Hiroshima

After paying a short visit to my "hometown" Fukuoka and some people there, I travelled to Hiroshima. The city that has gained sad fame for being the target of the world's first atomic bomb dropping, is nowadays a bustling larger city in Southern Honshu. Still, it is a strange feeling to come here, you feel the weight of the city's history. A bit more than 60 years ago this place was witnessing a massacre before unknown to mankind and almost entirely destroyed.

In the city center, in the epicenter of the bomb, a park reminds of the tragedy. there are numerous memorials for the victims. The most touching is maybe the memorial for the many children who fell victim to the bomb. School children were summoned for clean up efforts in the city center that day, in the immediate vicinity of the epicenter. There is also a monument for the Korean victims. About every tenth victim was a Korean or Chinese forced laborer in Hiroshima's armament factories. Next to the park you see the remainders of the former industrial promotion hall. The building was right next to the bombs epicenter and it's ruins were left as an eternal reminder of the tragedy.

The park and the museum are being visited by large numbers of visitors from all over Japan and a lot of school children who sit in the park having their bento lunches. Also the park is host to the many homeless that do not necessarily appear in official statistics.

The peace memorial museum in Hiroshima is really worth a visit. It is very moving and quite heavy, just like the one in Nagasaki. But unlike the latter it has a by far more critical outlook and openly describes Japan's role in WWII and its wrongdoings against other Asian nations. It is still a less overt criticism of the nations's past than you would see in a German museum for example (but Germany's way of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" is quite unique anyway), but historical facts are described in a balanced fashion. It enabled me to concentrate on the victim's tragedy much more while in Nagasaki I had been constantly looking for ANY critical description of Japan's past, but in vain.

Quite a large number of cities had originally been sought out as potential targets for the first atomic bomb, and these were spread over all majorly populated areas of Japan, among them the Tokyo urban area. Four cities were "shortlisted" then: Hiroshima, Niigata, Kokura, Nagasaki. Kyoto had been eliminated from the list because it was considered an important center for post-war reconstruction of the Japanese state. These cities were then spared with conventional bombing, the cynical logic was that the effect of the atomic bomb could be studied better if the city had before been relatively untouched. While on August 9, 1945 the sky over Kokura, the primary target for the second bomb was clouded and the plane detoured to Nagasaki, on August 6, the sky over Hiroshima was clear and its fate sealed.

Numerous accounts from survivors tell the story of the day that must have been hell on earth. The city shattered to pieces, fires burning everywhere, survivors with their skin peeling off and in unimaginable pain. Many couldn't stand the pain and jumped into the river which was soon filled with bodies. Black rain fell from the sky and many were drinking the poisonous water. People were writing messages on the leftovers of buildings in the hope of finding their relatives. Children's clothes were later donated to the museum, each with the story of a high school student who had died shortly after the bomb had been dropped. Some made it back to their parents only to die there within hours. Many more would die in the course of the next years. One of the best-known victims was Sadako Sasaki, a schoolgirl who had survived, but later developed leucemia as a result of the radiation. She started folding paper cranes - according to an old belief she thought if she managed to fold 1000 paper cranes and endue each one with the wish with getting well, she would survive. She died before one year was over, but the paper cranes have since been a symbol for the victim's tragedy and schoolchildren in Japan fold them and bring them to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Why was the bomb dropped on Japan? The museum states that the US considered the risk that the Germans would be able to draw knowledge from it if the bomb was dropped over Germany and would be able to produce a bomb in return, unlike the Japanese. Also the US had to justify the enormous cost of the development of the bomb. I personally think the knowledge theft argument is rather weak. An already weakened Germany after the dropping of such a bomb would hardly be able to counter in a short time, altough of course research on the bomb was already somewhat advanced in Germany. I think there are some more reasons that were not mentionned in the museum or in the US official documents. The awe of dropping an a-bomb in the heart of Europe while Japan is an island. Or the fact that POWs would be affected as well. Hiroshima was specifically selected because it was thought that no POWs were nearby. Note that the Korean and Chinese forced laborers were not considered there. And that leads to my third suspicion that there is something inherently racist about the decision to drop the bomb over Japan and not Germany. Victim's who come from a different cultural sphere seem to count less and this is still the case these days. See the media coverage for the tsunami and the disproportionate attention for the Western victims for example. I am convinced that even this inhumane, criminal German regime was so less likely a target because white victims just count more to white people - there are numerous events in history where you can see that...

The Hiroshima city officials have been writing a protest note for every atomic bomb test carried out since then. The museum shows the arsenal of atomic weapons over the world. It is frightening to see the masses of bombs that lay in the hands of non-democratic and very questionable regimes such as Russia, China or Pakistan. Seeing the recent developments in Pakistan for example where islamistic movements gain more and more territory or watching Russia's war engagement and its thorough lack of respect for civic rights makes you more than just worried.