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Friday, May 6, 2016

広島平和記念公園 Heiwa Kinen Koen - Where Time Stands Still... Part II

Numbed and shocked after seeing the aftermath of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, we proceeded back to Heiwa Kinen Koen to see the monuments there.


We stopped by at the Cenotaph -  the memorial Cenotaph hoped to reconstruct the ruined Hiroshima as a peaceful city. An ex-professor of Tokyo University, Tange Kenzo, designed the monument and its saddle-shaped roof - symbolic as though protecting nuclear victims from rain... 


The cenotaph carries an epitaph: "Let All The Souls Rest in Peace, For The Error Shall Not Be Repeated". The central stone room carries the list of name of A-bomb victims...


Apparently, in about 3 weeks, President Obama of the United States is expected to visit Hiroshima. The world would be watching whether the President would apologise for the attack...


Moving to the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound...


The mound is a large, grass-covered knoll that contains the ashes of 70,000 unidentified victims of the bomb...


Within the mound lies a vault that contains ashes of roughly 70,000 victims. These were persons whose ashes were unclaimed because the entire family had perished or because they were persons of unknown identity. Every year, Hiroshima City publishes a list of people whose identity has been learned, hoping that relatives will emerge to claim the ashes. Of the 2,432 individual containers of ashes in the vault in 1955, 824 remain unclaimed and continue to rest in this memorial mound...



The Bell of Peace...


Visitors are encouraged to ring the bell...


And now we move on the Genbaku Dome...

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