President Obama visited Hiroshima, Japan, on Friday, making a brief but historic visit that he hopes will bolster an important ally and remind the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons.
He visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and signed the guest book. He also laid a wreath at the cenotaph in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which commemorates the victims of the atomic bomb the United States dropped there in 1945.
Shortly after entering the Peace Memorial Museum here, visitors encounter a brutally graphic display of three wax figures set in an apocalyptic landscape, a re-creation of the day the bomb fell.
The display shows a woman and two children stumbling in the middle of brick rubble. Their clothes are in tatters, their hair matted by ashes and their limbs covered in blood and burns, shredded skin dripping from their fingertips.
When the city of Hiroshima began renovating the museum three years ago, the local government announced its decision to remove the mannequins. Instead of an artistic re-creation, the curators wanted to place more emphasis on real artifacts or photos collected from victims, their families or historical archives.
A group of residents have protested the decision, circulating petitions to retain the wax figures, arguing that they insert a needed dose of horror that helps remind visitors that a nuclear weapon must never be used again.
But Kazumi Mizumoto, deputy director of the Hiroshima Peace Institute and a member of the renovation committee for the museum, said the wax figures would be removed once the renovation was complete.
On Thursday, as groups of schoolchildren streamed through the museum on field trips, the mannequins evoked a range of reactions. “Is that real?” gasped one sixth grader, 12, from Toyonaka in Osaka Prefecture, as he walked up to the display. Another sixth grader, from Izumo in Shimane Prefecture, resolutely held a green folder in front of his face so that he would not have to see. “It’s too scary,” he said.
Kazuoki Namikawa, a teacher from Yamaguchi Prefecture who was accompanying a sixth-grade class, acknowledged that some children might be traumatized by the wax figures and the vivid depiction of bomb injuries. But, he said, perhaps that was part of the point.
“We are the only country which experienced an atomic bomb, so to teach the importance of peace, there is this place,” Mr. Namikawa said. With the wax figures, he said “the impact is very deep.”