Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is dedicated to the victims of the first atomic bomb. The park features a museum and many powerful monuments including the A Bomb Dome.
So lets begin with a few facts vividly illustrated in the table of figures held up by our Tour Guide. I will not repeat the facts here because I hope they are readable in the enlarged photo. I have, however, shown the lady because she is part of the story since her father, who was a military man, was sent to Hiroshima a few hours after the blast. He pulled many bodies of victims out of the river that runs by the ‘A Dome’. As a result mainly of radiation damage from the black rain that fell after the explosion, he suffered three forms of cancer and died some 3 years ago at the age of 86. A special certificate is held in the casket along with the names of all the victims of the bomb that I will show you later.
It was rather difficult to take in the scale of the losses and suffering inflicted as I stood in the mid-day sunshine in the expansive grounds of the Peace Memorial Park with so many trees breaking into leaf but as you move through the park and on into the Museum the full magnitude begins to penetrate your mind along with many questions.
Why? Were the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki justified? Is it a forlorn hope that man will ever give up this most destructive of weapons capable of wiping life off earth forever but which is the earnest wish of the people of Hiroshima and the aim of the Peace Memorial Museum?
I am not going to try to answer those questions here but I will give you some more facts so that you can perhaps form your own opinions as I have.
One issue I did find difficult to come to terms with is the conflict between the desire for world peace and the use of nuclear technology for ‘green’ power generation and the recent problems with the Fukujima (?) nuclear power station as a result of the Tsunami.
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