Hiroshima in the Morning Read Online Free PDF

of the only ruins left in Hiroshima, a great, spiked skeleton of the Czech-designed Industrial Hall, which escaped total destruction only because the blast was almost directly overhead so there was no horizontal force to blow it over. Once the very image of European grandeur, its broken brick walls now stagger as if the builder suddenly lost his train of thought.
    The Museum begins with the crawl of air conditioning on sweat, a fifty-yen admission ticket, and a commercial against nuclear weapons. I slip around that easily; the voiceover is unctuous, and the sentiment—one small step for man, one giant leap for peace or something along those lines—is not what I came for. If it doesn’t start with a bang, still I am confused by the deluge of excuses for the bombing: the walls are lined with images of Hiroshima as a military city; of its residents celebrating the occupation of Nanking. The displays in the first room, on the first floor, assure me that the US only decided to develop the bomb because they thought the Nazis were trying to do so. Two freestanding slabs are papered in letters protesting the nuclear tests by governments around the world, each signed by Hiroshima’s succession of mayors. There are nearly six hundred letters,
almost identical, as if, one leader to another, there was nothing new to say.
    Hiroshima has made a protest to your government against nuclear testing as many as twelve times only in terms of the last year . . .
    Such an action is absolutely not permissible . . .
    We vehemently protest . . .
    . . . a rash act, ignoring the wishes for survival of the human race . . .
    Hiroshima has made a protest.
    In the center of the room, there is a cityscape: an aerial view of Hiroshima after the explosion. It’s a barren circle with rivers, a couple of shattered walls, and a handful of sticks scattered near the edges. You could call it a model, except that that word implies a third dimension. When the bomb exploded over Shima Hospital, every building within a one-kilometer radius, except for three or four made of reinforced concrete, was completely demolished. I know this; why can’t I feel it? I have read about the firestorms that ripped through thirteen square kilometers and turned everything to ash, but they are not here. People and animals were vaporized, carbonized, melted, crushed, poisoned, maimed, and burned. Everyone within one thousand meters of the hypocenter was dead by the end of the day if not immediately. Almost everyone within two thousand meters died within weeks. I have seen these pictures, read the tallies. All I know of this city, this country, this journey I am taking comes from the books that say those who drank water died. Those who ate fruit may have had more
of a chance than the others. Those who weren’t even in the city, but were hit by the black rain, or worked in the rescue effort, also died. Total casualties over time: some two hundred thousand people.
    And now, I am standing in the resurrection of the model, in a cold, quiet building shaded in grey. On the second floor, in the next hall, the next rooms, I am awash in the dedicated revival of the city. This is Hiroshima’s “life must go on.” There is all sorts of hope here, and good will, and I know this is the “Peace” Museum, but isn’t that a euphemism? Isn’t this a museum of war? It is not only that I have yet to encounter any of the images that brought me here; I cannot see the point to building a paean to forgiveness. Forgiveness is forgetting, erasure, absence; it’s all the blanks in my family’s history, the expediency of accepting what isn’t real. The Peace Museum is the one place, if there is one place, that could hold America’s feet to the fire and say: look what you did here .
    Where is the bomb?
     
    MY MOTHER’S FACE sways in and out of darkness as she and I move through the museum, eyes checking in with each other as another door shuts behind us, before the new one slides open. A different