Must Go to Place in Japan, The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Monday, April 11, 2016

Must Go to Place in Japan, The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

There are many reasons you should travel Hiroshima in Japan. Miyajima Island has a beautiful trii at Itsukushima Shrine. You can enjoy delicious Hiroshima style okonomiyaki and momiji manju, which is local sweets of Hiroshima. In addition to that, I would like you to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum some day. It's not the place you will enjoy, but you will learn what happened in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima. It was huge news for both in the U.S. and Japan.

Some articles talked about that he didn't apologize, but the truth is that most Japanese people think it doesn't matter if the U.S. apologizes or not. The most important thing is that people should know how terrible the atomic bomb was, and it should never be used in future. I sometimes read articles about the atomic bombs and WWII in English, and I find some unbelievable comments. It goes, "Drop another atomic bomb again." I know those comments don't really mean it, but it really breaks my heart. They have never known that how people died by the atomic bombs. When I was at a grade school in Japan, all students learned about WWII every summer. Students watched movies about WWII in a classroom and went to a school gym to see many photos of the result of atomic bombs displayed. The photos were actually horrifying. People's skins were burned and things were melted. Some people became ash in seconds, and the whole city was gone. Those movie and photos scared me a lot. I remember that I was trying hard not to cry at that time. Indeed, some children were crying and couldn't look at the photos. I strongly believe that a war is never right. It should never happen again.

When I was 13, I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum as a field trip. The Peace Memorial Park was really beautiful and peaceful many decades after WWII, but its museum was very sad and emotional.

According to NBC News, Kerry also described a museum there as "stunning" and "gut-wrenching" and said it was a reminder to all in public life to work for a world free of nuclear weapons. Kerry wrote in the visitor's book, “Everyone in the world should see and feel the power of the memorials.”