Hiroshima Trip

Today I tagged along with a class trip to the Hiroshima Peace Museum. I've been wanting to go since last semester.
I woke up really early to catch the Shinkansen with the rest of the class. After about a two hour trip, we arrived in Hiroshima.
The public transportation system is a little different than Osaka. In addition to subways and buses, there are trolleys everywhere! In fact, we took a trolley to get to the Peace Museum. I found this short trip to be a little chilling, to be honest. In my class Popular Culture and Media in Japan, we watched Barefoot Gen, an anime movie version of the bombing of Hiroshima. As we crossed over a few bridges, the view from the trolley looked just how they were represented in the anime pre-bombing.
We got out of the trolley at the Genbaku ("atom-bomb") Dome stop. The Genbaku Dome is the ruins of the former Hiroshima Prefecture Industrial Promotion Hall. The atom bomb detonated about 600 meters directly above the building. The structure has been preserved to this day to show the destruction of the bomb.After passing by the Genbaku Dome, the class walked through the Peace Park to the museum. The Peace Museum is a modern-style building. On the pathway and grass in front of the museum, there are peace demonstrations and memorial services every year.

The museum is equal parts informative and depressing. The first section of the museum, in the building on the left, discusses the history of Hiroshima, the events leading up to the bomb, and the aftermath. There are photographs, overviews of the city, and video footage. Everything is dealt with in a very textbook-like manner.
The next part, on the second floor, is devoted to the science behind the atom bombs and the even more destructive H-bombs. This installation urges world peace, declaring the phrase "No More Hiroshimas."

All this was incredibly moving. But when the class entered the long hall (shown in the above photo), I learned why we were told to bring tissues.
This was where the museum got personal.
The entrance to the hall was lined with crumbling brick walls, the holes and bare windows allowing us to see through to murals displaying the black sky and flattened landscape right after the bomb was dropped. We turned the corner, where we saw a diorama of a mother and child, staggering through the rubble, burnt so severely that their skin was sloughing off.Survivors of the bomb often describe it as Hell on Earth. I always took that in a literal sense, but now I can see how it can be applied figuratively. Japanese ghosts (yuurei) are often portrayed with their hands limply dangling from their wrists, their arms angled at their sides, and exaggerated fingers. They also usually have unkempt hair and battered and/or emaciated forms.

See the similarities? I certainly do.

After this jarring diorama, the hall was filled with the shredded, burned, and bloodied uniforms of schoolchildren, donated by parents and grandparents. Graphic pictures of burn victims covered the walls, and there were even some preserved samples of the resulting keratoid scars. We saw stairs where a vaporized woman's shadow was burned into the stone. We were allowed to touch roof tiles and glass bottles that had been fused together because of the intense heat. We saw Sadako's 1,000 paper cranes.

Somehow, through all this, I managed not to cry. After the exhibit, the hall empties out into a room along the windowed wall of the museum, where people can recuperate. I wandered over to the museum guestbook, under a photograph of several hundred already-filled books, and thumbed through it. That's where I lost it.
In various different languages: no more Hiroshimas.