- WASHINGTON (Kyodo News) -
The Smithsonian Institution has received a petition from a group of nearly
200 scholars, writers and others criticizing its plans to exhibit the Enola
Gay, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World War II, without
mentioning Japanese casualties, an institution official said Thursday.
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- The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, which
plans to put the completely reassembled Enola Gay on public display on
Dec 15 when its new facility opens near Washington Dulles International
Airport, will announce its response to the petition Friday, the official
said.
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- The petition urges the museum to change the way of exhibiting
the B-29 Superfortress bomber, saying it is inappropriate to display the
plane only in celebration of American technology without mentioning the
consequences of the bombing, including the number of casualties.
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- Those who signed the petition included Hiroshima Mayor
Tadatoshi Akiba, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Joseph Rotblat, novelist Kurt
Vonnegut and historian Howard Zinn.
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- In 1994, the museum was planning an Enola Gay exhibit
that would focus largely on the destruction and suffering caused by the
1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and on the historical aftermath,
including the Cold War.
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- But in the face of a storm of protest from World War
II veterans' groups and politicians over the alleged excessive emphasis
on the Japanese victims, the planned exhibition was scrapped in January
1995.
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- Later, the fuselage of the Enola Gay and other items
were put on display in an exhibit that made no reference to the damage
caused by the bombing. That exhibition ran from June 1995 to 1998.
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- The Enola Gay dropped atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug
6, 1945. Approximately 140,000 people had died by the end of that year
as a result of the bomb and many others suffered radiation illnesses.
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- www.japantoday.com
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