Hiroshima
A couple of days into my trip to Osaka that I wasn’t enjoying all that much I decided to take the bullet train over to Hiroshima for a day trip. For those of you that are completely illeterate or feral, Hiroshima is a city in Japan where President Harry Truman dropped the world’s first atom bomb. That single act instantly killed 80,000 people and subsequently killed an additional 80,000 due to radiation poiosoning.
Look up douchebag in the dictionary and you’ll find a picture of Harry Truman next to it.
I arrived in Hiroshima at noon and I had about 4 hours to spare in the city before my ride back to Osaka. I live on the edge like that these days. The city looks plain enough and boring enough.
So I made my way over to one of the parks where they had a statue of some man. It’s some dude, probably very important, looks like Churchill but I can’t imagine they would have erected a statue to him so it’s probably not him.
Some remnants in the park of an old palace. It’s a dreary place. Quiet and sullen, it kind of sets the mood for what’s to come but really nothing prepares you for what’s to come.
I thought the castle in the background looked cool so I went in for a closer look. Sure enough it was pretty cool.
Called Hiroshima Castle it was built in 1590 but then we bombed it and destroyed it. This one is a replica. I made my way over to the Atom Bomb Dome.
I don’t know why but everything about this place was kind of depressing. But I was nearly at the Dome, and here it was along with all that remains.
Never heard of the Atom Bomb Dome? History lesson!
History Lesson: Hiroshima Peace Memorial or the Atomic Bomb Dome, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It stands in memorial to those who were killed by Harry Truman’s actions. It was constructed as a Product Exhibition Hall initially. When the bomb was dropped it exploded prematurely at 600 meters (2000 feet) nearly directly above the dome. The force of the explosion was so powerful it leveled nearly every building in the city.
Eighty thousand people died instananeously. The dome survived because the bomb exploded directly above. This meant that the shock hit the building from the top and the walls were able to withstand the pressure from above. If the blast had been on the side the building would have collapsed. When all was said and done and entire city leveled, this was the only structure to surivive.
Here’s a really good mockup of what this whole thing looked like in a 20,000:1 scale. What you’re seeing below is a mock of Hiroshima. The red ball is the fireball two seconds after explosion.
You begin to feel the emotional impact when you’re standing in front of the dome but it doesn’t quite hit you until you go into the museum and live through the audio tour of that day along with personal artificats. The effects of the bomb were absolutely devastating.
You’re ushered into the museum through a narrow corridor made of rubble.
And then you’re given the stories of suriviors and recounted stories of those who died shortly thereafter. It’s hard to understand the impact of radiation, and this rendition does a good job of demonstrating the true horror.
When the bomb detonated and in hours beyond people had absolutely no idea what had happened. Eighty thousand died instantly but those who survived looked much like these people above. Tathered clothes and skin that was literally melting off the muscle. Teeth and chunks of hair falling out.
Shigeru Orimen was a first-grader when the blast occured. Pulverized into nothing. Shigeru’s mother recognized her son because the charred body she came across was still clutching the lunch box she sent him to school with that day.
This was incomprehensible to most people. That a person could simply vanish instantaneously. But many did. For instance this is a famous step where a shadow of a man is engraved and etched into the stone. The force and energy of the bomb was so powerful that the person simply was gone and only his shadow remained.
I spent the whole time in that museum trying not to bawl my eyes out. The sadness of what had happened, the devastation, it’s beyond words and I hope you take the chance to read the post fully and I encourage anyone visiting to Japan to make it a priority to visit Hiroshima. It’s going to suck and it will be an incredibly depressing dark day but you owe it as a citizen of the Earth to visit this because there really is nothing like it on this planet. It is something we should never forget and never allow to happen again.
What’s scarier about all this is that only a very tiny amount of Plutonium in the bomb exploded because something went wrong so the explosion wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Also, the bombs we have today are many thousands of times more powerful.
I’ll just leave this post with a beautiful shot of Mount Fuji I took on my train ride.
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