If you were to walk about in Nagasaki today, you would never
suspect you were walking through what was an atomic graveyard less than 70
years ago. That is until you enter the Matsuyama-Machi
area, which houses the Atomic Bomb Museum and Peace Park.
I did not have the opportunity to visit the Memorial Museum
while we were in Hiroshima, so it was important to me that I go this site
today. It has been so exciting to play
with indigenous animals and experience the cultures of the countries I’ve
visited, but I believe that a visit to a historical site such as this cannot be
passed up. It is important to remember
such events so we can learn from them. I
was too humbled to take many pictures, but I will do my best to explain the
gravity of my visit in words.
To call the visit heavy would be an understatement. Our lecturer on board told me before I left,
“Remind yourself of the context in which the event happened.” Once I got there, I understood why. Without recognizing that this was an act of
war (considered necessary at the time), it makes the actions America took all
the more monstrous, and quite frankly, evil.
Upon entering the museum, there is a hallway of pictures
from pre-August 1945 Nagasaki. Packed
streetcars, children playing, women praying - a typical town scene from the
first half of the 20th century.
As you walk down this hallway, there is the constant sound of an anxious
clock ticking. Turning the corner, the
clock stops and is replaced with the sound of an explosion. The wall ahead is made up of television
screens showing footage of the mushroom cloud caused by the plutonium bomb the
United States dropped on Nagasaki, Japan at 11:02 am on August 9th,
1945. Next is a clock recovered from the
debris, presumably the one that “stopped ticking”, with its hands frozen at
11:02.
The next dark room is filled with recovered rubble, twisted
metal, charred concrete. A bent fire
tower to the right, a warped water tower on the left, a 3x3 foot square of surviving
wall from an elementary school.
Television screens projected before and after photographs of the
destruction. Two walls were dedicated to
pictures and artifacts from the original Urakami Cathedral, what was once the
largest Catholic Church is East Asia.
Blackened statues of saints and angels, a sculpture of a bleeding-heart
Jesus with his nose severed right off his face, and probably most hauntingly, a
crucifix with Jesus beheaded by the blast.
The before-and-after pictures of the building itself were just as
awful. A replica of one of the church
walls left standing after the bomb stood at the end of the room.
Women walked through the room crying. I was the only tourist in there at the time
and, clearly being an American, I would be lying if I said I didn’t get any
looks that made me uncomfortable. It
gave me a little bit of perspective on how people of Middle-Eastern descent
must feel going through American airports.
The rooms steadily became even more difficult to bear. Lights and lasers illustrated the span of the
destruction on a topographical map of Nagasaki. More artifacts…glass bottles, money,
tattered bloodstained clothing. Every
clock (that still had its hands) displayed 11:02. At one point, looking at all the relics
reminded me of being at the Titanic museum.
But the Titanic disaster was a horrible accident, and this tragedy was
inflicted with purpose.
Then came the pictures of the people. Caution: this will get graphic. The civilians we saw going about their days
in the first hallway looked rather different now. Piles of charred bodies lay dead in the
streets. A young girl, crying, standing
next to a corpse with blackened limbs, and with skin, flesh, and muscle peeled
away from the face revealing a clean skull.
Dismembered body parts of children in the schoolyard. A mother and her baby, bodies scorched black,
eyes seared clear out of the skull, lips parted, revealing the mother’s glowing
white teeth. These are all
photographs. Not drawings, or paintings,
but photographs. Photographs not of
soldiers, but of mothers and fathers and children, of homes and places of
worship and everyday life. There were
photos of survivors, too. Men with holes
clean through the sides of their faces, just waiting to look slightly less
disfigured after skin graft surgery. The
women with purple scalps who were lucky if they has 20 strands of hair left on
their heads. A man scarred up and down
the entire right side of his body, his chest so bad he no longer has a right
nipple.
A plaque told the recounting of a woman who was 9-years old
at the time of the bombing. A beam of
her house had collapsed on her two year old sister. As they were screaming for help, their mother
wandered back from working in the fields, red and purple flesh with no hair
left. No one had yet been able to lift
the beam, but the mother put her shoulder underneath it and pushed up with all
her might freeing her youngest daughter.
The mother died later that day.
After such a somber exhibition, I exited the museum and spent
some time in the Peace Park, which is located at the hypocenter of the bombing.
A portion of the Cathedral wall that was left standing was
relocated to the park, along with some other larger artifacts. A large statue of a mother holding her dead
baby was added to the park on the 50th anniversary of the attack as
a memorial to all who lost their lives.
Also, throughout the Museum and Peace Park, were thousands
of colorful origami cranes. Legend has
it that anyone who folds 1000 paper cranes will be granted one wish. The paper birds are now a symbol of peace.
Let us not forget that no matter our differences, we all
bleed the same.
