Hiroshima - girl

I started out by writing a few tasteless jokes about bombs but, actually, I don't think I can do it. A-bombs are probably never funny, like the holocaust. Except sometimes one needs to joke to relieve the enormity of it.

 

On the face of it Hiroshima has recovered amazingly. The city is neat, ordered and new but underneath there are scars. I have no idea if the scars are worn lightly or deeply, if the scars affect the city but not its inhabitants: nothing was obvious from two days in the place. However, the public facade chosen by the city in relation to the bomb is one of defender of peace, which I'm not really sure can ring true. Who isn't for peace (apart from a few crazies)? And who doesn't want fewer a-bombs in the world (again, apart from the crazies)? I think Hiroshima is pretty much preaching to the converted.

 

The a-bomb museum is fantastic, I learned an awful lot and it was only once or twice that I felt facts had been omitted to make Japan look better; the memorial park is both beautiful and peaceful but over 60 memorials to different groups of people who died? A weird shrine to a kid who died of leukaemia whilst trying to make 10,000 origami birds? Weird Christian women wandering around and accosting tourists asking if they're against peace? Isn't it all a little over the top?

 

And then I take off my cynical hat and doff my bleeding heart hat and I remember the pictures and the harrowing personal stories and I feel horrible for ever having been so cynical. Of course the city has a right to grieve, who am I to comment? Jews still grieve, every day, Rwandans still grieve, everyone grieves for their tragedies and if we choose to visit memorials we should accept them as they are, even if a city hit by a nuclear bomb then translates this into trite calls for world peace as well as an end to nuclear proliferation.