Tears welled up as I tried to blink them back. My fingers instinctively reached to wipe them away as I struggled to take a deep breath and continued walking through the panels with my audio guide. I heard sniffling around me. Good thing it was dark in there. The exhibits and glass display cabinets were the only items that were illuminated by the spotlights. Good thing it was dark in there so no one could see how emotionally affected some of us were, distraught by the images portraying the ravages of war and mass destruction by nuclear weapons. I grew up learning in history class about Little Boy and Fat Man. They were the two atomic bombs carried by the B-29 bomber planes, and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6 and August 9 in 1945, respectively. I learnt about the Japanese Occupation in Singapore from 1942 to 1945. I have seen accounts shared by people who had experienced and seen the brutal acts by the military police (kenpeitai 憲兵隊), striking bayonets through the bodies of babies. Life was harsh during that period of time until the end of Japanese Occupation, when the Japanese surrendered. It was a painful memory for my grandparents. Through their eyes, the period under the Japanese colonial rule was like a nightmarish scar that they don't even want to talk about since it is history anyway. Japan felt almost like a taboo subject that I didn't know how to bring it up to my grandmother until I had to pluck up my courage to talk to her about my decision to live and work in Japan. As a child, I naively thought that the atomic bombs that brought mass destruction and havoc to the lives of the people at that time saved us from the torture. If not for the atomic bombs, the Japanese Occupation might have continued for an indeterminate period. We were freed from the colonialists, the imperialists then. However, what I knew and understood from the textbooks was the extremely myopic view of the entire situation. What I failed to consider was the loss of innocent human lives, no matter which country they were from. Prior to my trip to Hiroshima, I picked up Ishibumi 碑, a documentary account of the deaths of the 321 students and 4 teachers from the Hiroshima Middle School (released by the Hiroshima Television Corporation) and Black Rain (written by Ibuse Masuji) from the library in Sanda. I hoped to gain a better insight and understanding of all that had happened, from the creation of firebreaks in response to the air raids beginning in 1944 to the period of recovery and restoration after the bombs. It was heart-wrenching going through pages of the memoirs when slim chances of survival gave in to silent deaths as their bodies succumbed to the exhaustion and suffered from the burns. The students who were mobilised for war efforts died a few days after the bomb in the company of their loved ones. It must have been so agonising for their family members. Also, there were parents who never found their children with their locations unknown and the extent of mass destruction and debris too much to bear. Those who survived were plagued with radiation sickness that made living unbearable. Going through the artefacts in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial museum gave me a more holistic understanding of the atomic bombs that fell in Japan. It was sombre coming across sobering scenes of the tattered student soldier uniforms, severely burnt bento boxes, photographs of people suffering from radiation sicknesses, as well as the degree of devastation resulted from the 'mushroom cloud' and the subsequent 'black rain.' My heart sank when I thought about how anyone could even harbour the thought of using nuclear weapons in the first place. It was a terrible, incomprehensible thought put into action. It was unbelievable discovering that the dropping of the bombs in these two cities was planned, strategised in order to "magnify the effects of the blast" based on city size and topography. I stood in front of the Atomic Dome across the riverbank. This structure used to be the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall before the atomic bomb struck Hiroshima city, its hypocenter approximately 160m southeast from the building. Now, the structural remnants of the building stand erect in the heart of Hiroshima, a stark reminder to the entire world about the horrific tragedies of the atomic bomb and a symbol of global peace. Let peace prevail in the world, please.
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