Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

nahh… Kok Hong will tell you…. so here’s the museum…

A museum in Hiroshima dedicated to the history of the first atomic bomb used against humankind.

I guess all of you here know that Hiroshima was devastated by the dropping of the atomic bomb… here’s the picture…

That’s a model inside the museum. This is what one part of the museum looks like…

The museum is separated to 2 sections… the introduction and the after-effect…

Hiroshima was one of the few targets for the bomb. Then Kokura (remember the entry on my 20 hr journey? I mentioned Kokura… and there will be an entry about Kokura soon) …. anyway… the 2nd target was Kokura. But due to cloudy conditions, the plane diverted to Nagasaki… (both Kyushu).

On August 6, 1945… at 8.15am… the bomb was released from a plane by the name of Enola Gay…

Here’s the model of how the bomb looked like…

Here’s a scale model that shows where exactly the bomb exploded…

I was surprised that it blew up mid air…

By the way, there were a lot of people in the museum, so much so I got scolded by a man (in canto, we would call him ‘dai lam yan’) for spending too much time on one exhibit… Japanese people rush so much, even in a museum… and this shows that it is not good to look like a Japanese kid. If i were a guai lou… he would’ve just ignored me and complained in mind.

Well there were a lot of people in the museum… Americans, to see what their armies did to Hiroshima… Chinese and Koreans to see how the Japanese received their revenge… Japanese people to see how the past Japan had gone through after the war… (the above statement has no intention to insult or offend anyone, therefore I apologize in advance if you feel that I did)

Europeans, africans, indonesians, thai…just here for a visit…

* Ever since I arrived in Japan, I have never been to a place where the density of foreigners is so high… not even in the airport…haha

Well of course there were Malaysians… ah beng and ah pek came just to kecoh (2 ding dongs came to play a fool)…

At one point of the exhibition… Calvin uttered…

Nah… we were serious visitors… (I’m serious)… I mean, it would be so unseemly to laugh and crack jokes inside a Memorial Museum for the victims…

By the way…. this is Calvin… I went to Hiroshima with him…

I was holding a remote control trying to zap him … click click… haha

okok…back to the story…

So the tour in the museum continues… there were lots of exhibits… all retrieved , or found after the blast…

The exhibits…

wasuremono means left-item (like my train ticket inside the taxi back in Shimonoseki which i found back later). That paper crane wasnt found after the blast… it was folded by a girl called Sadako, who died of leukemia. She believed that folding 1000 paper cranes would keep her spirits alive and battle with her illness, but she died in the end. There’s a statue dedicated to her at the Peace Park outside…

Some exhibits are sooo rusty, the explanation stated that it would crumble at any moment…

There was the ‘uneaten’ lunch in a box, all rusty, bent and contain carbonized rice.

There was half a pair of spectacles, which the other half had melted into the victim’s eyes and flesh.

There were skin and fingernails… the story goes… a boy burnt so severely, his skin hung loose from his whole body, who was rescued and taken home by his friend. Unable to bear his thirst, he reportedly sucked his pus (the same yellow stuff from your pimple) from the ends of his fingers, from which the nails had peeled off. He died in agony the next day. His mother kept his nails and skin for memory.

Well, thirst was one of the reasons why the victims fled to the river… They all cried for water… desperately…

The fire swept across the city like a living hell (as described by a survivor) .. The victims took refuge in the river… They were in the end swept away and drowned by the current… Here’s a description of the exhibit “Victims fleeing in search of water”

The Spirit Of Hiroshima , one of the 2 books i bought from the museum.

Then the tour of the museum continues….

What drew my attention the most was this…

The title of this exhibit is “Human shadow etched in stone (260m from hypocenter)”

The story behind goes… A person sitting on the steps to the Hiroshima branch of the Sumitomo Bank waiting for it to open was exposed to the flash from the atomic explosion. Receiving the rays directly, the victim must have died on the spot from massive burns. The surface of the surrounding stone steps was turned whitish by the intense heat rays. The place where the person was sitting became dark like a shadow.

Simply said, he was combusted alive, leaving a mark where he died.

The shadow now looks blurred.

The original photo taken after the blast was very clear…

Due to constant rain, it washed off a bit. Sumitomo Bank then decided to donate this steps to the museum.

I took a photo of this photo from the museum.

At one part of the museum, they exhibit textbooks from around the world, which mentioned about this bombing thing…. and so I went….

how’s that…?

Well, the tour of the museum has come to an end…

 

Meanwhile, outside…

 

Soooo hot… I practically got dried up due to over-sweating… (believe me, the heat here is definately different from KL)

 

Then we made a tour around the city, checking out buildings and bridges which remained ever since the blast…

trust me, its seriously freaky to even pass by that building…
we had to because we were staying in a hostel near this building.

imagine this….
at 8am, the staff came to work … getting ready for the day, sorting out paper work for the upcoming meeting, getting calls from customers as usual and …..

suddenly…. a blinding white light came and big boom…. the glass shattered into smithereens and everyone got swept away by the force, being pushed to the wall so hard that they were flatten and their intestines and other internal organs blew out….
juuuust like what happens when you throw an egg towards the wall…

Speaking of body implosions…
there was a picture painted by a victim which went, …the pressure around the hypocenter dropped so low in an instant, a soldier’s eyeballs popped out and his intestines were revealed…

no comments there…

The Peace Park….

 

(i love my camera)

Here’s a mosaic of the shots i took around the city… a wall of a former hospital, former university building (the red one), now abandoned…bridges…, paper cranes….Peace Boulevard at night… power outlet… hypocenter…. the interior of the A-dome… a primary school….

 

geez… you’ll never believe how much time i spent typing this… but its okay, I’m on holidays anyway….

Thanks for dropping by to read…

 

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