AO: dromedary
Q: Posse
PAX: 2xT, Punxsy, Das Boot, Deep Dish, Dana, Posse
FNGs: None
COUNT: 6
Today’s workout courtesy of the horrors experienced at the Hiroshima Peace Museum last month (
hpmmuseum.jp/?lang=eng)
– Everyone gets a bottle of water to carry the whole workout.
– The Enola Gay targeted the Aioi Bridge (178 m) because it is shaped like a T from the air.
– Genbaku Dome has a strong resemblance to the globe in front of MRMS.
– Sadako Sasaki folded 1,000 cranes (
www.wikihow.com/Fold-a-Paper-Crane) as she battled leukemia from the radiation poisoning, in the hopes of being healed.
web.archive.org/web/20160410154609/http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/shimin/heiwa/crane.html
– Visualized a 1 km radius. Virtually everything within a 1 km radius of the hypocenter was VAPORIZED.
– A 1 km radius can fit all of Lawson + Briar Crest inside it. It can almost fit Millbridge.
– Temperatures ranged between 5,000 & 7,000 degrees. For reference, lava is ~1,000 degrees.
– Just shy of the surface temperature of the sun.
– Once the mushroom cloud dissipated, thick drops of radioactive black rain began to fall. People were so desperately thirsty that they turned their heads up & drank it. They were being radioactively poisoned from the inside.
– If you were outside & within 1 km of the explosion, not only were you vaporized, but your shadow was scorched into the walls behind you. The most famous one was 260 meters from the hypocenter on the Sumitomo Bank steps.
hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=ItemView&item_id=112&lang=eng
– 140,000 people died by year’s end.
– The mushroom cloud formed about 15 seconds after detonation; bomb had a yield of around 15 kilotons of TNT.
– The blast wave traveled at 380 m/s; which is faster than the speed of sound (~Mach 1.3). You would have felt the blast before you could hear it.
Plank around a kid’s bike (thanks Bratwurst) while this was read:
Nobuo Tetsutani was 36 years old at the time of the atomic bombing.
He was exposed to the bombing 1.5 km from the hypocenter.
Mr. Tetsutani was a member of a civil defense unit.
He was exposed after returning home from his drugstore when the air-raid alert was cleared.
Air-raid warnings were issued the night before the atomic bombing.
“So I spent all night long at the office of the civil defense unit.
The all-clear was sounded at dawn, so I went home for breakfast.
The moment when I had just stepped into the house, there was a bluish-white flash of light.
At nearly the same moment there was a huge bang and the house collapsed.
For a moment I thought a gas pipe or something had exploded, but I never imagined a bomb had gone off.
My house was destroyed, and I seem to have lost consciousness.
3 to 5 minutes must have passed.
When I came to, I found that the house had collapsed and the debris was before me.
I could see a faint light coming in from the east.
I climbed up a pillar and broke through the ceiling to make my way out toward the light.
My 4 year old son, Shinichi, had been riding his tricycle in front of the house.
My wife was watching over him.
My daughters, first-grader Michiko and 1-year-old Yoko, had been playing in a room next to the store.
We could hear their cheerful voices just moments before the explosion.
My wife told me that Michiko and Yoko were still underneath the house, so I knew there was no longer any hope.
She and I left, praying for their forgiveness.
Shinichi was burned so badly that his eyes were barely visible on his swollen face.
He begged, “Give me water, water.”
Back then we had been told that giving water would kill a person with burns, so I said “Water would kill you. I need you to just hang on, please!”
I made him go without water.
Shinichi died that night.
I think it was the next day that I decided to bury Shinichi in the family air-raid shelter.
Michiko & Yoko had burned to death, so we could not face cremating Shinichi.
I put my steel helmet, the one I had worn as a member of the civil defense unit, on Shinichi’s head.
I laid the tricycle he had been riding at his feet and covered him with soil, so he could ride it even after his death.
I couldn’t speak about the bombing at all for nearly 30 years.
I made it a point not to speak of my experience.
After 40 years of the bombing, I decided to dig up Shinichi’s remains & move him to the family gravesite.
All my siblings, including those who were living in Tokyo, came together, and we all dug.
As we dug, we finally came upon the tricycle.
My family dug gently using brushes.
The tricycle appeared first, and then the steel helmet.
I said, “The body wearing the helmet is Shinichi.”
We gently removed the soil to reveal the crushed bones.
The tricycle was donated to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where it has been on display since 1991. hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=DocumentView&document_id=582&lang=eng
COT
“This should never happen to children. Please work to create a peaceful world where children can play to their heart’s content.”
– Nobuo Tetsutani, Shinichi’s father
MOLESKINE
Museums like this, plus concentration camps, serve as a barometer to our individual & collective empathy. When this is no longer gut wrenching, soul scarring, mind shatteringly horrific, we will have lost our humanity. They serve as an unflinching mirror to our capacity for destruction.
