an elementary school just a few kilometres upstream of the A-Dome.  None of these children survived.

One story I read was of a 13 year old girl who had complained of feeling ill the morning of the bombing. Her mother however, insisted that she go to school and do the volunteer work that they had been assigned to do that day for the war effort. She never came home, her body was never found, and her mother blamed herself for the rest of her life. There were diary entries of children, written hours before the bombing. Drawings by the same children, who died either instantly or passed in agony of the radiation sickness.

I am proud to say that I did make it through the whole exhibit, but I did have to leave for a few minutes to compose myself, and the thing is I wasn't actually there when it happened. I now have ten-fold respect for Kurt Vonnegut and for what he must have experienced in the war. He heard, saw and experienced the deaths of thousands of people, as a Prisoner of War. Forced to cremate bodies in mass graves... I cannot fathom, and I hope that I never will.

Dresden and Hiroshima, there is no difference. 
One last note to make though, I cannot bring myself to say "So it goes".