It contained several major components of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber used in the atomic mission that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. Two of the Hiroshima Panels on display portray the death of American prisoners of war and Korean forced laborers in the bombings.This past exhibition, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, told the story of the role of the Enola Gay in securing Japanese surrender. The exhibition shows not only Japanese suffering.
![enola gay exhibit dc enola gay exhibit dc](http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/EnolaGay/Enola19_1522c20.jpg)
“Part of why we’re doing this is because the danger has not really passed, and it’s important that people focus on it again,” he said. He lamented that Americans - including undergraduates he teaches - have become less aware since the end of the Cold War about the devastating impact a nuclear conflict would have. Kuznick said the primary aim of the exhibition is to portray the human suffering caused by the atomic bombings that ushered in an era in which absolute destruction of the planet became possible and “nobody’s future is guaranteed anymore.” “They go right to the heart of people who wish for long-lasting peace and for a ban on nuclear weapons,” she said. Yoshiko Hayakawa, who brought the panels from a gallery outside Tokyo, said it had been difficult to find a venue willing or able to display them in the United States. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum have provided an explanatory account of the bombings with photos, including panoramas of the two leveled cityscapes and images of the victims. In an adjacent room are 25 artifacts collected from the debris - a rosary, a glass fragment removed from the flesh of a casualty, a container of sake, a student’s cap and a student’s shoe.
![enola gay exhibit dc enola gay exhibit dc](https://againstthecurrent.org/files/ATC-56-cover-scaled.jpg)
It includes six pictures on folding screens by the late Iri and Toshi Maruki, a husband-and-wife team whose powerful depictions of nuclear horrors, known as the Hiroshima Panels, are being shown in the U.S. He’s reprising that effort, 20 years later, with a display scheduled to run through Aug. That year, Peter Kuznick, director of American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute, responded to the controversy by staging an exhibition of artifacts the Smithsonian would not.ĭoing so at a private institution, and not a government-funded one, made it less contentious. veterans’ protests that it portrayed the Japanese as victims rather than as aggressors. The 1995 exhibit was scaled back dramatically because of U.S. On the 50th anniversary, controversy surrounded an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. The precise death tolls from the atomic bombings are unknown, but it is believed that about 200,000 people were killed. The American University Museum is showcasing artifacts and art recalling the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: a pocket watch that stopped at 8:15 a.m., when the first atomic bomb dropped a picture of twisted bodies and screaming faces engulfed by the flames the school lunchbox of a girl who disappeared without trace.ĭefenders of the bombings say it eliminated the need for a land invasion of Japan that would have cost many American lives. That has the potential to upset American veterans, especially at a time of intensifying focus on Japan’s reluctance to face up to its militaristic past.
![enola gay exhibit dc enola gay exhibit dc](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/boeing-b-29-de-homosexueel-van-superfortress-enola-9253948.jpg)
![enola gay exhibit dc enola gay exhibit dc](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/200414120630-enola-gay-4.jpg)
WASHINGTON - As the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, a new museum exhibition provides a different perspective on the end of the conflict - one in which Japanese were the victims.