English-language panels feature at radiation exhibition

By Kakumi Kobayashi
HIROSHIMA, Aug. 4 Kyodo - A visitor from Singapore was surprised to see panels with English-language explanations at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, one of them stating ''The atomic bomb was not merely a bigger version of a conventional bomb.''

''I had learned something about the atom bomb, but didn't know much about the effects of radiation,'' said John Tee Hui, 19, on visiting an exhibition called ''The Atomic Bomb: Devastation by Unseen Radiation.''

''Radiation goes through cells...at this stage chromosomes in the cell nucleus are broken...the damaged cells die or, if they survive, usually have genetic abnormalities,'' one illustrated panel says.

In the atomic-bomb attack Aug. 6, 1945, an estimated 140,000 people died in the western Japan city.

Besides the dead, a number of survivors have since developed such diseases as leukemia, believed to have been caused by radiation from the atomic explosion, and have been subject to discrimination.

The atom bomb's most distinctive characteristic ''was the release of harmful radiation, a power no previous weapon has ever possessed,'' another panel says.

The museum states that 1 kilogram of fissioned uranium in the atom bomb killed 140,000 people, while a conventional attack killed 1,359 in Takamatsu, western Japan, using 833,000-kg bombs a month earlier.

''I regard radiation and radioactive materials as the really special thing, rather than the power of the atom bomb,'' visitor Norimi Kawada, 45, said, mentioning the two workers at a Tokaimura uranium-processing plant who were killed in an accident Sept. 30 last year.

A bar graph in the exhibition shows that Hisashi Ouchi, one of the two workers at the Tokaimura plant who died nearly three months later, was exposed to twice as much radiation as the fatal level.

The first ''Godzilla'' film which hit the cinemas in 1954 featured a monster that could blow radiation from its mouth, an episode which deliberately played on the Japanese fear of radiation.

The film was released after 23 crew members of the tuna fishing boat Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon) No. 5 were exposed to radiation during a U.S. nuclear test at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in March that year, one of whom later died apparently due to radiation.

The exhibition began July 19 and will last until Oct. 16.

The museum has held similar exhibitions once or twice a year since 1994. This time, however, curators set up question-and-answer style panels, with English-language explanations, so that children can easily understand the dangers of radiation.

One question says, ''If there was such terrible residual radiation around, why did people enter Hiroshima?'' The answer is, ''People at that time had never heard of an atomic bomb and knew nothing about the danger of residual radiation.''

The curators have added a further explanation -- ''Because of reports from the United States, the Japanese government knew the day after it was dropped that the bomb was atomic, but fearing that the people would lose their will to fight, they kept the disastrous conditions caused by the A-bomb a secret.''

As to why the U.S. dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, the curators say the city's size was appropriate for observing the effects of a weapon that had not yet been used.

''On Aug. 6, reconnaissance planes flew over to check the weather in Hiroshima, Kokura (Kitakyushu) and Nagasaki, and reported clear weather in Hiroshima. At that instant, Hiroshima's fate was sealed,'' another panel says.
==Kyodo

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