Day 13 - The Most often Mispronounced Japanese City

I chose a poor day to go to Hiroshima. It turns out that the Peace museum is quite a bit the school field trip you would think it is. Remember how I was interviewed in English by the boy at Kinkakuji? Well, today I was interviewed by more elementary school students. Five times. It was kind of creepy actually.

See, they were roving all over the park in herds looking for foreigners to interview for their English class, and well, I was the only foreigner, and I'm kind of easy to spot. I would hear running footsteps and sure enough swarms of elementary school children were sprinting towards me with "Hello!" pronounced in a Japanese accent. I would only make it thirty yards or so before another crowd would run up to me. For the record, My name is Cory, I come from America, and I like Football, Strawberries, and Udon. Those were the answers to the questions they asked me.

The museum (once I got to it) was an experience. It's the kind of thing that's even harder to describe in Japanese, because the Japanese word for 'interesting' (omoshiroi) also means 'fun'. And its never 'fun' to go to this kind of museum. They have in the park the remains of the only building left from the bombing. They call it the A-bomb Dome.

The museum itself was first a history of the buildup of WWII escalation in Japan and a historical outline of the events of the bomb, and then a collection of models and artifacts from the day the bomb was dropped. It went into great detail about how the bomb worked, so for example now I know the difference between a hydrogen bomb and an atomic bomb. 

The scale models were highly detailed, showing the before and after of the area around the museum, which is situated near the Hypocenter (the area directly below where the bomb was detonated mid-air). It also featured firsthand accounts of the day's events and a description about the lead up to the bombing. 

Something I didn't know: the elementary school children from a number of schools (about 6000 children) were evacuated out of the city in anticipation of conventional bombing raids and left their parents behind. This was a blessing and a curse. Yes, they survived, but they all became orphans.

It also clarified the narrative we learn in high school. It's never exactly what we learn in school, is it? But it was not as different as I imagined. First, the justification for using the atomic bomb on Japan. What we hear in school: we had to do it or we would be fighting a ground war in Japan from door to door and we would lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers. What I heard at Cornell: In fact, it was a show of force to decrease Soviet ambition in the postwar period through intimidation.

What I learned was that they are both partly true. Since the start of the Pacific War, the government here attempted to indoctrinate its residents that an honorable death was preferable to surrender. A PR campaign asked for 100,000 honorable deaths from the Japanese. It was working quite well, actually, as the US learned taking Okinawa. That was a very costly affair and it was only a small island of Japanese. So, had they attempted to take the mainland, it would have been very bloody.

But I also read letters today about strategy leading up to the bomb. Initially it was thought to be used against Germany, but since it was German technology that inspired it (it came from Einstein and his colleagues) they assumed that the Germans would learn too much if it was used on them. After it was decided to drop it on Japan (before we learned the ferocity of the Japanese at Okinawa), 17 cities were chosen and Nagasaki and Hiroshima were chosen because their topography would magnify the effects. So it was to be a show of force as well. This was also explicitly written in the letters that I read: that it would be effective in limiting the Soviet control of the region. 

I also learned that every nuclear test worldwide is sent a personal letter from Hiroshima's mayor asking them to stop and protesting the further development of nuclear weapons. The wish of the people of Hiroshima is a world without nuclear weapons. It makes sense, seeing as we could destroy the world many times over with the amount of power we have created. But at the same time I see why this can never be done. Because even if the US and Russia and all the nations of the world decommissioned every one of their nukes, there would always be lunatics like the Iranian president who want to wipe a place on Earth off the map. The only thing stopping these lunatics is fear of reprisal from a much larger force, and thats why as long as lunatics can have their own regimes, we can not completely eliminate our nuclear arsenal. Still, the vision that Hiroshima has for the future is a good one, if it could only be.

See more of my trip.

Cory