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Peace Memorial Hall special exhibition
Lantern Floating: Memorial for the A-bombing at Hiroshima Ichijo
－Records from a girls' high school that suffered the greatest sacrifice－
Period: January 1 (Tue.) ～ December 29 (Sun.), 2019
Place: Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims B1F
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The Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims organizes a special exhibition on a set theme each year, and displays A-bomb testimonies, to communicate the actual damage from the bombing.
The special exhibition for 2019 is "Lantern Floating: Memorial for the A-bombing at Hiroshima Ichijo", and has been put together based on recorded memoirs.
As the war situation worsened, classes for students in present-day junior high school and older were cancelled from April 1945, and students were mobilized to food production and munitions factories.
In the bombing of Hiroshima, around 7,200 students lost their lives.
In particular, the students who were involved in building demolition work outside near the hypocenter suffered great damage.
Most of the 1st and 2nd year students from Hiroshima Daiichi Girls' High School (commonly known as Ichijo, today called Hiroshima Municipal Funairi High School) had been mobilized, and 666 of them died in the bombing, making this the school that suffered the greatest loss.
In August 1957, on the 12th anniversary of their deaths, "Lantern Floating", a collection of essays in memory of the A-bomb victims, was published by the bereaved families.
The collection is a detailed record of the passage of time from the mobilization of students through to the end of the war, and includes memoirs of the bereaved families as well as posthumous writings of the deceased students.
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Bottom right is "Lantern Floating" published in 1957.
Sequels and reprints were also published, and it has been read by generations as a
precious record.
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In the triple-screen theater at the Peace Memorial Hall, visitors can view a film version of the memoirs, mainly made of memoirs writing by the parents of four female students who lost their lives in the bombing.
There are also some words by Zoroku Miyagawa, who was the school principal at the time, and information about Masao Mori, a teacher who died protecting students who had fled into a fire cistern, with the cistern still covering him when he died.
Also on display are precious testimonial videos of the late Fumiko Sakamoto, who continued to speak about the A-bomb death of her daughter, who was a student at Ichijo, to students visiting Hiroshima on school trips; and Miyako Yano, who was a 2nd-year student at Ichijo who escaped death from the bombing because she had been unwell on the day and not at school.
The words of those who experienced the bombing communicate their earnest wish for peace.
On display at the venue are 28 memoirs, as well as the first published edition of Lantern Floating, the school uniforms of Ichijo students, kept as mementos in their memory, and more.
The videos that are part of the special exhibition, including those that were produced in the past, can be viewed in the Library and on the Memorial Hall's homepage>>.
The videos can also be loaned out as DVDs for peace study materials.
Please contact the Memorial Hall if you would like to borrow a video.
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| (Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims) |
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