Sunday was for the Peace Memorial. I took my time walking through the museum, having braced myself the previous two days. I'm not sure if I just didn't notice in Nagasaki, but Hiroshima's memorial seems to go into more detail about life in Japan during the war. Pictures, maps, and artifacts illustrate the lifestyle of the people on the home front. They're accompanied by captions that explain the consequences of mobilization on the home front: the sacrifices citizens had to make, and the employment of junior high school students in factories. I was surprised at how unforgiving they were toward the Japanese government; I haven't encounted much Japanese criticism of anything Japanese, especially with regards to history.
The rest of that part of the museum gave the details of the events leading up to the bombing--the Manhattan Project, the Einstein-Szil%C3%A1rd letter to Roosevelt, the cities nominated as targets, the choice of bombing instead of a land invasion--all amid photographs of famous people, ordinary citizens, and Hiroshima before the bombing.
The next section presented the effects of the bomb. It gave technical details--the time the Enola Gay flight group departed from Tinian, the time Little Boy was dropped, its yield, the time and temperature at detonation, and the predicted range and devastation. A model of the region shows the hypocenter and the blast's range.
Photographs highlight the complete devastation of the city around the hypocenter, with buildings, bridges, and trees flattened or vaporized. There are numerous artifacts recovered from the debris, including tools and other pieces of metal, strong enough to withstand the blast but severely deformed and barely recognizable. A scale model of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the nearest structure to the hypocenter to survive the blast, is also part of the exhibit.
Next, the effects of the bomb on the people is described. Photographs and explanations detail the suffering from initial radiation burns: severely burned bodies, both living and dead; a picture of a woman's bare shoulder, the pattern of her kimono seared onto her skin from the heat of the blast. They also thoroughly explained the residual effects of radiation poisoning: scarring, sterility, and cancer.
I can't recall whether the Hiroshima museum contained as much information as Nagasaki's on the subject of nuclear proliferation after the bombings. I do remember one of the last stops being a row of guestbooks, with information on various heads of state and other noteworthy people who have signed.
Just as with the Nagasaki memorial, none of this conveyed anger at the perpetrators. The emotion evoked the most strongly was intense sorrow. I felt just as awful walking through this memorial as I did in Nagasaki's, but this time I wasn't as afraid of accusing looks from the other visitors.
Like in Nagasaki, I came away from this museum feeling thoroughly wretched. I understand that I am not personally responsible for what happened. I also understand that the bombs were dropped not with evil intent, but with the aim of ending the war with the least loss of life possible. That the estimates which informed that decision may have been grossly inaccurate doesn't matter; the people with their fingers on the trigger were convinced that their solution was, if not good, then the least evil solution.
What makes me feel so awful is that it came to this. I'm ashamed that my country knowingly slew so many thousands of non-combatants and prisoners of war. I'm ashamed that the western civilization I culturally belong to developed such a technology and allowed it to be used to harm. I'm ashamed that the same civilization spread its way of life to this part of the world in the first place, bringing colonialism and exploiting for trade the countries who might otherwise have fought back against the Japanese.
The Japanese murdered millions of civilians as they conquered southeast Asia, committing countless atrocities along the way. However, the western powers are indirectly responsible for the scale of the devastation, having crippled China and colonized Indochina and Oceania while Japan industrialized.
Despite this train of thought, I didn't feel as bad this time as I did after Nagasaki's museum. I feel bad admitting it, but I may have been a bit desensitized to it. (Most of the stuff above is elaboration from after the trip.)
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