A Visit To Hiroshima

The story of the bombing of the City of Hiroshima is a story that has been told over and over. August 6, 1945 is a watershed in world history that marked the beginning of the end to the Second World War and triggered the race for nuclear superiority, or at least parity, or the so-called Nuclear Age. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped on the City of Nagasaki and a few days later, Japan officially agreed to an unconditional surrender, thus ending hostilities and the Pacific War.

All told, some 140,000 people died in the bombing (the nuclear bomb was code-named Little Boy) of Hiroshima and another 80,000 died in the bombing (this nuclear device was code-named Fat Man) of Nagasaki. Even today, the debate continues whether or not it was necessary to “nuke” the two Japanese cities, as US reports show that in a single day, the fire bombing of Tokyo killed 130,000 people using 1,700 tons of ordinary bombs.

The fate of Hiroshima began when the 393rd Bombardment Squadron of B-29 Superfortresses nicknamed “Enola Gay” piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets of the 509th Composite Group, flew from the island of Tinian in the Marianas together with two other B-29s for the six-hour flight to Japan. The other B-29 carried instrumentation to check the nuclear explosion, while the other plane was laden with photographic equipment to record the historic event.

At exactly 8:15, Little Boy was dropped from an altitude of 32,000 ft. and detonated some 1,900 ft. above the intended target, the Aioi Bridge, missing it by 800 ft. (due to a high crosswind) creating a blast equivalent of around 13 kilotons of TNT. The radius of the total destruction was about 1.6 square kilometers, with resulting fires across 11.4-kilometer radius, destroying about 90 percent of Hiroshima’s infrastructure.

As a World War II history buff, I have read and seen a lot of documentaries of the events on how the United States worked feverishly to acquire the first Atomic bomb. Today, the City of Hiroshima is one of the well-planned cities of Japan, for the simple reason that it was totally flattened by the Atom bomb. But the citizens of Hiroshima kept the ruins of the Exhibition Hall that is now called the Genbaku Dome, which is right below the Hypo Center, where the nuclear bomb exploded.

Going to Hiroshima from Tokyo is a four-hour train ride via the famous Shinkansen Bullet (Nozomi) train that whizzes by at 300 kilometers per hour. Since we only had a day trip with my sister Adela and her husband Yuki Kono, we took the four-hour train ride from Tokyo and stayed in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Center for another four-hours and returning to the Hiroshima train station for another four-hour ride back to Tokyo.

It was drizzling when we got into the main memorial site or the Cenotaph for the A-bomb victims and the Memorial Museum run by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation that displays photographs and artifacts of that catastrophic event. There were many tourists inside the jam-packed museum, but they were all so solemn and eerily quiet, as if they were inside a sacred tomb, not a museum.

Some of the artifacts included were the front stairs of a building that bore the shadow of the person who was seated on it when the blast struck. The person’s remains is embedded on the stair like a dark shadow. Also there are two dioramas, one of Hiroshima before the blast and in the other hall, Hiroshima after the blast, where only a few structures remained standing. Of particular interest is the wristwatch worn by a person that depicted the time of the blast 8:15 a.m.

I prayed my three o’clock prayer for the souls of those who perished in Hiroshima and after my prayer, the rain stopped and a complete rainbow appeared coming from the Genbaku dome. Perhaps it was a sign from God, “No more Hiroshimas!”