Homage to Hiroshima
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
August 07, 2005

Visiting this Japanese city for the first time, 60 years after it became the first populated place on earth to endure a nuclear explosion, was a sort of pilgrimage ... .

PHOTO: AP

AWESOME IMAGES, DEVASTATING IMPACT: Think Hiroshima and images of the giant mushroom cloud come to mind.

I DIDN'T know quite what to expect when I stepped off the train at Hiroshima. Certainly not the spacious station arcade, with gleaming stalls advertising cappuccinos and beer, nor the sight, soon after my taxi turned a corner, of the Groovin' Disc Shop, selling new and used CDs. Maybe the profusion of blond heads towering above the Japanese throngs on the platform should have alerted me: Hiroshima was now an international city.

Its history ensured it belonged not just to Japan, but to the world.

PHOTO: AFP

A few steel and concrete buildings and bridges were all that remained intact in the burnt-out city.

Visiting Hiroshima for the first time, 60 years after this mid-sized Japanese city became the first populated place on earth to endure a nuclear explosion, was a sort of pilgrimage for me. At some unconscious level, I suppose I had expected sombreness, the solemnity one associates with cemeteries, not the bustle of a thriving city where every second building near the station seemed to be an international hotel.

The Peace Memorial Park

Nor was somberness in the air. It was a brilliantly clear spring day, the air crisp, the sky a bright blue, when I walked through the Peace Memorial Park to the museum. The park, which stands at the centre of the explosion, is lovingly maintained as only Japanese gardeners seem to know how, with monuments scattered through it, most dedicated to victims of the A-bomb, though some pay tribute to such famous peaceniks as Marcel Junod and the American editor Norman Cousins. One ruined building, the Atomic Bomb Dome, stands undisturbed in the park as it stood in 1945, its rubble a stark reminder of that summer's day when clocks stopped at 8:15 a.m. and most of the rest of the city was obliterated. Otherwise grass gleams and flowers bloom on land where scientists had predicted nothing would grow for decades.

So life had, as always, triumphed over death. And yet the memorial museum remains the highlight of any visit to Hiroshima. I could not fail to be impressed by its evocation of the scale of the tragedy: a huge photograph entirely covering a long wall showed the city minutes after the explosion, with practically every feature levelled, a handful of steel-and-concrete buildings standing skeletally, the rest a smouldering ruin. Large dioramas, each the size of two table-tennis tables, displayed the city before and after, recreating homes, office blocks, the railway station, and then their remains; a red ball suspended in the air above pointed to the hypocenter of the explosion, directly above the city centre.

PHOTO: AP

The B-29 aircraft after landing on Tinian Island after its mission.

Displays explained A-bomb technology, the historical forces at work, and the target selection process that doomed the 2,30,000 victims in Hiroshima.

(If clouds had not prevented it, the city of Kokura might have been immortalised instead.) Extracts from United States military cables revealed that the absence of any Allied prisoner-of-war camps in Hiroshima had helped seal the city's fate.

But history buff though I am — and impressive though the museum's recreation is — it was not the immensity of the event that struck me most deeply. It was, instead, the little personal stories lovingly collected by the curators and displayed throughout the museum. A picture of a schoolgirl with 80 per cent of her body covered with burns. The skin and nails of a schoolboy who died in agony, his flesh literally melting off his body. The charred lunchbox of another, its blackened remains still inside. Shredded school uniforms. The burned-out favourite tricycle of a three-year-old killed while riding it. Pictures of a woman's back, the pattern of the kimono she was wearing imprinted onto her skin by the bomb's radiation. The shadow of a human being engraved permanently into the steps and wall of a building.

Reliving the horror

All tragedy is ultimately personal. The intimacy of these details touched me more profoundly than the mind-numbing statistics about the horror of that day.

PHOTO: AP

The Atomic Bomb Dome that is a stark reminder.

I asked the museum's director, Minoru Hataguchi, whether the A-bomb had affected his own family. "Yes," he said simply.

"My father was a railway employee, working at the station that morning. He died instantly." His mother? "She was pregnant with me the day the bomb hit." I expressed relief that he looked so well, when so many babies born after the explosion had suffered grotesque deformities and cancers. "I am well — so far," he said, grimly.

But his face lightened when I gingerly asked him about his mother. "She is 85," he told me. "And she hasn't been ill for a day since the bombing. But now, alas, her memory is going."

A metaphor, perhaps, for what I had seen in Hiroshima: survivors who have transcended the horror, and whose memories, at last, are going. But their legacy is for all of us too. Hiroshima's charismatic Mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba, a former college professor in America and perhaps the last prominent Socialist politician left in Japan, has made a personal crusade out of the city's memory of horror, convening peace conferences with unflagging persistence and passionately leading the anti-nuclear cause around the world.

The museum displays copies of letters of protest sent by the city to every country that has detonated a nuclear device (and yes, the ones to India and Pakistan in 1998 are prominently displayed). The fallout of 60 years ago is not only radioactive.

Yesterday, the Hiroshima museum commemorated its 50th anniversary, 60 years to the day after the A-bomb fell.

May it celebrate many more, ensuring that the world keeps its collective memory intact — so that humankind can ensure it never witnesses the horror of atomic bombing again.