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Hiroshima Peace Museum examines holding A-bomb exhibition at Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor in 2020

by Kanako Noda, Staff Writer

On September 21, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, located in Naka Ward, announced that it has begun examining the possibility of holding an atomic bomb exhibition at the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in the summer of 2020, the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Pearl Harbor is where the Pacific War broke out. The museum is also planning to hold an exhibition at the Los Alamos Historical Museum in New Mexico in the summer of 2019. Los Alamos was the center of development for the atomic bombs. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is considering holding atomic bomb exhibitions at four locations in the United States between 2019 and 2020 for the purpose of appealing to the public of the nuclear superpower about the inhumane nature of nuclear weapons.

The 2019 to 2020 atomic bomb exhibitions scheduled to be held in the United States were made public in a media interview in the east building of the Peace Memorial Museum by the museum director, Kenji Shiga. He visited the United States from September 6 to 19 to strengthen the Hiroshima museum’s ties with museums overseas. He met with curatorial staff at the Arizona Memorial and the museum director at the Los Alamos Historical Museum and received favorable responses to his exhibition proposals. The museums will now begin discussing the exhibition period and the items and materials to be exhibited. In addition to the museums mentioned above, the Hiroshima museum is planning to hold exhibitions at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in the fall of 2019 and at the University of Hawaii at Hilo in the fall of 2020.

The USS Arizona Memorial lies above the battleship USS Arizona, which sank during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. If the atomic bomb exhibition takes place, it would be the first exhibition to be held at the museum.

When the Smithsonian Institution Air and Space Museum, located in Washington, D.C., planned to hold an A-bomb exhibition in 1995, it was eventually called off after U.S. veterans voiced opposition. When asked about the responses from the museums to which he made proposals for the exhibitions, Mr. Shiga said that he felt that they all showed a positive attitude toward facing history squarely and understanding the past from various viewpoints. He also talked about the impact that former U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Hiroshima in May 2016 had on the museum.

Since 1995, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been holding “Hiroshima-Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Exhibitions,” which convey the catastrophic devastation caused by the atomic bombs through personal belongings of the A-bomb victims and accounts made by A-bomb survivors. To date, these exhibitions have been held 53 times overseas, in 46 cities in 17 countries. In the United States, 18 exhibitions have been held in 12 cities.

Keywords

USS Arizona Memorial
A memorial that commemorates the crew of the battleship USS Arizona, which was sunk during the Imperial Japanese Army attack on Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, in December 1941. The memorial was erected just above the sunken battleship and was opened in 1962. Oil, which still leaks from the ship into the water, is referred to as “the tears of the Arizona.” As the symbol of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the USS Arizona Memorial is visited by many people to mourn the ship’s lost crew members.

(Originally published on September 22, 2017)

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