In February, I accompanied my 86-year-old mom to visit her 84-year-old sister in Hiroshima. While they were enjoying a long chat after many years of absence from each other, I alone paid a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum after a couple of decades.
I've been there quite a few times in my life since I was a kid. Every time, I needed a bit of emotional preparation to visit this museum because the entire exhibition was gruesome, and knowing it as a fact made me feel devastated. Still, I wanted to visit there again this time to remind me of it to my heart.
To my surprise, my preparation was not necessary this time. The museum has been drastically reorganized and refined to accommodate any visitors. A curator of the museum explained that the exhibition is not for scaring people with victim wax dolls in an awful state and horrifying photographs. Instead, the exhibition should tell stories about those who were killed by the N-bomb and had ordinary everyday lives before becoming the victims, and one drop of a small bomb has changed their ordinary lives forever.
I know it's not fun to think about wars and bombs but I now know it's one of my missions to talk about Hiroshima when I remembered since I am blessed to hear stories from those who still alive.
About the images:
The small one is called Little Boy which was dropped over the city of Hiroshima and killed over 140 000 people.
A few days later, Fat Man was dropped over Nagasaki and killed over 80 000.
