Walking through Japan's Peace Memorials

From the build-up to the war to the structure of the bomb that blew Hiroshima apart, there's tonnes of information at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. We stroll through a dimly-lit corridor filled with images of the mushroom clouds that filled the sky seconds after the world's first nuclear bomb detonated about 600 m above Hiroshima, and calmly read the details about who clicked them, from where and when. We calmly walk past a broken wall beyond which people with in ragged and charred clothes and disheveled hair are bathed in an eerie red-yellow light, that makes them look like the walking dead. Then we circle around a 360-degree reconstruction of Hiroshima before the A-bomb, said to have been created using 140,000 tiles—the number of people whose deaths were attributed to the bomb, by the end of 1945. Suspended around two feet above this ground-level reconstruction, is a red football-sized ball representing the enormous sun that formed when the bomb exploded. But, it's difficult to walk past the tattered clothes of a school student, a lone wooden sandal with straps lovingly woven from an old kimono, a charred lunch, an old tricycle without a seat, colourful paper cranes... all of which tell stories of the real cost of war. Even the stats and the pictorial depictions of the diseases caused by the A-bomb, which we come across later, fail to touch a nerve the way the war relics accompanied by stories that preceded have.

Descriptions of Hiroshima before and after the war are a firm reminder of a people's will to survive and to move on. Stories of how the rest of Japan rallied around Hiroshima are reassuring, to say the least. The visitor logs tell tales of the many people who haven't been able to walk through these halls untouched by the devastation caused by the first nuclear bomb. A board beside a window in the passage pin-points the other memorials in the park visible through the window. The Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound—a large, grass-covered knoll that contains the ashes of 70,000 unidentified victims of the bomb—though pin-pointed on the board is not visible through the window. But we can clearly see the memorial cenotaph, the peace flame built in 1964 and the A-bomb dome. The children's memorial and the monument to honour the Korean victims and survivors of the A-bomb are shrouded by shrubbery that's part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. This was reportedly one of the city's busiest downtown commercial and residential districts until the bomb blasted it apart into an open field.

All these memorials and the relics of the destruction that the A-bomb caused are here for two reasons; to honour the lives claimed by the A-bomb and to remind the world why this must never be allowed to happen again. The Japanese refuse to forget; every 6th August at 8.15 a.m. (the time the bomb went off), there's a minute of silence in honour of the lives lost and a peace memorial ceremony in front of the cenotaph that contains the names of those whose lives were claimed by the “little boy”. The cenotaph carries an epitaph in Japanese, which translates to "please rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the error”. Polite Japanese speech is typically ambiguous and omits the subject, leaving the interpretation open to "[we] shall not repeat the error" or as "[they] shall not repeat the error". Through the arc built over the cenotaph, you can see the peace flame burning bright atop a cement structure that resembles two open palms joined at the wrist; it will keep burning till all the countries of the world decide they can do without nuclear weapons.

Remember the cranes we spoke of earlier in the museum? They told the tale of Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old when the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Ten years later she was diagnosed with leukemia. She believed that if you folded a thousand paper cranes your wishes will come true and that is just what this little girl did, to no avail. Atop the Children's peace monument is a girl with arms outstretched towards an origami crane. Of the three peace bells in the park, the most popular by far is the one built in 1964 beside the Children's Peace Monument, which visitors encouraged to ring.

You can catch glimpses of blue sky through sections of The A-bomb Dome, declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996. Now a mere skeleton of what used to be the Industrial Promotion Hall of a thriving city, it is said to be the building closest to the hypocenter of the bomb that remained at least partially standing. Our guide Toshisan tells us how there was much conflict about whether the building should be demolished or allowed to stand, but in the end it was allowed to stand as a reminder of the damage that war can cause. From here you can look across the Motoyasu River see the peace clock tower, built to remind the world that there is no good time for another A-bomb.