Exhibit Goes 50 Years Beyond The Enola Gay

Hiromu Morishita was 13, waiting to help other students build firelanes to diminish the impact of the air raid the stillintact city of Hiroshima knew was coming after long years of war.

And at 8:15 a.m., Aug. 6, 1945, a “heavy rain of fire fell out of the sky at us; it felt as though we had fallen into a large furnace in which a great fire was burning.”

With the mayor of Hiroshima in attendance and with three “Hibakusha” or Atomic Bomb Survivors offering their still vivid memories, The American University opened an exhibition Saturday telling the story of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The exhibit, “Constructing a Peaceful World,” goes beyond the events of the summer of 1945 and describes how the survivors of nuclear attack struggled for the next half century to work toward a future in which nuclear arms might be abolished and war eliminated. It was organized with the help of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

In nearly two hours of speeches, none of the survivors or officials mentioned the controversial display this summer by the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum of the restored fuselage of the Enola Gay, the aircraft from which the Hiroshima bomb was dropped.

The artifacts displayed in this exhibition were of a different nature, the products of the explosion the Enola Gay’s bomb caused: The shadow pattern of leaves burned into a bamboo trunk, a pocket watch stopped at exactly 8:15, a mass of melted roof tiles fused with the tea cups onto which they had crashed.

Interspersed among wall-mounted photographs showing the immensity of the destruction, the severity of the wounds and burns and radiation poisoning, were cases holding a ripped and burned uniform jacket, the scorched and warped head of a statue, lumps of fused coins and nails, glass fragments extracted from the bones of a survivor 33 years later.

Morishita remembered running with a classmate and diving into the river.

“My friend asked, ‘How do I look?” he said. “I looked and the skin on his face was peeled and very much like pieces of rag. I am certain I looked exactly like him.”Another survivor, Senji Yamaguchi, founder and chairman of the Council for Nagasaki A-Bomb Victims, said a half century later the physical and mental scars of the bombing of his city remain.”I saw a person whose eye ball was popped out; I saw a body stabbed with shards of glass; I saw a woman holding a baby with its head cut off,” he said. “There were 210,000 dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 90 percent of them civilians.”

Benjamin Ladner, the university president, said it is hoped the exhibit widens feelings of understanding between the two nations because in a time of tensions over trade disputes.

And Hiroshima Mayor Takashi Hiraoka said the ultimate aim of the people of his city remains staunch after a half century: “To plead for elimination of nuclear weapons and universal world peace.”