A-Bomb Survivors to Protest New Exhibit

TOKYO (AP) - Survivors said Monday they will ask the Smithsonian Institution to include figures and photographs of Japanese casualties in a new exhibit of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb.

The Japan Confederation of A-Bomb and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations plans to send a team to Washington on Dec. 11 to deliver a petition, the group said on its Web site.

They will stage a protest outside the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's new Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, where the restored Enola Gay is to be on display from Dec. 15.

"As victims of the A-bombs, we can't bear to have the Enola Gay, which killed thousands of Hiroshima residents, on public display without including details of the destruction it wrought," Terumi Tanaka, the organization's director, was quoted as saying by the Kyodo news agency.

The B-29 bomber, which has been under restoration since 1984, is one of 200 historic aircraft in the new hangar-like museum.

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http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/w-asia/2003/dec/01/120109944.html

I support the use of atomic weapons on Japan, and I think having a display to show thier effects would be a good thing too.

It's a big part of Enola Gay's story and the reason she's been preserved. Its history may not be pretty, but to not tell the whole story about the Hiroshima raid would be revisionist, to say the least...

they wanted to avoid it.

peace

So that's why they left it all out, rather than fight that battle and lose either way by offending one side or the other. (Or possibly both.)

...the truth being told about it. Are there that many elderly freepers out there that oppose the acknowlegement of the victins of Hiroshima?

There are numerous threads on this topic detailing what both sides would probably want disclosed. Since the threads probably brought the servers to their needs, I would hate to regurgitate what has been said many times over. Try searching, you'll find a ton and bpilgrim, I and others will save huge chunks of our lives rearguing this issue.

Who cares what they think, this is history and it should
be on display

Millions of innocents died and suffered horribly(and still are) due to our xenophobic act, and you think these these victims shouldn't be listened to or acknowledged. What, do you also think the Jews shouldn't be part of the Holocaust memorial?

Why must these survivors put a damper on our celebration of mass extermination? Geez! It wasn't personal, after all.