Hiroshima: Part Two

Traveling to Hiroshima to explore it’s history through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and personal reflection into family history.

Dear Jane,

Japanese Caleb and I make great travel friends. He was open to how early I wanted to get to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum at/before it opened, and wasn’t phased when it was me who made us arrive a few minutes late.

My top tips for this museum: arrive early (the Peace Park has a lot of room to host a LONG line) and bring tissues. My friend had told me to bring some. Bring more than you think you’ll need because you’ll need some, your friend will need some, and so will a bunch of strangers. The museum doesn’t provide tissues. They do have a little paper sheet dispenser after you’ve walked through the main exhibit. And that paper was thin.

The following is a spoiler about the Museum, and I encourage you to go even if you read this.

There are three permanent exhibits and several limited-time exhibits. You have to walk through the first exhibit to see anything else.

And that first exhibit is about what happened to the people of Hiroshima. It takes 2 hours to walk through this if you’re not rushing. It did get pretty crowded, and some folks who came in later were trying to push through the crowd to get somewhere. If you do this, you will miss the point of the museum, and you might as well have not visited.

The first part of the exhibit is comprised of recovered debris, each with an explanation of what the extreme heat, force, or radiation from the atomic bomb did to the different materials. There were examples from the epicenter and varying degrees of distance from the explosion.

The next and biggest part of the exhibit is a collection of personal effects owned and used by victims and survivors. Each item came with a detailed description of how that person or family suffered to death or how the survivors coped or didn’t, with their sudden losses from the bombing and the aftermath. It felt like these rooms were filled with hundreds of people, and the whole place was silent, except for the sounds of sniffling and nose blowing.

Caleb and I walked through this separately but met back up at a few points. And I think there was a point where the entire room evolved into collective depression, and I wondered what the rest of our day would be like. Was this the best thing to do first thing in the morning? Shortly after thinking that, the depressive atmosphere was lifted by the loud ringing of a phone, and then a (Japanese!) woman answering her phone and having a conversation.

It was highly inappropriate, in my opinion, but it worked out because we needed the mental energy to get through three more exhibits.

The A-bomb and my grandfather.

The next permanent exhibit was all about the creation of the A-bomb. There was a very in-depth history and explanation of how nuclear bombs work.

When I went to this museum, I was under the impression that my grandfather had worked on the bomb developing the shell. I never met him. He died years before I was born, and I’d heard more negative things about him than positive. He was super patriotic, so I assumed he had known what he was doing and was doing it for his country. He worked as an engineer at a company called Shock Guzmer, which I think is now Gusmer Enterprises Inc., and he helped build breweries.

Both my uncles and my father were born after the bombing. My uncles told me they were told that a small area of the factory (or manufacturing area?) was walled off with tarps, and there wasn’t a discussion of what was worked on behind the tarps. Men “from the government” would come in and work behind the tarps. My dad said that my grandfather worked on the casing because brewery building involves creating vessels. He also said that my grandfather was unaware of what he had worked on until after it had been used.

My 21st century self, with easy access to lots of information, might be making a serious assumption here, but I feel like he would’ve known what it was if he had worked directly on. Unless his direct work on it was the prep math/science for the materials, I think that bomb looked pretty bomb-like.

I consulted with my oldest uncle, the family genealogist, and he set me straight:

“I have always had the impression that he didn’t know what was going on until after the bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Considering the time and circumstances, this wouldn’t have been unreasonable. Remember, the Manhattan Project was huge. This is important. At the time, it was the largest scientific research and development project anyone in the United States had tried to carry out. People all over the country were involved, and very few people knew all the details of what they were doing. The only project I can think of since that might compare to it is the mission to land humans on the moon… In the world of high-level classified information, (which I lived in while I was in the Army) one of the holiest concepts is something called ‘need to know’. ‘Need to know’ means that if you don’t need to know some specific piece of information to do your job, you would be blocked from learning about it. In fact, you could get in trouble if you did try to learn about it. In this case, all the engineers, machinists, and others at Shock Guzmer needed to know was the shape and dimensions of what they were working on. They had no need to know what that piece, or pieces, were going to be used for. In fact, they almost certainly were discouraged from trying to figure it out.”

While I was walking through the first exhibit, I didn’t think about my grandfather. The suffering was overwhelming, and that’s what I was focused on. I did think about him during the second exhibit, which is about the history of nuclear bombs. The U.S. basically rushed the research and application of atomic and wanted to “psychologically” damage the Japanese. There are literally letters from the U.S. government in this exhibit. It was interesting that they had specific parts of the letters translated into Japanese and not the entirety. Based on what I know about my grandfather, psychological terror in the name of patriotism sounds like it was up his alley.

But perhaps not.

The mission of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is to share Hiroshima’s story as a way to discourage the use of inhumane nuclear weapons and to spread a message of peace. While this was a tough museum to go through, I think everyone should visit.

After the other exhibits, we strolled through the Peace Park to pay our respects at each monument, crossed the bridge that was the intended target, and reflected about what we learned at the Atomic Bomb Dome. We finished up trying to find that soba shop, and we think that we did, but it had a very long wait time. We ended up grabbing some food from the bakery across the street and picnicked overlooking the Peace Park.

<3 Katherine

PS – If you don’t think you’ll get to Hiroshima but want to experience a little Hiroshima history, consider reading Hiroshima by John Hersey watching this video by Only in Japan. These are both accounts by survivors. The video is about a then 14-year-old tram operator. And if you missed Hiroshima: Part One, go read it.