Short of standing next to a nuclear bomb when it goes off, to experience the destruction wrought by a nuclear explosion, visit the atomic-bomb museum in Hiroshima, Japan.
Officially named the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, it’s located in Peace Park, a large green space in the middle of the city, close to the epicentre of where the atomic bomb was dropped at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945. (The second was dropped on Nagasaki, which also has its own, albeit smaller, atomic-bomb museum.)
Although the exact number will never be known, it’s estimated that about 66,000 people died that first day, with the death toll doubling over the next few months.
Hiroshima is about four hours from Tokyo by Shinkansen, the high-speed railway, and Peace Park is a short tram ride from Hiroshima’s main station. As most of the signs are bilingual, you don’t have to read Japanese to find it — or you can just follow the ubiquitous throngs of chattering school kids on field trips to the museum.
Inside the park is one of the few original structures still standing from 1945 — the charred skeleton of the Japanese Museum of Industry, which, until recent earthquake strengthening, has remained undisturbed since the day the bomb was dropped. Further on is a pavilion decorated in brightly coloured, handmade paper cranes.
The 50-yen admission (about 50 cents) to the Peace Memorial Museum has to be the best bargain in Japan. Inside are displays and photographs documenting the history of Hiroshima and the buildup to the Second World War, along with two large and incredibly detailed scale models of the city, one showing the city before the bomb was dropped and the other after.
It’s hard to describe the utter devastation wrought by the bomb, so put it this way: the artist who built the “after” model didn’t have a lot of work to do.
In the second half of the museum, you are confronted with the effects of an atomic blast. Charred schoolchildren’s uniforms, massive steel girders twisted by the explosion, sections of a stone wall pockmarked with debris and stained with “black rain” and, most chilling, the white granite steps of a bank where someone was sitting the instant the explosion took place, leaving only a shadow on the granite.
Survivors’ accounts are mingled with photographs of victims who had their flesh literally boiled off them in the intense heat (about a million degrees Celsius at the epicentre). Near the end of the hall are the effects of the radiation: grotesquely deformed limbs and cancerous flesh pickled in jars of formaldehyde. It is horrifying and deeply moving, but nothing can prepare you for the last exhibit and the story of Sadako Sasaki.
If there is a poster child for nuclear disarmament, it is Sadako Sasaki. Only two years old when the bomb was dropped, she survived the initial blast only to contract leukemia 10 years later. Within months of diagnosis, the cancer had progressed to the point doctors could do no more for her.
In desperation, Sadako heard that making 1,000 paper cranes brought good luck and good health. But in the ruins of postwar Japan, there was a shortage of paper, so she made them out of any scrap paper she could scrounge off the streets. The paper became scarcer, requiring her to reduce the size of her cranes until they became so tiny, she was making them with a needle.
Sadly, her luck and health ran out. The last photograph in the exhibit is of Sadako lying in a coffin, surrounded by her tiny paper cranes.
Which is why, outside in the Peace Park pavilion, are hung thousands of tiny paper cranes made by Japanese schoolchildren to honour the memory of Sadako, and the others who died from the bomb.
Times Colonist cartoonist Adrian Raeside visits Japan frequently and is in the process of writing a book about the country. This is an excerpt from that work in progress.
