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| a building built for exhibitions is now a famous reminder - known as the Atomic Bomb Dome |
Let's admit it - we all live with propaganda prominent in our lives. We always did, but never really considered it happened to us, just to the other countries. Commercial, political, personal gain or loss has always been at the base of information that is released and can be accessed. Everyone wants to be right, but few do the work to determine the facts to ensure whether they are in fact right. A 6 can be mistaken for a 9 when looked at it from one way, and it's only by walking around to see the other perspective and the context that one can determine whether it really is a 6 or a 9.
Both Nagasaki and Hiroshima have excellent museums relating to the War of the Pacific and the second World War, acknowledging Japan's path, its violent path to exerting its influence in the East, colonizing Korea and Taiwan and Manchuria in China. Its bombing of the American fleet in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. Its lead over the USA for awhile and then the tide turning. Its attempt to save face by forming an armistice. USA and UK fears that Soviet influence would grow if it turned its forces on Japan after Germany capitulated and thus led the terms of Japanese surrender.
Germany split the atom, and, if it hadn't been for Hitler's war on Judaism, Germany would have developed the atomic bomb first, but most of the relevant scientists were Jewish and fled to the USA where they were supported and funded to the tune of $2 billion (in 1945 dollars!), which was more than the entire national budget of Japan. Germany surrendered in May, and the first atomic test was done in July, which made Japan the chosen recipient of the bomb in wartime. Japan was already on its way out, but the USA , for the above two reason regarding citizen backlash and Soviet influence, decided to use the bomb anyway. What was and is the most troubling aspect to me was detonating the bombs without any warning, so that more people died than had to, and those that did die were primarily children, the elderly and women, especially in Nagasaki where 70% of the victims fit these populations.
It was the combination of blast, heat and radiation that caused such devastation. At the surface ground, the temperature was almost 4,000 degrees Celsius. The blast wind was 440 metres in a second in the hypocentre vicinity and 160 metres a second a kilometre away. Everything was destroyed within 1.5 kilometres, and impacted within 4 kilometres. Fires raged for hours. Some people were incinerated immediately, others were killed when glass and wood went right through their bodies. Most killed that year suffered for hours or days or weeks. The worst was done in a day, but the dying is still continuing with radiation-caused cancers manifesting sometimes decades later, and physically impacting second and even third generations affected. One survivor was finding glass shards and dust coming out his pores 60 years after the event. By the end of 1945, some 300,000 people had died. Since then, more than that.
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| glass bottled fused together in the heat |
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| church for persecuted Christians took 3 decades to build - it was gone in a minute |
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| the difference between ground level then and now, with a window of household items, debris and dust that fills it |
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| old ground level and new ground level |
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| same view, then and now |
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| A camphor tree blasted by the blast and thought dead |
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| within months it started to leaf out again and is living still |
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| half a shinto gate sheared off.... |
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| ....and left today as a remembrance |
All that was explained pretty succinctly, and so what was most interesting was that both museums spent more time dealing with what happened next. One would think that was it, but it was really just the beginning of from the nuclear bomb's trajectory, so to speak. USA's success spurred on the USSR, which developed their own bomb in 1949. The USA developed the many more times deadly hydrogen bomb in 1952, with the Russians following in 1955. The UK and France and China also developed nuclear bomb technology. In 1970, five countries were "allowed" to have the bomb through the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Bomb development included accidental dropping, crashes, lost and sunk nuclear submarines, radiation leaks and tests, which impacted everything around them. Other than the tests, most of this was never revealed to the people living around site of development, who suspected over time only because of the effects. Areas of New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Washington State have experienced substantial health and environment damage. The Marshall Island's Bikini atoll and its local population was treated abysmally in the name of testing, as were other parts of the Pacific Ocean. The Sahara dessert, and the area near Semey in the old USSR. Others too, which have not been made known. By 1980, 500 tests were conducted, spreading radiation over vast areas of the earth, while research into the effects of that 1945 radiation was still not complete.
Since the cold war ended, more of less in 1989, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Libya and Iran have developed nuclear bomb technologies. When Libya disarmed (hooray) the black market for "loose nukes" making their way to other countries was discovered (booo!) Test ban treaties did not ban underground testing, nor sub-critical tests. In 1996 a call to end nuclear based bombs was not ratified by the USA or India, China, Pakistan and a few other states, which rendered it toothless. Latin and Central America were the first to ban them outright, in 1967. They were followed by the South Pacific and Oceania, Africa and southeast Asia, with the result that almost the entire southern hemisphere is bomb free.
After decades of work, much of it by these two cities and the country that experienced atomic bomb damage, two years ago, in 2016, then-president Obama made a speech in Prague, saying that as the USA was the first and only country to have used these bombs in war, it had the moral responsibility to lead the way to international disarmament. The newest treaty is to reduce stored caches by one third within a specific, short time period. 122 countries endorsed this. But not the USA. Nor China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Egypt, Iran and North Korea, and there are no prospects of this happening.
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| current statistics |
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| poor score people! |
There is a man who sits on a street corner in Hiroshima here, who was still in his mother's womb when the blast hit, and he speaks eloquently and factually about what happened. When current President Trump hinted that everything was on the table when dealing with North Korea, even nuclear strikes, he was most ashamed of his own Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for not replying "No, nuclear weapons should never be on the table, not even against North Korea." The conversation needs to be shut down over even the potential for use, and it is hypocritical that the countries who preach at others are guilty of holding the weapons themselves. A nuclear winter, which would result from a nuclear tit for tat war, would take only 52 days to enwrap the earth. Temperatures would drop, plants would wither, animals would die and mankind would start to starve.
One of the worst horrors of those days: 8:15am on August 6, 1945, and 11:02am on August 9, 1945, is that the immediately impacted victims - more than 200,000 dead by the end of the year - were in agonizing pain from degrees of burn up to fifth. First hand account tell of cries for water, and thousands dying in the river, or just before getting to the river. Both cities now have large parks with fountains, and water is a clear element used in memorial halls and statues of remembrance. I may not look at a glass of water the same way twice.
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| designed as angel's wings |
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| the river where so many died |
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| a fountain with 74,000 LED lights at night for the number that died in this city on that day |
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| fountain designed to look like open palms facing skyward |
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| fountain with everlasting flame |
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| fountain illustrating 8:15 on a clockfact, when the bomb struck this city |
Being shamed is one of the worst things a Japanese person, especially a man, can suffer. There were soldiers - young men - who chose to commit suicide rather than suffer the shame of defeat after the Emperor of Japan surrendered in august 1945 after the second attack, on Nagasaki. But since then, the Japanese people, with good help from the USA and other countries, have really made a remarkable success with their country. I think the lessons learned from the disastrous treaty of Versailles after the first World War were learned and more care was spent helping the country get back on its feet and achieve sovereignty again. and Japan has done that in spades.
The people we have met in the museums and on the street hand us paper cranes folded by themselves or school children. This started after a school girl, who survived the bombing at the age of 2, came down with leukemia several years later, as so many others did, as a result of radiation. folding paper cranes has long been a Japanese tradition of hope and wish fulfillment, and this girl Sadako Sasaki,thought that if she could fold 1,000 cranes she would be cured. She died before she could complete her wish , and every since then, school children fold streamers of cranes to promote nuclear disarmament and peace.
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| children's peace statue with crane |
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| one of many posters of cranes made by school children every year |
I came away feeling anger at the hypocrisy of governments who say one thing for themselves and another for other countries, and sorrow and a restlessness of what I could pos
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| statue and crane festoons at a school that was hit |
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| the school was rebuilt, and all students bow to this statue every morning |
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| the bit of school that was left, and open to the public |
The peace memorial in Hiroshima includes sorrow for those sacrificed to "mistaken national policy". Maybe that is my takeaway, to be vigilant about my own nation's policies. To take the time to research what we are told and divine the facts. And then speak up for them. Grumbling about small issues pales next to something like this. I hope no other city ever has to suffer what Nagasaki and Hiroshima have suffered, because no city "deserves" it. No country "deserves" it. And it's always a majority of innocents who suffer it.
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| a real live crane for peace with a stark backdrop |
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