Hiroshima

After 20 years of being an America, I've never once questioned how proud, or lucky, I am to be from this country. Today was the first day I did. Our field trip today took us to the city of Hiroshima. I don't think I need to go into details about the history of this city. I consider myself very fortunate to visit this city, including the Hiroshima manorial museum. Now I understand that the actions of war are/can be justified by the times, and I'm not here debate about WWII, but visiting the museum guavas a whole new perspective on what actually happened on August 6th, 1945 at 8:15am.
All through out our trip, we've been given a lot of looks and stares, being from outside the country that we are in. But today, we received a lot more…For obvious reason. So the first thing we visited is what's not known as the A-bomb dome. Being only a few miles away from the actually blast, the A-bomb dome is one of the only buildings that still stands. This building is hardly standing on it's on as it almost a pile of rubble. After milling around the city for a while, we found ourselves at the manorial museum. Now I understand the whole idea of propaganda, and different views points, but a lot of the things I learned there were just straight facts. Somethings you could find there are models of the city, before and after the bombing, photos of the destruction, people, and objects, and stories from survivors. I find myself not getting emotional about a lot of things, but I found it impossible to not get choke up most of the trip.
There was one story in particular that really hit home. A photographer, a few days after the bombing, wanted to go into town to photograph the destruction. But once he was in town, the utter chaos and destruction paralyzed him, only allowing him to take five photographs total. He described how people were just wondering the streets aimlessly, with no place to go, or no family, food, or water. I won't go into graphics but you can only imagine the condition of the people who were not instantly killed by the blast.
Over all this experience was life changing. I'm not much a history major, and never knew much about this actual event, but after this trip, it's definitely going to change my the outlook on my life
This photo was a panorama photo taken by a photographer after the bombing. This should give a good comparison to the model photos. Just as a reference point, the bridge on the right of this image, and the T shape bridge on the models was the target for the bomb.