You can only really understand the devastation that hit Hiroshima by going there as i suggested a few weeks back. The A-Bomb Dome was one of the only remaining structures that survived, if only partially.
In the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum there’s a scale model of Hiroshima before and after.
Widespread destruction with only several buildings still standing.
A representation of the A-Bomb Dome in sparse surroundings.
The A-Bomb Dome as it stands today, surrounded by a rebuilt Hiroshima.
The photos of the Atomic Bomb Watch that stopped at exactly the time the bomb dropped are interesting too – Atomic Bomb Watch.
Check out the full szie versions on flickr and some other trip photos from Hiroshima and Kyoto.
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My grandfather was on one of the first foreign ships to land in Japan following the end of the war. He and his buddies had a road trip planned to see the devastation in Hiroshima – the effects of radiation poisoning were not widely known in those days. Thankfully their bus broke down half way and they went back to port, but I still shudder at what might have been… I’ve been to Nagasaki but not Hiroshima – your post reminds me that I really should try to go this year.
Get down there Chris, there`s lots to see, not just the remnants of this disaster, which are very interesting, but a different side of Japan too, certainly different to other places i`d seen.
Birthplace of the modern Yakuza. Pretty much. (Thanks to the post-war vacuum)
Did you see any wingnuts wearing wingtips??
Sightings = 0
Visited Hiroshima and the dome about 10 years ago. Hiroshima was gorgeous, lots of green. It was hard to wrap my head around what had happened there during the war, and the visit to the museum was like a punch in the gut. Definitely glad I made the trip though.
Agreed JT, it’s a must see for many reasons. I learnt a lot about the events from ~60 years ago.
Is there a movie (drama or documentary) that surrounds this event from the Japanese perspective that might be available in the US? I’d love to learn more about these events from the Japanese perspective. The one we get is that the Japanese weren’t going to surrender any time soon and therefore we had to bomb them. But then, I’ve also heard that the Japanese were trying to work out a deal to surrender when the bombs were dropped. Of course, I believe that this sort of weapon should not be used and, save for an equal or greater threat, should not be allowed to exist.
Even then, I’m not sure it’s worth cost of using it.
Not sure on a movie but recently i saw a doco on Discovery outlining exactly the points you made re US and Japanese position at the very time it all happened. Interesting stuff. Will try and scan my TV guide and find a name for you.
I just found this post off an internet search and wanted to respond. I think you gotta be a little careful trying at all to make it seem like Japan was a victim of WW2. Their military did horrific, unspeakable things to anyone they encountered. I love Japan and dated a great girl from Hiroshima. But if you’re going to go back (or to a museum) to revisit history never forget what Japan’s military was all about then. The people of Hiroshima didn’t deserve what they got of course but it was Japan’s emperor and military that brought it all back upon Japan. When you read about what happened over in Asia when the Japanese military went nuts (it’s the only explanation one can come to) it is some seriously twisted, sick sh– they did to Asians and then allied prisoners they captured. They were the most awful of human beings. They were not honorable warriors like modern times are trying to make them out to be. Sure their fighting style and war inventions can be admired but they were not human when they encountered new people or took prisoners. They were wretched human beings and some Japanese soldiers wrote letters back home to say how evil their commanders were (many committed suicide because they couldn’t partake in what was asked of them). They were twisted individuals is honestly the only way to describe them. Who knows what happened to them but they lost their mind. They don’t teach this stuff in Japan. I took a semester of Japanese in college and my teacher once told us she was hired to translate the Marshal Plan. She said that she was really impressed and inspired the way America treated Japan after the war. She asked her mother about the war and her mother said American soldiers almost all of them were great to japanese people (especially women and children and elderly) and she also said that if Japan had won the war they would have terrorized American citizens and the grandmother in the end was happy america had actually one. They were not honorable warriors in any way shape or form. Hirohito also refused to surrender when it was obvious he should do so to save his people and his military. My great uncle fought against the Japanese in some of the most horrific battles and he said they just had would not give up when it was just obvious they had to. They forced allied forces to slaughter them. They sometimes begged them to surrender but eventually were just like “f it. If they won’t surrender let’s just fire ball them out of their caves”. It didn’t even make any sense and it wasn’t about honorable samurai dying. And the emperor of Japan was told of a bomb by Japanese scientists but he didn’t want to believe. He let one city (Hiroshima) get completely wiped out and still refused to surrender. WW2 was just a horrid time frame and people back then just wanted the insanity and grotesque immorality of Japan/German and the war to end. It was a terrifying time for people back then. Germany and Japan went bonkers leading up to and during WW2. They were demented individuals. Maybe thier citizens had no idea but it’s just the way it is. They had to be stopped and submitted by all means necessary. Japan’s military did unspeakable things to everyone they defeated. They went on mass raping sprees and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Koreans, Chinese, Philippines, and treated western prisoners like Germans treated Jews. They were about the most cruel soldiers ever and there was nothing at all about them that anyone back then could respect. Also, President Truman didn’t really understand the atomic bomb. He was a simple man in many ways thrust into presidency when FDR died. I read “Truman” and he was very disturbed when he realized what destruction it had to women, children, elderly. He initially cheered the bomb when he found out it worked but later he understood what it really was. He wasn’t proud of it but he didn’t regret that it ended the horror of WW2. He thought it was just a new bomb that would be better than fire bombing entire cities. People forget that allied forces had to fire bomb entire cities because of Germany and Japan’s stubborn refusal to end the war. Fire bombing honestly was a lot more horrific than atomic bomb. That’s the truth. Truman really did look at it as mercy ending to force the emperor to surrender. The musuem is extremely important as a message of why nuclear war just can’t happen. But I would hope the Japanese have something in the museum to show what they did to CHinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and western prisoners of war. They also should show the documents where Hirohito and many of his commander bascially were calling for mass suicide of the entire Japanese nation before ever allowing themselves to surrender. Again, I love modern Japan and I’m young so I don’t have any reason to write this other than to remember what led up to Hiroshima. To this day Japan has not (refuses) to offer an official proper apology to China. The current leader went right back to an old ceremony honoring Japanese war dead where war criminals of WW2 were also honored. Sorry for this long post and interrupting your community. But I had to respond like this. Japan was no victim of WW2. They were sadistic warriors with absolutely positively no human decency for those they defeated or conquered. They were Orks. And there was only one way to get them to stop.
You’re missing the point of my post ….. these are purely pictures of an event that happened many years, rightly or wrongly and there’ll always be people that sit on both sides of the fence. I would do the same if i visited Pearl Harbour, Anzac Cove or any other place of significance.
WTF is it with people wanting to get into debates about this stuff !!!
usually when i see a block of unformatted text that long, i just do a quick “tl, dr”. but for some reason, i read through Rin’s whole post and i have to say that i agree. i’ve lived in japan for 2 years and i hear a lot of similar stories.
i realize that you didn’t mean to get in to a debate over the war, but the very idea of a monument that focuses on the destruction of the bomb without acknowledging the politics that led up to it isn’t right. it’s just demonizing americans and that is far from the whole picture.
gorgeous photos, nonetheless. the attention to detail in the miniature model is surreal.
Agreed, there was lots of truth in it …. but all been said before and an area i can`t be arsed getting involved in.
The unformatted text probably pissed me off more than anything!!!
Actually, if we had not dropped the bombs, it is likely that Japan would have won the war after dropping similar devices on Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Have the guts to leave a name and email address if you’re going to comment. Link deleted on that basis.
You apparently don’t know what you are talking about since it was said that Japan would have likely soon surrendered anyway. The US didn’t know that at the time, so they dropped the bombs. As for them Dropping devices on LA and SF that’s hogwash. If they got that close with planes they would have started using conventional weapons on the US, and their balloon tech failed miserably and landed harmlessly in the pacific.
nice shots mate! you didn’t revisit the dome again at night?
No, pushed for time Ken … and to be honest, didn’t think of it, i guess it would have been well lit up and made for some great pics!
The A-Bomb Dome by itself just appears as a decayed old building amidst a growing city- it’s only when you go into the museum that you really can understand it in context and enormity of the devastation wrought.
Agreed, the museum is a must visit.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Pluie-Noire-NON-USA-FORMAT/dp/B001ECG4J4/ref=pd_sbs_v_2
I’m guessing this is a book that has significance to Hiroshima???
I’m guessing you didn’t look at the link. Not that I blame you, as it does look like a spam link. But then, why respond if you think it’s spam. Black Rain refers to the fallout, and this is a movie that was shown at Cannes Film Festival. Read the synopsis at the link or google it, but yes, it has a significance to Hiroshima.
btw, these comments, whether you agree with them or not, ALL have significance to Hiroshima. If you don’t think they do, or if you aren’t moved by what you saw in the museum, then all you have is some tourist-grade snapshots of an old wrecked building. A post like this should generate discussion. If you’re not interested, instead of trashing the commenters, either ignore the posts, or better yet turn off commenting. Taken as a whole, this entry plus your responses to the comments, you look to an outsider like a self-absorbed prat who wants to appear like they care about something p.c. when in fact you couldn’t give a crap.
Rant off.
Can’t remember why i deleted it, if anything it was probably because i thought it was an affiliate link.
“self-absorbed prat who wants to appear like they care about something p.c” …pfffff.
I visited Hiroshima and the Peace Park and the Museum in 2004. I was part of a group that spent six weeks in Japan and this was one of the most monumental stops for me. A couple things I’d like to note:
1. I went on my tour of Japan with several other people, including a Korean friend of mine. The experience I had with him was one that I will always remember. There is a monument in the peace park for all the Korean prisoners that were in Hiroshima and died due to the bomb. I had known Kim a long time and had never seen him cry, but I watched him fall to his knees in front of that monument. “They are helping to make things better with this.” he said over and over. In Korea, military service is mandatory. Therefore, some people who had become prisoners in Japan and died because of it did not even agree with their presence in the country. Japanese/Korean relations are improving because of moves like the monument in Hiroshima.
2. The Japanese people at the park were amazing. I was nervous about being American and traveling in Hiroshima, but my fears were not only unfounded, they were downright ridiculous. We had an older Japanese man come up to us, struggle for words, and then in broken English, finally exclaim, “Thank you for respect…what happened here.” Would we do the same to Vietnamese who visited The Wall? It was an eye opener.
3. Sadoko. We were there in June and the number of beautiful paper cranes surrounding the Sadoko monument, with notes attached and rainbow colors were amazing. All those cranes represented all of the hopes and wishes that so many people had.
Sorry the message is so long, but although I do not want to get into an argument over who did what and what should have happened, Hiroshima is indeed a place that you must visit if you are in Japan.
Sorry to see bomb sites. Completely obliterated!
Back in the spring of 2002 I was in Japan for 3 months. I made my way to Hiroshima and I wasn’t quite expecting myself to be so taken by the park and the museum. While I was there I got these pictures. Highly recommend going to anyone who hasn’t.
http://gallery.jamesmandrews.com/main.php?g2_itemId=8354
My great-grandfather was with the first group of soldiers to land after the bomb hit. He was assigned on a clean-up crew at the time. It was illegal to take pictures of the destruction, but he smuggled out three photographs which show the raw destruction of the aftermath. It shows the horrors of man.
I hold them very dear to me.
I went to the bomb park years ago- one of the main things I wanted to see in Japan. I was disappointed there was not more wreckage like the A-bomb dome to see. The park and museum are tastefully done, and in Japanese terms they are actually quite big and planned with line of sight etc, but compared to similar memorials in other countries- I felt quite let down.
Get into the history though and you’ll find it’s a miracle the A-bomb dome was preserved at all. Like with most of their older buildings, the Japanese (government) wanted to erase all memory of a failed past, tear down the dome, and replace it with the same kind of unplanned convenience store trash-buildings we see everywhere in Tokyo. Modernism! The future! They did that for most all of the other buildings that survived the blast. They’re just not nearly as interested in preserving the past as European countries. Entire bombed cities and genocide camps were left standing in Europe after WWII, as memorials. In Hiroshima there is only the dome.
Ah well.
As to Rin and other people- you reply back peremptorily Neil, but when you’re a popular blog posting about things people care deeply about, you ought to expect this. You don’t have to engage with them, but why not at least respect their thoughts rather than chide them for being ‘off-topic’?
Because showing a few photos of a trip i went on doesn’t mean i want to enter a debate on who was right and who was wrong. Being neither Japanese or American i have no strong feeling either way.
If i post a picture of a fish it doesn’t mean i want to get into a debate on the over fishing of local waterways. If they looked at the context in which i posted the photos, or at least intended too, it was from a photographic / tourist point of view and not one opening a discussion on war.
I expect i will just ignore the comments in the future.
“As to Rin and other people- you reply back peremptorily Neil, but when you’re a popular blog posting about things people care deeply about, you ought to expect this. You don’t have to engage with them, but why not at least respect their thoughts rather than chide them for being ‘off-topic’?”
Agreed,
You have changed over the past year. Your site no longer rewards loyal posters but instead is aimed at Otaku/Pedofreaks and the ilk. Some links in your sidebar are truly “whack” I remember not long ago (last year) when you were getting attacked by most everyone for your take on Japanese woman(?).I remember you visiting the other sites trying to defend your own opinion (which was strange because your view is your own…right?? Now you act like they did. The irony is thick.
I actually don’t get your point Chris. Yes the site has changed, like many sites, for no conscious reason, just been getting more into photography.
I remember getting called racist and sexist over that Amae article and tried to defend myself where that was cited. Now i don’t have the time or inclination to chase my name across the internet. Are you suggesting the people commenting here are doing what i did and telling their side of the story and i’m shutting them down?? It’s hardly the same if that’s the case, they weren’t called out on my post, they chose to go down a road i didn’t want to go down.
Like i said to MJG, i have no problem with opinions, i just didn’t start a discussion on war and who did what to whom, i posted some photos from a trip, and the post should be seen that way and nothing more. Next time i post a few photos on a night out to Yakiniku i don’t expected to get people banging on about the virtues of being vegetarian. Would you like that for one of your BBQ posts??
“Your site no longer rewards loyal posters” … what is it you want from me?
“WTF is it with people wanting to get into debates about this stuff !!!”
#1
What is “this stuff” Neil?? WTF is it with people posting pics then getting their panties bunched when everyone doesn’t say “Hey great pics ___”
#2
I would never assume even in a drunken stooper that a Hiroshima/Pearl harbor post or any other polarizing historical event WOULDN’T stimulate strong opinions? Are you fuckin’ joking Neil???
#3 (was my mistake to mention) but to finish my “cry baby” act…
I started posting here after that Amae problem because it was such a joke to even be claimed. I was happy to see you stand your ground against the sometimes incestuous Japanese blogging community with it’s community networks and carnivals that pat each other on the ass for posting the same shit again and again that someone already posted.
That same fucked up punk ass troupe held your feet to the fire because?? I don’t even know why?? Cuz there fuckin dick heads?? maybe?? Probably. They debate the moralities of having sex with an inflatable doll for fucks sake. (I’d rather debate this “Hiroshima” post anyday.)
“Yes the site has changed, like many sites, for no conscious reason,…getting more into photography”<<Er…O.K.??
You dropped your most comments widget/plugin for “Sankaku complex” ..”Really Cute Asians”
and Danny Choo because your “into” photography???? Neil…NEIL!!
***I never got over the dropping of your plugin, but that’s a personal issue***
You once sent me a private mail thanking me for being a straight talker. This is my opinion.
You have sold your soul to the otakus or your such a camera geek you can’t even “See” the images you take anymore and realize the effects they cause.
I am honestly happy to say more than ..
“She is my favorite so far!!”
or
“Nice pic Neil”
for the first time in a while.
No worries Chris, my original WTF concerns people that, sometimes anonymously, write massive diatribes that seem to me like generic replies to searches they’ve done on the event they want to rant on. Certainly i wasn’t expecting that anyway.
“This stuff” just refers to issues i don’t necessarily want to get into, the usual, politics, religion, race and discussions where people will always differ, often strongly …. not the direction i intend any site i have taking.
I removed myself from the Japansoc scene after that event after being questioned on whether the J-Babe was a legitimate post to feature in their community.
I dropped the widget because at various stages through out the month, often at the beginning the SAME people would pepper 5 posts from the archives to get there name in lights, just pissed me off people abused it.
I have Danny’s link as part of the Otaku.fm feed exchange, i also tried that with Sankaku complex although i get jack shit traffic from them and will get out of that soon. I give and get a lot of traffic from Steve at RCA so we both sport each others feed. I know Lee well and drink with him often ….. Not that i have to explain this to anyone but since you asked.
I remember that email Chris and still stand by it. I just write what i want, what makes me laugh or at times lazily post a picture if i have nothing too say, and seeing it’s my name in the url i guess that’s my prerogative.
Anyway, i appreciate your comments Chris …. it get me thinking on my online direction.
I missed the anonymous angle which started it all. If I wasn’t the poster child for A.D.H.D I woulda caught it. I’m a lifetime reader Neil. Thanks for spending 5 minutes of your life explaining stuff thats none off my f’ing business.
That’s why your cool.
Always like the banter Chris …. i’ll probably chose my words a little more careful next time with regards to “this stuff” etc
i don’t know if this is in your area of experteice but do u think that when the
A-bomb hit Hiroshima and NagaSaki do u think that the japanese civilians
deserved what they got . I say this because when the Japanese bombed
Pearl Harbour if the japanese were smart back then they would have
moved away from Japan because there is no way that the Americans would
have done nothing after Pearl Harbour. I had a huge debate with one of my
classmates about this topic in my grade 10 history class
Thanx for listening
I went to Hiroshima on a rainy morning my first year in Japan, and I have to say – while your pictures are great, photos on a rainy day really capture the sense/mood of the place.
And support the use of the bomb or not (and I do), what happened to individuals in Hiroshima was horrific. That is what the museum conveys so clearly..
I have been to Hiroshima. It was one of the most sobering experiences of my life and now I find myself advocating for the total disarmament of nuclear arms. Thank you so much for this page, I am wholly relieved to find other people who have been able to experience this.