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Comment by frozenbit | Hacker News Reader

It’s been posted on HN before, but if this topic interests you, John Hersey’s famous reporting on the aftermath at Hiroshima (entitled “Hiroshima”) is worth reading. It’s essentially a short book, but the accounts laid out in the story make the impersonal tragedy into something that’s tangible. It should be required reading.

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In a similar vein, going to Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial Museum there was a life changing experience for me.

There is currently an additional special exhibition on there as well, containing first-hand accounts from survivors who were high school students at the time.

Just went there two weeks ago. The main exhibit was horrifying. The special exhibit you mention was even worse if that's possible. These kids just living their lives as written in their diaries and then the unthinkable happened to them.

Yes. A lot of students were on outside working crews creating firebreaks, so the survivor accounts tended to be along the lines of "I was sick that day, I never saw my friends again".

Would you mind talking about it a little? What you saw, how you felt, how you feel now—anything.

Like with the Holocaust memorial and the Berlin Wall, these are things that have deeply affected me to see in person and comprehend what they represent, but I came away from a better person for it in the long-term—even if it broke me mentally at the time to be there and face it.

Nuclear weapons really disturb me on a whole other level I've yet to really comprehend, especially the idea that countries continue to build them. I worry about my own mental well-being with that, but feel that it's important to understand these things better and get beyond words on a printed page or digitised celluloid. Yes, these things are scary, we should be scared of them, they do scare me, just like the still-raw history of Berlin scared me. I think we run from the idea of feeling fear too often and choose to ignore it. People forget what these things do. People forget what people do to other people. We shouldn't be allowed to forget.

I visited Hiroshima about ten years ago while on vacation with my wife. The museum presents accounts of the day and artifacts from the bombing very plainly, which by their very nature means it's horrifying. I've always had some "normal" level of fear of nuclear war. The first decade of my life was in the UK during the last decade of the cold war, so I think that planted that seed. I don't think visiting Hiroshima increased that fear about nuclear weapons though. My overwhelming memory of the day is just deep sadness that we have the capacity to do something like that to each other. I do also remember feeling some glimmer of hope coming out of the museum as there was information about the current anti-nuclear weapons movement and, apart from the Genbaku Dome, you would never know that Hiroshima was the site of a nuclear bombing based on the city today. So maybe it's possible to recover from anything.

Before that visit I felt that I could detach myself emotionally from the reality of an event like that and make justifications for the continued existence of nuclear weapons for "bigger picture" reason. Now I find it impossible to make those kind of arguments. So I think I grew up a little that day and became more empathetic to others at an individual level.

From one Brit to another, this is exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you. I know I need to do this now.

Not GP but what made me empathize the most was they didn't just have like architectural artifacts with the damage. They had written things like letters or journals. They had extremely personal accounts, some with photos, of what happened to people. The stories of extremely young children (8 years old or younger) trying to care for their parents before the parents succumbed to injuries. Kids becoming orphaned. Parents being unable to find their children. The physical results, like people's nails growing extremely oddly and totally black, skin no longer looking healthy in obscene ways.

It was honestly a bit like _being there_. Everything they have at that museum, if you have even a relatively vivid imagination, easily placed me in my mind's eye, like I was in Hiroshima for the aftermath.

Even with all this said, I'm still mostly speechless about everything I saw and read there.

I really recommend if you ever get to Japan to make some time to visit Hiroshima. Not even just for the memorial. It's actually quite a beautiful city.

Thanks so much for this. This is now definitely where I want to visit next.

Just don't go to the Yasukuni shrine.

(Why not? It's Japan's memorial to its war dead. All of them. Including the convicted war criminals. Visiting the shrine is seen, especially by Chinese and Koreans, as an endorsement of the war crimes. Every now and again a Japanese celebrity gets "cancelled" over this.)

Hiroshima is available here as a PDF: https://learn.k20center.ou.edu/lesson/503/John%20Hersey%20Hi...

There’s also a second reporting, from years later, on what some of the survivors have become.

It tells about the lifelong vaguely defined health impacts those exposed to the bomb had to live with, and how they tried to rebuild their lives after having truly lost everything and, for some of them, everyone.

Also barefoot gen.

...and just in case you're tempted to take sides, don't forget about Pearl Harbor nor the Nanjing Massacre either.

I've taken sides.

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