The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was a fascinating experience, invoking powerful emotion with an overarching anti nuclear power theme, and placing emphasis on individual lives and experiences. The exhibits affected three of my senses strongly: sight, touch, and sound.
Listening to the audio of poems written by people who were hurt by the atomic bomb made me feel as if I were speaking to them in person. Historical writing can only go so far to describe human suffering. The poems were personal and horrifying, forcing me to the realization that the devastation of Hiroshima was much more extensive than I had ever imagined. One exhibit displayed the iron shutters of the Army Clothing Depot, 2600 meters from the hypocenter. Students who were working there were thrown into the air, and the iron shutters were melted by the heat. Later, the center became a place where the injured came for help.
A poem about the warehouse read “Here’s 50 cent, get this dead body away from my feet. Parents come in to peer at faces of children, Historic chorus of begging for help.” The use of the word chorus emphasizes to me the magnitude of people that were suffering, in unity. The poem feels more real than the photographs do, because the poem makes me see colors and hear screams. The black and white photos are much less personal, they are on the outside looking in. The poem is a raw expression of emotion and pain from the heart.
A second artifact that struck me profoundly was a drawing done in colors of green and blue. One reason it stood out to me was because most of the drawings used warm colors, to represent the actual explosion itself. These were jarring in their own way because all photographs of the devastation are devoid of color. Color is so moving to me because it can say a lot more than words, and reflect the artists intentions abstractly. In the drawing, a green girl is sitting by a blue river. The caption expressed the artists experience verbally: he gave the girl a tomato, but later after giving it to her, he laments that he should have cut it in half, because the girls lips and hands were too damaged to break it herself to get the water from it. The use of blues and greens highlights the sadness and regret of the artist, expressing his experience visually and less concretely.
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