Everyone Should Go
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Tokyo—today is our wedding anniversary (thirty-three never-dull years), which also happens to be the 8th anniversary of our nomadic life. Yes, we began this epic adventure on our twenty-fifth anniversary. Lee does an annual recap of our wandering; you can read this year’s at roseninstitute.com/nomad (and it has pretty pictures, because he is the photographer in this crew).
Everyone Should Go
On August 6th, 1945, an American B-29 dropped the bomb known as Little Boy on the city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a different flight crew dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Six days after that, Japan surrendered, and the Second World War was over, leaving in its wake a world forever changed.
The United States had jumped directly into the nuclear age, dragging with us the entire world, whether they wanted it or not.
Obviously, Hiroshima has recovered and rebuilt in the almost-eighty years since. The G7 meeting was held there just a few weeks ago; Lee and I arrived in the city only a couple of days after the meeting ended. The boulevards and gardens and souvenir shops were still looking shiny and spiffy from their pre-meeting glow-up. Merch was abundant—I bought a red bean bun that had “G7” stamped on top.
One thing that didn’t get the ‘fresh and new’ treatment, though, was the iconic (infamous?) dome in the Peace Park. You’ve probably seen photos—the blast blew out everything but the ribs, and now it’s preserved to commemorate that day.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is intense and depressing and sad, and you should go. Everyone should go.
Of all the intense and depressing and sad museums I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot), this is the one I feel most strongly should be required viewing for all humans.
To this day, historians—including some Japanese historians—debate whether or not the bomb actually resulted in fewer deaths, because it hastened the end of the war (as it was meant to do). Did it, in that one moment of utter destruction, save more lives than it destroyed?
I have no idea.
What I know is that it was a complicated decision, made at a complicated moment, in a complicated situation. That’s how life works. That’s how the world works. Complicated is hard—I know, I get it. It’s easier to ignore the complicated stuff—the hard feelings, the complex conundrums, the impossible choices. Everything would be easier, every day, if the world was black and white and simple. Winners vs losers, good people vs bad people, friends vs enemies.
Part of our responsibility as humans is to really face and understand nuance and complexity. It’s hard to look straight at difficult decisions, to consider all sides of a choice that has no good outcomes. It’s uncomfortable, even painful—we shy away from nuance. But nothing is ever simple.
The route through the museum in Hiroshima takes you through a series of photographs of the city before the bomb was dropped. Then you see a large scale model of the city, about the size of a dining table for twenty, perhaps. You can pick out the little tiny spot in the middle where the museum is now located. You see the labyrinth of streets, the tiny little houses, each representing a whole family. You see the river, the old bridge crossing it at the same spot where you crossed over just an hour ago, on the new bridge. Just as your eyes are picking out the landmarks you recognize, a simulation of the bomb, in real-time, flattens the model.
Flattens it. Completely. In two seconds. The city is there, in front of you, and there’s a flash of light, and a ripple spreads across the model, and the city is just gone. Vaporized.
It was stunning. So stunning, in fact, that I went back the next day, just before closing. I paid to enter the museum a second time, so that I could watch that simulation again, without the crowd, in an effort to process what I had seen.
And then I moved slowly, looking at photos of children who died that day. I made myself look into their faces and read their stories.
I visited the remains of the concentration camp at Dachau when I was 19. I felt strongly, even then, that if we really mean Never Again, we—each of us—have to look directly at what happened, and face, head on, our human capacity for destruction. As humans, we bear collective responsibility for our species—for each other.
That war did finally end, but the difficult, complicated, impossible dilemmas of international relations are as fraught as ever and far more dangerous.
Complicated problems can be uncomfortable, but we’re doomed if we pretend the answers are simple. No one is coming to save us.
Take care,
Lisa
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