THE Japanese city of Hiroshima is obsessed with the word ‘peace’… understandably.

Every time a nuclear test is set off anywhere in the world, the mayor of the city flashes off a letter of protest, the last one being on September 20 to the United States.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum established in 1955 as a monument to “lasting peace” gets equal billing among the institutions that city officials give priority in the rebuilding of the historic town.

In the lobby of the museum are two towers (digital) — one that shows the number of days since the August 6, 1945 devastation of Hiroshima with the world’s first atomic bomb, dropped by the United States, and the other showing the number of days since the last nuclear test was done.

Space is rapidly running out in the exhibition hall of the museum where copies of the protest letters from the Hiroshima mayor to countries conducting nuclear test are kept.

“Our mission is to convey the experience and suffering to the people of the world, not to accuse anyone, but for the abolition of nuclear weapons and realisation of peace,” volunteer Kenichi Harada told the Sunday Observer during a tour of the museum last month.

The dropping of the A-bomb during World War II, ostensibly in retaliation for Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbour, explains this abiding obsession with peace.

The unmistakable trappings of a modern city that Hiroshima is today can scarcely mask the scars of the American bomb.

Photographs taken as early as one hour after the bombing: burnt uniforms worn by some of the school children killed, after they were mobilised for the war; iron shutters bent by the blast; melted bottles; the burnt tricycle of a three-year-old boy who died; a watch that stopped at 8:15 am — the time the bomb struck — and even the silhouette of a woman that was left on the stone steps of a bank, are among the exhibits in the museum that document the destruction caused by the atomic bomb.

The blast killed 140,000 people — 100,000 of them civilians. In fact, Harada said, 2,000 pieces from the ruins are kept at the museum.

Some 280,000 people survived the attack — including those from the nearby city of Nagasaki, which was attacked shortly after Hiroshima. However, many to this day suffer from cancers, leukaemia, diarrhoea, vomiting of blood and other disorders. About 5,000 die every year and their names are added to the memorial in the peace park.

About 1.1 million people visit the museum and tour the peace park every year, many of them Japanese students on field trips, to learn about the atrocities of the war. Australians and Americans are said to be among the main foreigners who flock to the Hiroshima Peace Park and Museum.

The Japanese still harbour memories of the atomic bombing and many go to the peace park just to meditate and remember those who died.

A spokesman for the Hiroshima Peace Museum said there are about 17,000 nuclear warheads in the world, possessed mainly by the United States, Russia, France, China and the United Kingdom. Israel, India and Pakistan also possess nuclear weapons.

“Human beings and nuclear weapons can’t co-exist together,” he said.

In the lobby of the museum, visitors scarcely pass without stopping to read the epitaph to war, through the words of Pope John Paul II, who visited on February 25, 1981:

“War is the work of man; War is the destruction of human life; War is death

To remember the past is to remember the future

To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war

To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace.”

Outside the museum in the memorial peace park burns the ‘Flames of Peace’ — lit in 1964.

“It will burn until the abolition of nuclear weapons from the earth,” said Harada.

Hiroshima, before the bombing, was a flourishing castle town in the Edo period (1603 ú 1868). But after the Meiji Restoration, the Higher School of Education opened, and the city began developing a large concentration of army facilities. At the end of the war, most of Japan’s major cities had been destroyed by US air attacks, but Hiroshima was still intact.

Japanese historians believe that it was then chosen as the site for the atomic bomb attack because the topography of the city was well suited to observe the destructive power of the bomb. It also had a high concentration of troops, military facilities and military factories that had not yet been subject to significant damage.

Today, the tramcar is one of the favourite modes of transportation around Hiroshima, as generations remember the kindness of the tram company in transporting residents free of cost after the war, until the people were able to get their lives back together. The tram resumed operation three days after the bombing.

Hiroshima is now a bubbling city, with ‘big name’ stores offering the finest clothes, electronics, handbags and the like. But at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, young Japanese are being taught that the one commodity that cannot be bought with money is peace.