Peace peace peace peace hate

I think Kate's put up most of the pictures she's going to put up, so feel free to check them out.

Hiroshima felt a lot like Vancouver. Some of the intersections were dead ringers for West Broadway, or West 4th. And the southern part of the Peace Memorial Park bears an eerie resemblance to SFU. The Pond of Peace leads to a path, flanked on either side by large lawns and tall hedges, which in turn leads to the Peace Memorial Museum, a long concrete building with a vertical slit motif, held up from the ground by concrete pillars. Behold: the Academic Quadrangle's long lost twin.

The Peace Memorial Museum and the Memorial Hall were both well worth the trip. We visited the Memorial Hall first, which has no entrance fee. The Memorial Hall contains the Hall of Remembrance, which presents a panoramic view of the city from the hypocenter, and sounds of water echo from the circular fountain in the center, which represents both 8:15, the time of the bombing, and "consolation to A-bomb victims who died begging for a drink". There is more to it than that, but I don't think I have the words to do it justice. Let's just say it was an experience I won't soon forget. The Memorial Hall also contains a searchable database of the names and, where possible, faces of the known victims of the A-bomb (they are still collecting names), as well as a library and exhibit of testimonies of survivors.

The Museum (entrance fee 50 yen) wasn't quite so artistic or sublime as the Hall, but it presented a wealth of information. The museum displayed artifacts such as time pieces frozen at 8:15, historical background about Japan's actions in the role and the development and decision to drop the A-bombs, explanations of the physics, exhibits showing the effects of the bombs on the city and its people, and on and on. I was really quite impressed by how fair, unbiased, thorough, and nonjudgmental the exhibits were. Japan is all too often amnesic about the war, or outright revisionist as in Yasukuni shrine (a controversial place which honours Japan's war dead and sells books such as The Alleged 'Nanking Massacre'). The Museum was a welcome contrast.

Although photography wasn't forbidden, and there were things worth capturing on film (or memory card), taking pictures felt a bit, well, sacrilegious. I did take one picture though, of the visitor's "dialogue notebook" that people can write in after going through the museum.



Everything in the Memorial Hall and Museum is worth remembering, and that comment is worth remembering, too, I think.