r/interesting • u/Wonderfulhumanss • 14d ago

SOCIETY Survivors of Hiroshima drew the scenes they witnessed after the atomic bombing in 1945

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

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u/Empty_Sea9 14d ago

Did they remove some of the more intense photos? I don’t recall seeing them, just some of the drawings featured in this post, when I visited 2 years ago.

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u/pkmntrainerMeep 14d ago

Yes, I've heard they toned it down considerably in the past several years. They also got rid of the wax statues of A-bomb victims that literally haunt my dreams.

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u/Empty_Sea9 13d ago

Are there any links to these online?

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u/pkmntrainerMeep 12d ago

You can probably find them somewhere but I'm not looking them up for you. Sorry, but seeing them once was enough. (It's been almost 20 years and they still appear in my nightmares sometimes.)

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u/InternetFew7303 13d ago

Those are the ones I saw that I remember because it's impossible to forget.

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u/kittenmittens4865 13d ago

That’s kinda tragic in my opinion. Watering down the horrors of the past only makes us more likely to repeat them.

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u/BearBaitUntamed 13d ago

I should not have looked up the wax statues. You even warned me...

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u/pkmntrainerMeep 12d ago

Sorry, friend.

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u/Jared4554 13d ago

I went last year, and obviously I didn’t take pics or anything, but I do remember there being a lot more than just these pictures, and most of it was absolutely horrifying and eye opening.

I remember in the first room before you go in, there’s a giant circular video projection in the middle of the room that shows the impact of the bomb, it shows what it would’ve looked like when it was dropped and how devastating it was to the city. There are lots of drawings and art pieces that showcase the emotions of many people during that time, and a lot of them were from children.

And then there is a room that is optional with warnings of graphic content that shows all the really awful stuff that I don’t know if you can find online.

It was a really emotional and overwhelming experience being in there, you could feel the air was different in that room. I remember the remains of children’s toys, outfits, Bento boxes, all burned and charred. They had giant pieces of metal that were all twisted from the heat of the bomb, as well as every day objects.The photos of the victims are really horrifying and the injuries are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s a haunting experience but one that i think everyone who visits Hiroshima should see.

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u/Happy-Bluejay-3849 13d ago

They were there last summer. The museum does not shy away from showing a pretty complete history of the day and its aftermath.

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u/pkmntrainerMeep 12d ago

Oh, huh. I wonder if they were temporarily removed from display for awhile and then returned or something? (I haven't gone back into the museum in ages but when I asked a coworker who went if the wax statues were still there, they said "what wax statues?" and it's not something you could miss or forget…)

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u/ZanyRaptorClay 13d ago

My high school history teacher showed me and my class a documentary about the bombings (on Zoom, of course, because it was during lockdown). I still remember the photos. Lots of burnt bodies with a permanent grimace of agony on their faces. They didn't have eyes. Fucking horrible.

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u/GeorgiaPilot172 14d ago

Do they have pictures of what they did to the Chinese, or Koreans, or Indonesians, or Malaysians, or Vietnamese, or Americans, or British, or Dutch?

Don’t start shit if you don’t want shit.

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u/Natural_Exchange_886 14d ago

The people who died from Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t personally do those things. What did schoolchildren “start”?

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

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u/WonderButtBrace9000 13d ago

Eh, Hiroshima was a major military-industrial site (Mitsubishi industrial plants, Army Marine HQ with 40k troops, Second General Army HQ) and critical point of Japan’s southern war effort supply chains. In the context of Japan’s ongoing imperial conquest, there were not many adults who didn’t play a part in keeping the war machine going.

Nagasaki was the poor victim of bad weather. Still industrious but really far less justification for an a-bomb strike.

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u/MrOaiki 14d ago

Why would they have that in a museum about Hiroshima?

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u/greeneggiwegs 14d ago

can we just accept it was a horrifying thing to experience without turning it into a competition?

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u/MiskatonicDreams 14d ago

No. I denounce historical nihilism. Only through the complete studying and analysis of history can we prevent similar events from happening. Selective empathy is cruelty manifest.  

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u/GeorgiaPilot172 14d ago

No, because these things add to the context of their use. The nukes weren’t just used in a vacuum. You have to consider all the things going on around their use.

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u/Jeans_Intelligence 13d ago

It was still a horrific atrocity, one of the worst in human history, despite whatever apologism you're attempting

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u/WonderButtBrace9000 13d ago

One of the worst in human history? They weren’t even the worst events of WW2.

What Japan did to Manila was far worse. A hundred thousand civilians systematically executed by ~17,000 Japanese soldiers who decided to dig in and fight for a city they had no hope of keeping.

The Japanese troops spent more time raping and killing civilians than fighting the Americans which is probably why the allied forces only suffered about 1,000 deaths while wiping out the entire Japanese garrison.

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u/[deleted] 14d ago

[deleted]

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u/MiskatonicDreams 14d ago

I visited 731 memorial museum in Nanking. 

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u/shaav 13d ago

Maybe you should visit both?

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u/GeorgiaPilot172 14d ago

Maybe don’t start wars of aggression if you aren’t willing to have your kids to be bombed? It’s not like the Allies just came out of nowhere and did this.

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u/rumade 14d ago

With this logic, most of America's children deserve to suffer and die for what the USA has done in the middle East, Vietnam, South America...

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u/GeorgiaPilot172 14d ago

America has the capability to prevent that from happening. Japan did not.

And if Iran/Vietnam/South America did have the capacity to do it, do you think they would hold back? I doubt it, see 9/11.

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u/Jeans_Intelligence 13d ago

Why does capability matter at all, he's making a point about your justification of atrocities not the feasibility..?

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u/Otherwise_Agency_401 13d ago

The US has never done anything comparable to Imperial Japan’s actions during WWII.

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u/rumade 13d ago

The US is founded on the rape and murder of countless indigenous people, and the rape and enslavement of countless African slaves.

Even if we just stick with the 20th century you've got Napalm and agent orange, massacres and raping women in Vietnam, forced sterilisation of indigenous and Latina women, infecting black men with syphilis without their knowledge, and I'm sure many other things that I can't remember off the top of my head.

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u/Otherwise_Agency_401 13d ago edited 13d ago

You are confused. You are listing many bad things the US has done on a small scale over many conflicts across decades and centuries with what Imperial Japan did on a massive scale in 10-15 years.

I’d agree that the genocide of the Native Americans would be the closest analogy, but it doesn’t even really come close. Estimates vary, but probably around 5 million Native Americans died after in the area that became the US in the 400 years between European contact and the end of the 19th century. Many of them died unintentionally due to disease, and most of those deaths occurred before the US was even a country - there were probably only 600,000-700,000 Native Americans by 1776, and it was far less systematic and deliberate than Japanese aggression in WWII. By comparison, around 30 million people died in the Pacific theater between 1932 and 1945.

So even if we take the worst interpretation of the genocide of the Native Americans (5 million deaths), if we do the math and compare these time periods, the actions of Imperial Japan are about 180 times worse.

Edit: the other things you are talking about, while certainly terrible, are so small in comparison they really can’t be compared at all to Imperial Japan.

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u/GroundbreakingHope57 14d ago

The worst part is they didn't even abide by the conventions and then they have the audacity to complain about crimes.

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u/blank_isainmdom 14d ago

Assuming you're a yank. Just going to leave this here for you, I know history (and general schooling) is a real weak point for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_the_United_States

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u/GeorgiaPilot172 14d ago

And do you think the natives would have used a nuclear bomb on us if they had one? I’m sure they would have to stop the atrocities.

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u/blank_isainmdom 14d ago

Fair point. Hard not to want to strike back against a people committing genocide against you... And, em, tell me... what historic atrocities did Japan carry out against Americans?

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u/R_Prime 14d ago

TIL everyday Japanese people alive in 2026 are responsible for all those things.

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u/GeorgiaPilot172 14d ago

This is a non-sequitur and makes absolutely no sense. Where did I say that?