August sixth, 1945

Inside a glass case, resting on a waist-high pedastel sits an old brass-bodied pocketwatch. The glass that covered the ivory colored face with its handsome black roman numerals has been missing for years. It belonged to a man named Kengo, and it was given to him by his son one year for his birthday. They say he wore it and wound it unfailingly every day until one morning in early August. Kengo must have been a punctual man, since the hands of the old watch stopped at 8:15 on the morning of August sixth, 1945, the precise time at which Little Boy, a nuclear bomb loaded with uranium, detonated 516 meters directly above the Shima hospital in the middle of Hiroshima. He was several hundred meters from the hypocenter, but the blast burned his entire body, and he was blown into a boiling river by a wind of over a hundred kilometers an hour. He survived somehow, and made it to the foundation where his home used to be, and there he died of massive burns, his melted skin peeling off his arms, hanging down from his hands, face swollen and black, regonizable only by his voice, although his esophgas was horribly burned from the superheated air.

Accross the room from Kengo's watch sits a three-year-old boy's tricycle and metal helmet. The frame is twisted, warped, melted and rusted almost beyond recognition. It was buried in the place of the boy's body, which was completely anhilliated by the blast and heat, which reached up to three thousand degrees centigrade five hundred meters from the hypocenter. In the immediate two hundred meter diameter of the hypocenter, the air temperature reached a million degrees centigrade, leaving not one single soul alive. That two hundred meter radius was covered by the blast in a matter of less than one second after the bomb detonated. By the time it was over, the blast radius covered several miles, enveloping all of urban Hiroshima. Structural members from the t-shaped Aioi bridge, which was used as a target by the B-29 that dropped Little Boy are on display, their inch-thick steel massively warped by the extreme heat. Name tags from school uniforms are on display, their black lettering, which absorbed heat more readily, burned through, leaving only the white cloth with the names of their former owners eerily empty. The Hiroshima atomic bomb museum is filled with relics like these, each one with a story. Most of the stories are from children, who were conscripted to help tear down builidings in the central urban area in an effort to cut the risk of massive fires like Tokyo experienced when most of its wooden buildings were detroyed by repeated firebombing. Ironically, Hiroshima, along with Nagasaki, was spared from the bombings that occurred in most Japanese cities so that the effects of the A-bomb could be more accurately studied by the United States department of War.

One hundred and forty thousand people died on August sixth, 1945. A hundred thousand more died in the after from burns, leukemia, and other after effects of the bomb. Even one kilometer from the blast, shards of glass driven by massive winds penetrated flesh and concrete walls. Supplies of medicine ran out within hours, leaving the survivors with nothing to do but give their loved ones water that they so desperately craved. On August sixth, there was no help for those hundreds of thousands who survived. They had no idea what had happened. When they finally found out, the rumors came, saying that nothing would grow there for seventy-five years. Six months later, when weeds began to sprout after a winter spent in temporary barracks style housing, the Hibakusha, or survivors of the attack gained some small measure of hope. If the weeds can come back, and the blossoms can flower again, so can we, they reasoned.

My first impression of Hiroshima, as I stepped off the bus after a twelve-hour overnight ride, was that it was like smaller cities and towns in California. So many cities in California have little more than fiifty or sixty years' history since their founding, giving them an unlived-in feel. The city was completely re engineered after the bombing, and now has the widest thoroughfares I have seen anywhere in Japan. It has an open, green feel that puts Tokyo to shame.

Today, all that remains of that day in 1945 is the ruins of the former Japanese Industrial promotion hall, renamed the Genbaku Dome, or A-bomb dome, which is designated as a UNESCO world heritage site, and according to a mayoral decree in 1966, is to be maintained in its current condition into perpetuity. The rest of the city except for the city hall building was completely leveled and covered in grey ash and dark streaks where radioactive black rain fell after the blast.

In the museum, hordes of schoolchildren scurried around, taking notes for their school assignments, glancing over the exhibits for a few moments, then scurrying on to the next. Maybe because I rented an English audio guide that made me stop to listen to the story behind each exhibit, I spent more time there. Maybe they were too young to really understand, but there was too much joking and yelling from the children; as if they didn't realize what they were looking at. They could have been transported to a natural history museum, looking at dinosaur skeletons, and the reaction would have been exactly the same.

Outside, I sat on the concrete steps outside the museum, processing what I had seen. School children from a junior high school in Osaka walked up to me with their English homework, reading their introductions off the top of the page:

"Hello, my name is Misako Tanaka from Osaka junior high school. May we interview you?"
"Sure"
"How are you?"
She and her four friends waited for my response.
"I'm fine", I said. The Japanese are typically unprepared for any response that differs from that stock response.
"Nice to meet you", she read, her eyes following the text visibly from left to right. "What do you think of the Atomic Bomb Museum?"
"It was..." I paused. I didn..t really know. It wasn't good, in the sense of being enjoyable. But it was worthwhile. They waited, anxious to find the next foreigner to accost for their homework.
"Powerful". I said, after a moments.. thought. They looked at each other, conferring, translating to each other. Sometimes I think that..s why the Japanese have such a hard time with foreign languages; they approach it like they do for science and math, using a group to work it out, so when they are put in a conversational situation, they flounder. Finally, after some nodding to each other, they presented me with a paper. "Please answer these questions", Misako said, and handed me a thick green mechanical pencil with a picture of Hello Kitty on its barrel.
1. Is this your first trip to Hiroshima?
Yes.
2. How did you feel about the atomic bomb museum?
It was a very powerful experience.
3. Should nuclear weapons be used again?
No.
4. What should be done for world peace?
End nuclear arms and poverty.
Simple answers I hoped they would be able to understand. But the antsy feet and glances to each other gave me the impression they were only doing this for the grade. I signed it and let them go, and they ran off to talk to an Australian couple a few meters away, skipping, giggling, and doing what Junior high schoolers do.