Spectre of the A-bomb

October 30, 2010
Geoff Collett goes on an uncomfortable pilgrimage in Japan.
--------------------
Perhaps it's because I'm a child of the Cold War (the later bits, I hasten to add) that when I was asked if there was anywhere I really wanted to go in Japan, I thought of Hiroshima.
My teenage years, way back in the 1980s, were steeped in nuclear paranoia and marinated in a noxious broth of wild-eyed, hysterical punk rock - spiky, skinny Brits shrieking, bellowing, howling and stuttering about a world tormented by cruise missiles, tapioca sunrises and . . . Hiroshima.
I never got it out of my system. Today's youngsters wringing their hands about climate change seem a bit limp. A polar bear clinging to an ice floe somehow doesn't bother me the same way the thought of a city's worth of life being vapourised, or an entire planet being blasted into cosmic dust because of some sort of dispute over ideology did back in the day (and still does, if I stop to dwell on it).
So we arrived at Hiroshima on the Shinkansen (bullet train), after a few days of hanging out in Osaka and lapping up the food and noise and shops, the great architecture and cool people and the heat - just loving and admiring modern Japan, in other words.
As we wandered out of the train station, sweltering and a bit disoriented, a toothy old guy dashed up and in comic book Ingrish asked us excitedly where we were from ("ah, New Zeerand - I went to Sydney once, 20 years ago"). It was marginally odd - perhaps he wanted to practise his English, but maybe he just felt like being nice to people.
He knew where we wanted to go and enthusiastically - kindly - directed us to the streetcars which patiently trundle the ceaseless herds of tourists to the place in Hiroshima that matters above all else, to outsiders anyway.
We rode in a crowded tram 10 minutes or so across town, along neat, busy, modern streets, bustling but not chaotic, in the best Japanese fashion.
When you get to the A-Bomb Dome (or Genbaku Dome, or peace memorial) the first instinct is to take photos. Important place. Visually striking. Then, you feel like nothing so much as staring. Gawping, actually, as you notice the details - the twisted reinforcing steel, the lumps of concrete, the strewn rubble - and discover the interpretation panels and slowly piece it together.
You'll possibly feel slightly ill, or perhaps like going over and slapping her, if you see an idiot Western girl having her picture taken while striking an epic pose making the peace sign with the ruined dome as her backdrop, no doubt ready to rush off to the nearest Starbucks to post it to her Facebook page. Britney is hoping for world peace.
Because this really isn't a place for aggrandisement or farting about with the self-indulgences of the modern world. If you've got blood running through your veins and electrical pulses in your brain a more considered response would surely be to find a shady tree, to sit beneath it for a while, contemplate what it is before you, and wonder: how in Christ's name did it come to this?
Before it was a peace memorial, it was known as the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. According to the interpretation panel, it was much-loved around the city.
The old photos leave no doubt it was grand and handsome, an obvious source of pride to a belligerently proud city which would have no sooner anointed a peace-anything as it would have surrendered to the Americans.
It sits beside the river, and within a couple of hundred metres of what, on August 6, 1945, became ground zero - the point precisely beneath where the American B29 Enola Gay dropped its payload one hot morning, probably quite a bit like this mid-August day, the A-bomb detonating high in the sky for the first time as an act of war.
In the massive energy wave unleashed, most of the central city was reduced to rubble; people to atoms or, if they were truly unlucky, molten flesh.
Somehow, the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall wasn't obliterated. Everybody within died, most crushed by the collapsing interior, apparently, and all the building's windows were blasted out, the walls mostly blown to pieces. But its form remained and the skeleton of its dome left to stand like a buckled tombstone amid hundreds of acres of rubble.
A few hundred metres away is the Peace Museum. This is a new building, large and box-like, and it is hard to imagine it being fondly or proudly regarded, but the simple knowledge of what it represents gives it a palpable dignity.
They charge a modest admission fee and there are queues here, but people are mostly patient and only a few are given to barging in front of your view line as happens at any other crowded attraction in this country. The displays start with a history of Hiroshima, detailed in the typical museum- style interpretation-panel way, with various grainy black and white old photos, which would be dull and ignorable if you didn't have that sick feeling about where this is all heading.
Impressively - to me at least - it doesn't gloss over stuff about Hiroshima's militaristic history, its importance as a military base from where various of its forces set off to do shocking things in the Sino- Japanese wars, and later to South- east Asia and the Pacific where generations of Australians and New Zealanders learnt to hate and fear all things Japanese.
It's hard to know which is the starkest part of the museum's huge display. There's an especially arresting effect where the stories of pre-bomb Hiroshima suddenly give way to a wall-sized photo of a fob-watch stopped, like all clocks in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, at 8.15am, along with a few vaguely familiar lines: A dragonfly flitted in front of me and stopped on a fence. I stood up, took my cap in my hands, and was about to catch the dragonfly when . . .
The gruesome bits are hard to forget: the photos of the lady with her face melted to nothing recognisable and still alive to know it; or the other lady whose kimono pattern was branded into her flesh.
The infamous step in front of a bank, where a citizen sat in the morning sun and had his or her shadow scorched into the cement for posterity is now part of the museum's collection and that's something you hope not to see again, even if the vanished soul's only remnant is faint and hard to make out.
The section devoted to the technical details about the actual bomb is all the more chilling for the fact that the one which obliterated the city outside was an utter tiddler compared to what the bomb- makers have long since learnt to fashion. It's best not to think about that too long either.
It's hard, too, to fully comprehend the section which explains the calculated decisions taken by the Americans leading up to the bombing itself.
But after an hour or two of shuffling and staring as respectfully as possible, straining at times to absorb even a fraction of the horrors on display and having to keep reminding yourself that all this was only a fraction of the total, it's the children's stories which inevitably sink in the deepest.
Lots of them were out in the open that morning, helping clear the rubble from demolition sites to create firebreaks in a city preparing - optimistically, as it turned out - for an Allied onslaught. Doing what they were told, making their parents proud, probably mixed up with fear and wonderment and pride and obedience and conformity, and all that other kids' stuff.
One girl had made her own dress and wore it that day. It's here, salvaged by her parents from her corpse. So are 15-year-old Haruyo Akita's trousers. The junior high school pupil's parents are said to have rushed to find him dying in the rubble immediately after the blast, at his side when he died.
Thirteen-year-old Teruko Aotani managed to drag her charred body home to die. Her mother saved a lock of the girl's hair, clearly scorched, and preserved here as her lasting testament.
There is a memorial of sorts too, to Noriaki Teshia, who was maybe 13 or 14 and helped home by a friend, his skin hanging in tatters and trying to slake his terrible thirst by sucking the pus from his blistered, burning fingers. His fingernails and some skin are here, keepsakes gathered by a distraught mother to share with her husband when he returned from his military service.
And there is the only remnant of a first-year high-school student, Miyoko, who vanished in the bomb's shockwave, leaving nothing but a sandal and a footprint.
On the way out of the museum a display stand carries all the letters of protest successive mayors of Hiroshima have written down the decades since 1945 each time a foreign government tested a nuclear weapon. There are a lot and even the polite language such matters are conducted in cannot disguise the rawness that is the preserve of those who really know what weapons of the most massive destruction are all about.
There are also photos of various dignitaries - politicians and the like - who have made the pilgrimage to Hiroshima. It's not the most impressive lineup. No heads of state from any of the nuclear countries stand out.
Wandering through the sweltering streets of Hiroshima after, it's hard to look at anything without wondering how it must have been on this spot or that 65 years earlier; or to watch the people without wondering what it's like to have the A-bomb scorched forever into their civic identity and their cultural memory.
Climbing back on the Shinkansen as it sweeps into the train station and out into the industrial wonderlands of Japan, it's hard to shake the feeling that if everybody was required to come here and see it for themselves, the justification for nuclear arsenals would wither in no time.
And for those back in the 80s who said it was all just noise - it's hard not to think that maybe, you just weren't listening properly.