Peace Memorial Park
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- Heiwa-kōen
Lonely Planet review for Peace Memorial Park
From the Atomic Bomb Dome, cross over into Peace Memorial Park , which is dotted with memorials, including the cenotaph (原爆死没者慰霊碑), which contains the names of all the known victims of the bomb. The cenotaph frames the Flame of Peace (平和の灯), which will only be extinguished once the last nuclear weapon on earth has been destroyed, and the Atomic Bomb Dome across the river.
Just north of the road through the park is the Children's Peace Monument (原爆の子の像), inspired by Sadako Sasaki. When Sadako developed leukaemia at 11 years of age in 1955, she decided to fold 1000 paper cranes. In Japan, the crane is the symbol of longevity and happiness, and she was convinced that if she achieved that target she would recover. She died before reaching her goal, but her classmates folded the rest. The story inspired a nationwide spate of paper-crane folding that continues to this day.
Nearby is the Korean Atomic Bomb Memorial (韓国人原爆犠牲者慰霊碑). Many Koreans were shipped over to work as slave labourers during WWII, and Koreans accounted for more than one in 10 of those killed by the atomic bomb.
Traveller reviews for Peace Memorial Park (1)
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August 6, 1945: A date which will live in infamy
colonelplink recommends this,
In retrospect, it becomes more and more difficult to justify the atomic bombing of the people of Hiroshima for any reason. The purported rationale is a thinly-veiled justification for a ghastly experiment. No military gain whatsoever was achieved, in stark opposition to the fatuous claim of President Truman that Hiroshima was a military target. Hiroshima had thus far been spared the conflagrations that laid waste to Yokohama and Tokyo, partially because it added nothing to the Japanese war effort. The justification for such atrocity was apparently implicit in the Manhattan Project to build the bomb, with no evaluation of why it should perhaps not be used on people.
The official myth that atomic bombings of civilians were required to force Japan's capitulation, and supposedly preclude an American invasion, is patently false. United States Secretary of War Henry Stimson had full knowledge of Japan's desire to surrender before August 1945, and the lie that the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender was proven by the terms of the capitulation themselves: Japan was allowed to keep its Emperor, the only condition for surrender its leadership had ever sought.
In this light there can be absolutely no equivocation regarding the criminal nature of the atomic strike on the people of Nagasaki. The United States continued to turn a deaf ear to Japan's pleas for surrender after the bombing of Hiroshima. No material difference in Japan's petition for mercy occurred between the atrocities, further stripping credibility from the official narrative.
In fact, Japan sited the entry of the Soviet Union into the war against them as the sole reason for capitulation. In hindsight, the official story breaks down at each major point: the US neither sought nor accepted unconditional surrender, and Japan capitulated not in response to the atomic bombings but instead because the were menaced by a Soviet declaration of war. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki obliterated cities much more efficiently than Japan had suffrered to that time, but differed more in means than effect. That two cities were razed by the atom when neither was necessary adds credence to the assertion that the US sought to intimidate the USSR by doing so, and to dictate the initial terms of the nuclear age.
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