What are the cancer rates there?
I wonder if they rebuilt that ground zero faster than we are with the WTC site.. Wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Our enemies destroyed two building in 2001 with 3,000 deaths, and achieved nothing.
Not a bad record!
It reads as if he’s disappointed that there isn’t still a big smoking hole in the ground so he can revel in how evil amerikkka is.
Hiroshima is a city, not a shrine and certainly not a mausoleum. People live there, many of whom were deliberately denied the full history of WWII by a culture that still struggles between deserved shame for the war and deserved pride in the phoenix-like rise of Japan afterward. There has been an effort of late to remediate this convenient amnesia. The first time I visited the Peace Museum I was infuriated at the degree to which the war consisted of two bombs and some vague goings-on leading up to it. The last time I visited it, things had changed somewhat.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki did serve to inoculate the world against the incredible destructiveness of nuclear war. Like all inoculations, it fades with time, and it is disturbing to consider what it might take to remind the world now that these weapons are very serious business indeed. That only sounds trite to those who remember. To those who are capable of dismissing the Holocaust as a historical non-event, surely Hiroshima and Nagasaki must make little impression.
The problem with that lies not only in the principals. The U.S. and the Soviet Union did, after all, manage to conduct a world war without using these weapons. The damage has been done in Europe, where the amnesia concerning two destroyed cities half a world away has been hastened by the memories of the damage to their own. For this reason, perhaps, there is less of an impetus to stopping nuclear proliferation in Iran than there ought to be. It will not be a fatal error to either the U.S. or the remnants of the U.S.S.R., who have retained a retaliation capability. It might be for those who have none. And that is a lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that no one seems to wish to talk about.
What did this guy expect?
Hiroshima was never abandoned. It was rebuilt after the war just like every other Japanese city.
I’ve never been there because I find the city’s constant harping on it’s atomic victimhood to be irritating and disingenuous as other cities suffered hugely as well.
The firebombing of East Tokyo left the Sumida and Koto Wards of the city as flat as a pancake for as far as the eye can see in almost any direction, and with a casualty rate the topped the atom bombings.
Nagasaki also suffered, but they are less strident about their losses and have refrained from turning the city into a huge tourist trap — which is what Hiroshima has done.
When I visited Hiroshima a few years ago, I was actually surprised at how limited the damage area was. The bomb exploded above the ground and the shock wave and heat only destroyed buildings in a radius of a few hundred yards. Of course this was a very small bomb by subsequent standards, but I had internalized a much larger model of Hiroshima destruction.
Is there a point to this story?
TOURIST: WHAT HAPPEN?
VISITORS BUREAU EMPLOYEE: SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB.