P K Niaz
Hiroshima, Japan: The entrance of the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima has an electronic display panel that shows the number of days since the dropping of the first nuclear bomb as well as the number of days since the last nuclear test was carried out.
When I reached there the number showing on the display panel was 121 days since the last nuclear test was conducted without naming which country had carried out the test.
The US government had announced that it conducted the test in Nevada in February as part of a drive to modernise the country’s nuclear weapons. It was the first test since December 2017, and the second under the Trump administration.
People in Hiroshima reacted to the latest nuclear test by organising a protest March near the Peace Memorial Museum in the last week of May.
When President Trump will be landing in the Japanese city of Osaka later this week for the G-20 summit, people here want him to visit the atomic bombing site.
“The leaders who repeatedly speak about war should find time to visit this museum and other sites related to the nuclear bombing which will give them an insight about the deadliest images of the war,” said Takashi Takigawa, a school teacher, while speaking to The Peninsula. Takigawa came here with a group of students for a study tour to create awareness against war.
Barack Obama was the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima, where the United States dropped an atomic bomb on August 6, 1945, to force Japan’s surrender in World War II. Even though Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter had visited the site in 1964 and 1984 respectively, both visits were not during their stay at the White House. Carter made his visit long after he had left the White House, while Richard Nixon went to this historic place four years before he won the presidential election.
The main building of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which reopened in April after a two-year renovation, has a new section featuring foreign victims of the atomic bomb, for the first time. According to the museum description, hundreds of Koreans, Chinese and Taiwanese were in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing.
The exhibit also explains that students from Southeast Asia and China, German and Russian residents and the US prisoners of war, also died in the bombing. The museum is a touching tribute to the nuclear bomb victims and a strong reminder to the rest of the world. The photographs, the personal belongings of victims, items affected by the heat and radiation of the bomb and the artworks displayed there move the visitors to tears.
Tokyo, which is hosting next year’s Olympics, announced that the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which is a world heritage site, will be included in the Olympics torch relay route.
The 121-day relay will start on 2020 March 26 from the J-Village, in Fukushima Prefecture and will conclude on July 24, when the Olympic flame is carried into Tokyo’s new National Stadium.
