Tag Archives: Hiroshima

The Most Morbid Cemeteries on Cemetery Travel

I don’t know if there’s a connection for sure, but the most morbid cemeteries on this blog are also the most often searched for.  Here they are in order of queries:

Week 15: The Capuchin Catacomb of Rome

Antique postcard of the Crypt of the Three Skeletons

Antique postcard of the Crypt of the Three Skeletons

Far and away the most popular post I’ve ever written on Cemetery Travel: Sometime in the 1700s, the bones of 4000 monks were arranged into butterflies, hourglasses, and the Grim Reaper himself in the crypt beneath Rome’s Church of the Immaculate Conception. The various rooms are known as the Crypt of the Skulls or the Crypt of the Pelvises, to help you identify the dominant decorative motif. When in Rome, this should not be missed.

Week #23: Aître Saint Maclou in Rouen, France

The Aître Saint Maclou

The Aître Saint Maclou

I was surprised how popular this little gem is, when it comes to queries on Cemetery Travel. Tucked in behind other buildings — and no longer full of bodies — the Atrium of St. Maclou is the only remaining medieval plague cloister still in existence. When the Black Plague struck Rouen in 1348, it wiped out three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants. To accommodate the dead, a new cemetery was built near the Church of Saint Maclou. Without regard to social standings, all bodies were dumped into the mass grave. When the plague returned in the 16th century, the earlier bodies were exhumed and stored in the surrounding cloister to make room for the new victims. It’s a lovely, peaceful little square — as long as you find the skulls, crossbones, coffins, and spades carved into the woodwork on all the buildings to be cheerful. I suppose it’s no surprise I do. Any day above ground is a good day.

Week #19: The Paris Municipal Ossuary in Paris, France

Cross of Skulls in the Paris Municipal Ossuary.

Cross of Skulls

Six million people, including victims of the French Revolution, were exhumed from the cemeteries of Paris by order of Napoleon. Their bones were transferred to this quarry beneath the city streets.  The doorway to the ossuary greets you with “Arrêtez. C’est ici l’empire de la mort.” The warning turned away Nazis, who never discovered the Resistance fighters and their radio hidden here. I spent one of the best birthdays of my life exploring the corridors full of bones and poetry.

Week #38: the Sedlec Ossuary (the Bone Chapel), Kutna Hora, the Czech Republic

My photo of the bone chalice in Kutna Hora.

My photo of the bone chalice in Kutna Hora.

In 1278, Abbot Heidenreich brought a jar of dirt back from the Holy Land to sanctify this little Cistercian graveyard. It soon became the most popular burying ground in Central Europe. People literally came to Kutna Hora to die. At the close of the 14th century, after the Bohemian brush with the Black Death, the monks exhumed the bones and stored them in their mortuary church, where they lingered until Frantisek Rint rearranged them in the 1860s. The decor includes a spectacular chandelier and a coat of arms, both made of bones. I spent another memorable birthday traveling just to see them.

Week #26: the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, Japan

The Atomic Dome

The Atomic Dome

For my taste, the most morbid cemetery of them all is Ground Zero of the first atomic bomb. There were no bones left to display after most of the victims were vaporized by the blast, but those who were exhumed from the rubble or recovered from the river were cremated and reburied in a 12-foot-high tumulus which contains the remains of 70,000 people. The museum displays gruesome mementos that were all survivors could save of their loved ones. It’s an intense place, where school boys reached out to shake hands with my husband. There aren’t many cemeteries that bring me to tears, but this one did.

Cemeteries of this Week: The Hiroshima Peace Park and the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial

I’m in the field again this week — and trying to blog on the iPad — so here are two of my favorite early Cemeteries of the Week that you may have missed. They seem appropriate, since another anniversary has gone by.

Cemetery of the Week #26: the Hiroshima Peace Park.

Cemetery of the Week #44: the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial.

See you next week!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Waiting

The chapel inside the USS Arizona Memorial

Once the ferry docked, everyone shuffled down the gangplank onto the blindingly white memorial. Despite the bustle, the monument seemed very peaceful. People kept quiet, moved slowly, were relatively polite to each other — but the men didn’t take off their baseball caps. I didn’t feel they were being consciously disrespectful. They just didn’t know any better.

I kept thinking of my visit to Hiroshima, the bookend of America’s involvement in World War II in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor’s shipyard had been an obvious military target. Victims here had been warriors. Even if war remained undeclared in 1941, the men at Pearl Harbor were trained and ready to fight. They expected to be called upon to give their lives for their country, if not as soon as they did. These sailors were betrayed by their government and their commanders — and, to be fair, by the enemy — but their deaths succinctly served the purpose the American government had in mind: to goad an uncommitted public into war.

Hymns I recognized from my childhood played over the speakers while people filed through the memorial. The structure is basically an enclosed bridge that straddles the sunken battleship. The Arizona rests on the harbor bottom, forty feet down. Its brittle, rusty smokestack protrudes from the water.

As I watched, a rainbow slick of oil drifted from a slowly leaking tank. An older gentleman in military uniform volunteered that the oil had been seeping since the ship went down. “Legend claims,” he said, “that the oil will flow until the last survivor dies.”

The veteran guide continued to speak, telling us how the memorial received some of its funding. When Elvis Presley came to Oahu in 1961 to film Blue Hawaii, he asked to be taken to Pearl Harbor. At the time, only a plaque marked the spot. Presley performed a benefit in Honolulu and donated the proceeds to the memorial fund.

I wondered how native Hawaiians feel about the monument in the bay where their ancient kings had hunted sharks. A million and a half people visit the Arizona Memorial each year, tossing coins and flowers into the water. It struck me as odd that the Park Service worried about the effect of lei strings on wildlife, but not sixty years of seeping oil.

I leaned through one of the rectangular openings in the memorial bridge, gazing down into the water. I’m not sure what I wanted to see to make the experience real. The men below had long been dissolved and carried away by the ocean. No fish could brave the contaminated water. Below me sat rusting steel bought by the American public, paid for with American blood. What did it mean?

An older woman leaned out from the next opening. I watched her methodically strip pink dendrobium orchids from a lei. The flowers dropped the short distance from her fingers to bob on the wavelets. Tears washed her cheeks. I felt I was intruding and turned away.

Dazed, I considered how I don’t have any personal connection to WWII. My parents were infants at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing. My grandfathers were too old to enlist. Later in the war, my mother’s father moved the family to Virginia to build warships to replace those lost in Hawaii. My mom was too young to recall much of that. My grandparents, who would have remembered, are gone now.

I wandered into the memorial’s chapel in the room farthest from the hubbub of the dock. An angular framework suggested a modernistic stained glass window, except that the panels were open to the sky and water outside. Bright sunlight only emphasized the gloom in the chapel, highlighting a fraction of the 1177 names on the wall.

Tourists balked at going more than halfway into the shrine. They clustered toward the back of the room, clogging the entrance. I wasn’t sure if that was out of respect or from the same atavistic impulse that keeps people out of the front pew in church. I sidled through the crowd to get a picture without baseball caps in it.

On my way back to the ferry, the veteran guide said that scuba had been so new in 1941 that the rescue effort was abandoned quickly, even though they knew people survived inside the sunken ships. Among the tourists he’d spoken to had been a Navy diver. While the man dived that December morning, he heard someone banging for the longest time. They couldn’t rescue him. The banging came less and less frequently until it eventually stopped.

Even though I hadn’t reached the connection I desired, time had come to return to the tour bus. I kept thinking of the Japanese schoolchildren shaking my husband Mason’s hand in the Peace Museum. I wondered if Japanese visitors found such courtesy here.

Cemetery of the Week #44: the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial

Cemetery of the Week #26: the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

The Atomic Dome

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
c/o Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
1-2 Nakajimama-cho, Naka-ku, Hirosima City 730-0811, Japan
Telephone: +81-82-241-4004
Established: 1952
Number of interments: 70,000 or more
Admission: The park is free to visitors. Admission to the museum is 50 yen for adults, 30 yen for children under 18.
Museum hours: 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. (or until 7 p.m. in August). Admission ends 30 minutes before closing time. Closed: December 29 to January 1.

The Genbaku Domu — the Atomic Dome — caps the ruins of the Industrial Promotion Hall on the shore of the Ota-gawa River: Ground Zero on August 6, 1945, when the Enola Gay dropped the world’s first atomic weapon. The bomb exploded, as hot as the surface of the sun, leveling tens of thousands of buildings instantly. The rubbish was set afire by the burning winds. Only the Industrial Promotion Hall, at the eye of the storm, survived amidst the devastation.

Behind the Atomic Dome, the entry to the Peace Museum winds through a darkened hallway. Photographs in window frames recorded the surrounding destruction. Here and there buildings huddled amidst the rubble, windows gaping and roofs ripped away. In the black-and-white photos, Hiroshima glowed the color of ashes.

In another room, little cases display articles of clothing, still stained with blood 60-some years later. In clipped BBC English, the narrative tape assures that the Germans, Russians, British, Italians, and Japanese had all been developing atomic weapons. Whoever won the race and produced the first nuclear bomb felt they had to drop it before the others could. The narration carefully deflected blame from America.

Hiroshima had been chosen as a target specifically because it was an industrial city with a large population that had escaped the firebombing inflicted on the rest of Japan. Any damage Hiroshima received on August 6, 1945 could be attributed solely to the atom bomb.

On that day, children had been released from school to create fire lanes through town in case America dropped conventional bombs. After the daily American fly-over at 7 a.m., the all-clear siren sounded. Everyone who could be outside was, leading to the staggering loss of life: 140,000 the first day.

Winds generated by the bomb fanned a firestorm that leveled 75% of the buildings between the mountains and the sea. Museum cases held a pair of broken eyeglasses or a dented metal water bottle: sole mementos of children who vanished that day. One of the cases contained fingernail clippings and dried strips of skin, all that a woman had been able to save of her husband.

Outside the museum, the Peace Memorial Park holds a jumble of monuments. A polished granite cenotaph in the shape of a bomb recorded the names of the victims. Millions of paper cranes, folded out of bright origami paper, lay in heaps around it. Nearby stood a statue of Kannon, bodhisattva of mercy. The most shocking sculpture captured an almost fishlike creature, fallen on one side, supported in midair at the shoulder and hip. Its limbs had been reduced to sticks, its features and flesh chiseled away. It looked like nothing so much as a charred corpse.

The simplest monument is a grave. In the center of the park, a grassy mound rises like the barrows on Salisbury Plain. This tumulus holds such victims as could be recovered, pried out of collapsed buildings or hauled, bloated, from the contaminated river.

A plaque said that the barrow contained the ashes of the 70,000 victims. In keeping with Buddhist tradition, they had all been cremated. The mound of ashes stood twelve feet high.

Nearby, a huge deep bell tolls. In Japan, temple bells are upended cups of bronze. They have no clappers. Instead, a baton — sometimes big as a tree trunk — is suspended outside the bell. Anyone can pull the striker back and let it swing forward to sound the bell. In this case, every peal said a prayer for the repose of the dead.

This Saturday, August 6, the city of Hiroshima will hold a Peace Memorial Ceremony with speeches, the laying of wreathes at monuments in the Peace Park, and a moment of silence at 8:15 a.m., the time when the bomb was dropped.  More information is here.

Useful links:

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

Guided Tour of the Peace Park

Why the Peace Park is a World Heritage site

Tourist information

Related posts on Cemetery Travel:

Cemetery of the Week #44: the Arizona Memorial

My visit to the Arizona and thoughts about Hiroshima