japanamerica

The Details of Hiroshima 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 year...