Photos That Reveal More About The Past

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Time Stopped

Cloudfront

This is a watch that survived the Hiroshima bombing, and perhaps the only one that is still readable after having its hands blown off. The watch stopped at 8:15am on 6 August 1945, when the bomb dropped on the city. The watch belongs to a survivor Shinji Mikamo, who in 2015 was still living in Hiroshima. It had been given to his grandfather, for this work as a photographer who took portraits of the Emperor. In 1955, the watch was donated to the new Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. In 1989, Shinji Mikamo’s daughter Akiko moved to the US to complete her graduate work in psychology, and she went straight to UN headquarters to visit the watch. The tour guide was excited to show it to her, she said, but by the time they got to the display, the only thing she saw was a label describing the watch. The watch itself was gone. It took the UN four months to report the loss to the media, and to issue a letter of apology to Shinji Mikamo and to Japanese authorities. 31 years later, nobody seems to remember anything about the watch — but some people suspect that it may have been part of a crime ring organized inside the UN. A year and a half before the watch was stolen, a silver coffee urn and two 21-karat gold bottles containing a rare perfume, all of which were a gift to the UN from the Kingdom of Oman, were stolen from a glass case just yards from the Security Council chamber.