Visiting Hiroshima Today

A streetcar of another era rattles down a track in Hiroshima that it shares with a sleeker, rattle-free model of the 21st century. A soothing, electronic Japanese voice announces:

"Tsugi wa Hatchobori [Next stop, Hatchobori]."

Two more stops and then, startingly:

"Tsugi wa Genbaku Dome-mae."

A second disembodied voice, this one American, states:

"Next stop is the Atom Bomb Dome."

As if all cities had an Atom Bomb Dome and this was just one stop of many on the streetcar line, most of which were for shopping. At this one you were just going to consume something else.

Visiting Hiroshima left me unaffected, which is a strange thing to say for someone who believes the bombing was both depraved and unnecessary (yes, I know all of the arguments on both sides of this debate). It is probably heresy that I say this and many people probably are quite affected if they didn't come with much knowledge about the event.

Maybe I'd already read too much about it, most movingly many years ago in a book called Hiroshima Diary by a Japanese doctor who was a witness. He laid bare the human story in a much more harrowing way than I saw at the dome or the memorial museum. There is little in Hiroshima that shocked me.

Historical context

For one thing, all context is removed from the city that Hiroshima was. The dome is interesting but unremarkable. I think the black and white photos of it amid the destroyed city are more evocative. The modern city rises in gleeming steel, neon, and jumbotrons as a backdrop that mutes the effect the dome might have had. The city authorities argued for years whether to tear it down but it is there now for the ages as an interesting sculpture.

The museum is not well done and is dated I think. There is no coordination between sections, some distracting repetition, and a general avoidance of offense. It evokes, to my Western eyes, a message of suffering that in some ways is too abstracted to reach the viewer on a human scale and too specific in other ways that make it melodramatic. It seems to fail in its attempt at a universal message of the madness of war and nuclear weapons.

For example, there is a life-sized diorama of some children fleeing a building with shredded flesh hanging from their arms. The actual photos create a more horrific impact but few are used and are mostly of burn victims (and not the worst).

The bomb from a distance

Something I found interesting were pictures taken on the ground within two to forty minutes after the blast and from two km to eight km distant. It looked like St Helens erupting. This came back to mind as I stood gazing at Hiroshima across the bay two days later from the top of Misenyama on the island of Miyajima.

Also interesting is what humans do in horrific situations. The very afternoon of the bombing, Japanese meteorologists were taking measurements of the black rain that fell from the dissipating mushroom cloud.

And the remarkable ability humans have to keep going. They started restoring electricity the next day and had some streetcars running within three days.

Since the human scale of Hiroshima is what shocked me when I read in depth about it, I wanted to see something in the city that would leave visitors shaken and thoughtful. The only things that did this, in my opinion, were the video accounts of survivors collected in recent years. There you see the emotional impact of events that the rest of us cannot fully imagine or appreciate; emotion that has not dimmed over the decades.

To its credit, Hiroshima is a city devoted to world peace. There are monuments around the city. And after all, it is not an easy thing to convey something powerful about the event that will transcend all cultures.

If you've visited Hiroshima, I'd be interested in reading your experience as well. If you're planning to go there, be prepared for a muted experience.

This account is from a December 2007 visit to Japan.