On the 75th Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, my story for The New Yorker about the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
The New Yorker
The first time I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I carried a notebook and a sense of dread. The mood was as solemn as I expected, but the place was crowded and not very peaceful. Visitors were silently urged to go with the flow, move in step with others and not linger too long.
The displays were impressively well kept—maybe too well kept. There were life-size dioramas of the victims trudging barefoot through ashen sludge, shredded and bloodied; massive models of the city as it was, pinpointing the exact location of ground zero; bent and crushed watches and clocks frozen to the moment—8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945. The feeling that all the carefully curated and eye-catching exhibits sometimes felt like part of a Hiroshima theme park was probably unavoidable.
“A lot of people died instantly,” I wrote, but I was wrong. While trying to soothe burning skin, some died in the river when fireballs swept up the oil-slicked water. Others died years later, stricken by cancer.
Lots of letters were written by Hiroshima mayors, global politicians, and civilians, begging the world and the powers that be to not let it happen again.
I wanted to write that the bombing was unthinkable, or something equally righteous. But, of course, it was very thinkable. It had happened, not once but twice, and could easily happen again. If anything, the museum was there to make us think about that banality.
One object pierced me. I kept circling back to it, leaving and rejoining the flow, nodding politely to the guards as I ducked past: a neatly folded Japanese schoolboy’s uniform—modeled, as they are today, on nineteenth-century European naval dress—had been blown out in quarter-sized patches from the inside, so that sharp spikes of its fabric reached up toward the glass and viewer.
Part of my fascination was personal. I’d been teaching at a few Japanese junior and senior high schools that year where the boys wore the very same jackets to class each day, with their formal high-necked collars and rigid lines projecting a sense of adolescent duty and conformity.
But it was also the one artifact that made me imagine being that specific boy on that specific morning, buttoning up that jacket and walking to school, and what it might feel like to have your body blown apart from within, as if the bomb had detonated inside your chest and bowels.
I was similarly mesmerized when watching the director Linda Hoaglund’s latest documentary film, “Things Left Behind,” which opened in Tokyo last month and in Hiroshima this weekend, to coincide with the sixty-eighth anniversary of the bombing. Ostensibly a chronicle of “ひろしま hiroshima,” an exhibition of forty-eight color prints by the photographer Miyako Ishiuchi, in Vancouver, the film is an urgent reminder of the role of contemplation in evoking feeling from history.
Ishiuchi’s photographs of clothing and personal effects left behind by the dead are naturally lit and dreamlike, plucked from the unconscious, rendered against white backgrounds and fluttering through space and time.
Visitors to the museum confront the photographs as if stunned by kliegs. This is not the Hiroshima of bloodied sculptures, corpse-strewn black-and-white rubble-scapes, mushroom clouds, and denuded domes. It’s colorful and fashionable—but between the folds of disembodied silk blouses and dinner jackets, in the hollow eyes of an abandoned Ichimatsu doll, and between the sleeves of a child’s kimono, something is missing, absent, incomplete.
We want to fill it in.
There is no voiceover narration; the photos are uncaptioned. “I wonder who wore this,” the voice of a visitor says, poring over a man’s jacket. Eyeing a scarred and beaten-up boot, a woman says, “Did it have laces, and what happened to them?”
The power of images can be subverted by proliferation and reach. The mushroom cloud and the skeletal Hiroshima dome are the two most recognizable images of Hiroshima, which remains a profound and endless human tragedy. But who really sees them?
In an oft-quoted passage from his 1985 novel, “White Noise,” Don DeLillo imagined “the most photographed barn in America.” “No one sees the barn,” he writes. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn. We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one.”
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum maintains the bomb’s imagery, often admirably. But 75 years later, the story of Hiroshima, its possible meanings and emotions, are fast becoming dead artifacts, especially in Japan, where the platitudes and memorials are broadcast live once every year, dominating the airwaves with about as much salient impact as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. It’s the most photographed A-bomb site in the world.
“I can’t photograph the past,” Ishiuchi tells a curator from Vancouver in the film. “Only the present. So it’s up to the viewers to bring their own memories to the images.”
“Things Left Behind” records more than just objects. It records stories as objects, all connected to the bomb.
“I developed my approach by photographing my mother’s lingerie,” Ishiuchi tells me from her home in Hiroshima, referring to her series, “Mother’s,” depicting personal artifacts from her deceased parent. “She left it behind after she passed away, [and I discovered] in that process that objects left behind by humans speak to me. Things left behind are eloquent, and I hear them. Things are created for people to use, and they exist for humans. So once their user vanishes, the things should vanish, too. But these personal effects have outlived the persons who used them. The question is: Why?”
Hoaglund’s relationship is both more transcultural and more intimate. Born and raised in Japan as the child of American missionaries, she was startled one day when her Japanese teacher addressed Hiroshima and the atomic bomb in the classroom. Her Japanese classmates stared her down—a tall fourth grader with blond hair—and she never wanted to visit the site.
“I wanted to dig a hole under my desk,” she says now. “Learning that you belong to a country that has blood on its hands. It disfigured my conscience.”
Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the United States.” He divides his time between New York and Tokyo.
Credit: Miyako Ishiuchi.
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