A building near Hiroshima's Peace Memorial has been left as it was after the bombing. Photo / Getty Images
A building near Hiroshima's Peace Memorial has been left as it was after the bombing. Photo / Getty Images
This city's horror was 70 years ago, but the memories will never leave, writes Kevin Pilley
There's nothing like a Peace Park pint to get you over man's cruelty to man.
In a little stand-up around the corner from the bomb site, I got maudlin in the one-row-of-barstools-wide Sakaimachi Baru on Honkawa Bridge.
The wisteria was out and the cherry blossom just over. A bell sounded and schoolchildren assembled for their lesson in the open air. They took their positions around a large mound full of spring flowers.
The bell rang again and their teacher, talking through a large yellow megaphone, asked once more for peace.
An elderly artist sat sketching by the riverbank. Beneath us, a heron stood in the shallows. As I stood watching the artist, I felt a tug at my sleeve. A boy, no more than 7, wanted to practise his English. He asked me my name and I asked him his. Then he asked me the date. I told him. He shook his head. "No," he said. "In Hiroshima, it is first August 6 1945". Then he bowed, said goodbye and ran back to his friends.
The city's peace bell was struck again and another lesson was over. The bell's deep low resonance echoed through the whole park, over the downtown traffic and all around Japan's "City of International Peace and Culture".
At 8.15am, after flying from Tinian Island, the B6 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atom bomb over Hiroshima. The target was the Aoi bridge on the Motoyasu River. Being T-shaped, it was clearly visible from the air. One kilogram of Uranium-235 was dropped from 9970m and detonated at 580m above the famous castle city of west Honshu. Ten square kilometres of the city, including four schools, were immediately flattened in an explosion equivalent to about 15,000 tonnes of TNT. The "pikadon" fireball travelled 11km in 30 seconds, and more than 60,000 people died instantly. Three days later, Nagasaki was bombed by the Americans.
Both cities rebuilt themselves. Hiroshima's street cars were running two months after the blast. Today they rattle and bounce through a city of high-rise offices, chic department stores, pricey designer shops, banks, karaoke bars, flower shops, airline offices, breweries, truck factories, shipyards, needle factories, oyster restaurants and fish shops selling sardines fresh from the inland sea of Seto.
One million people live in Hiroshima. At night, it is another identikit oriental modern city. Another Osaka and another Tokyo. Another nondescript noisy neon town in Japan. During the day, however, it doesn't seem to have the same teeming frenzy as Tokyo or Osaka. Hiroshima becomes bearable and what makes it bearable are its memories. "Wide Island" is a place which deserves respect.
You cannot hate Hiroshima as you might hate Tokyo. You cannot be indifferent to it as you might be towards all the other sprawling urban messes which make up a large part of Japan. You cannot compare it to the dainty watercolour rice paper Shogun atmosphere of Kyoto or Nara. Its shrine and temple count is far behind those ancient cities. Hiroshima is famous for just one thing — for being the right size and shape for the United States to test the effectiveness of its Manhattan Project. Cities are not all alike. Hiroshima is not Tokyo. Hiroshima has clinics to help the hibakusha, the A-bomb survivors.
A building near Hiroshima's Peace Memorial has been left as it was after the bombing. Photo / Getty Images
The city's Memorial Peace Park has at its middle a cenotaph. Under a vault shaped like clay saddles found in ancient tombs is a chest containing the names of all the victims. The epitaph reads: "Repose ye in peace, for the error shall not be repeated." Few people photograph it. Many stand for many minutes in front of it. Children sit at the edge of the small lake eating sweet-potato icecreams. Business people sleep nearby under the shade of the Figure of the Merciful Goddess of Peace. Others eat their box lunches and drink their energy drinks under the peace clock. A couple walk hand in hand past the stone lantern. A family picnics beside the Fountain of Prayer. Children in white bobby socks are everywhere. All smiles.
It costs 50c to enter the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. To see film of the bomb drop. To see stopped watches and to touch the twisted remains of roof tiles. To see graphic illustrations of deformities and cancers caused by the blast. To read the pleas for peace and nuclear disarmament. To see the photographs of the devastation and the suffering. It costs $12 for a "No More Hiroshimas" T-shirt from the museum gift shop.
It doesn't cost much more to take a pleasure boat cruise down the Honkawa River, under the West Peace Bridge, passing the second Middle School A-bomb memorial monument and on the other side of the river the monument in memory of the Korean victims before turning full circle beneath the dome into the Motoyasugawa to pass the memorial tower to the mobilised youth, the flower clock , the monument to the post office workers who perished, the children's monument and the monument to the employees of Hiroshima Gas Corporation. The Radiation Effect Research Foundation is on the other side of town.
Inside the museum is a tricycle, buckled and blistered and blackened. It belonged to 3-year-old Shinichi Tetsutana who was riding it when the Americans dropped the bomb. Her father buried the tricycle with his daughter where he found them. They were soldered together.
Several years later, he dug up the grave and buried his daughter nearer her home. He donated her tricycle to the museum. That twisted piece of charred metal made me cry.
There was a tug at my sleeve. It was the boy who I had spoken to earlier.
He nodded and smiled up at me and said "Thank you".
