Hull (DD 945) - Naval Cruise Book

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Museum: August 9, 1945 The feeling begins before you enter the building: 1 am an intruder. Silly, but it doesn't go away. The lobby is open, more businesslike than comfortable, with chairs, concession stands, magazine racks and an information booth that doubles as a currency exchange. The elevator, compact and precise, moves upward slowly to the third floor. You step out onto a terrayo floor, polished bright- ly. You notice a few glances from curious Japanese, but other- wise, no special recognition. The third floor of the museum is mostly taken up by photo- graphs, enlargements of pictures taken on the morning and after- noon of August 9, 1945. Each has accompanying text in several languages. Significantly, English is the most prominent. The photographs, in both before and after comparisons, show a city that was alive and vital one moment and destroyed the next. The scenes at first elicit no special reaction: you think perhaps you've become innured to catastrophy through it's relentless reporting. Gradually, though, you become uncomfortable: the sheer number of photographs, showing destruction on a scale previously unimagined, penetrates into your consciousness. They cannot be ignored. You begin to take a closer look at the scenes. You look at the people, what's left of them. Where the third floor is visual, the fourth is predominately physical. There are hundreds of artifacts that attest to the vio- lence of that morning. Pottery which was found for miles from ground zero, has been blistered under it's glaze from the heat. A section of an iron bridge, ornately decorated, shows signs of melting. Where before you could see the carnage, now you can reach out and touch it. The narrow staris leading to the fifth, uppermost floor are not sized for Westerners. You must bend, because the ceiling is so low. The feeling of being an intruder has passed. You notice that school children, who look at you most directly, and adolescents. who look at you most intensely, do not have hatred in their eyes. They do not blame you for what happened in the past. Rather. they seem to be questioning. The fifth floor is given over to the effects radiation had on those who survived the detonation. lt is not a pretty display. By now, thoughts of right and wrong, politics and military need have passed from your mind. You feel, not guilt, but a terrible emptyness: emotionally drained. You hope no other people need die that awful death. lt's bright outside, sort of. Watery sunlight is half-heartedly trying to shine through clouds. Another group of school children pass on their way into the museum, on one of the innumerable field trips they always seem to be taking. You notice that where yesterday you thought of them as Japanese children, you now think of them as children, period. You wonder whether you will be able to classify people as readily again.

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