Today was a bit of a gloomy, typical, rainy season day in Tokyo. With a bit of free time on my hands, I decided to undertake the monumental task of sorting and tagging the close to 30,000 images that are on my back up hard drive (and that is just 2008 and 2009!); of course, during the course of this, I will be drastically reducing that number to, I hope, a third.

Anyway, as I am also making an effort to write more regular blog entries and I happened to be working on January, 2009, I decided to write about my visit to the Imperial War Museum in London in, yes, you guessed it, January.

The reason I put “serendipity” in the title of this entry is because my sister and I had not actually planned to go to the museum. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true: we were planning to go to the museum that day, just not the War Museum. It was probably the third day in a row that we set out to “go to the Tate Modern”. Each of those days we just ended up NOT going to the TM (we did get there eventually); it was not for any particular reason, but just because neither of us is very hung up on sticking rigidly to an itinerary (which is, in itself, a funny statement because it seems to imply that we HAD an itinerary). Needless to say, we travel well together and we both take a pretty relaxed approach to the day.

So, in our attempt to take a less-travelled route to the Tate Modern, we decided on the spur of the moment to go to the Imperial War Museum because we were very nearby. I won’t go into too much detail about the several cups of coffee I’d had beforehand, the lack of public toilets (or ANY toilets for that matter) in London, or how I’ve never been so happy to approach a public building in my life.

I’m sure the War Museum is not that high on a lot of visitor’s lists for London, but, simply put, it should be. I certainly have my biases (I’ve always been interested in history, my grandfather was in the trenches in WWI, and my father served in the Pacific in WWII), but, beyond that, I just think everyone living in the comfort of a war-free zone in 2009 should at least acquaint herself/himself with events that took place in our parents’ or grandparents’ lifetime. These things should never be forgotten and for anyone who does not have access to a first-hand narrative, the War Museum can bring some of it to life and deliver some of those narratives that time might otherwise erase.

For me, it ended up being a very resonant experience. I grew up listening to a lot of stories about WWII. From my mother, I heard about life in the U.K. during the bombings and air raids, and what it was like to go outside in the morning and discover that half a block in your neighbourhood and been blown away; and from my father, I heard stories about life on a ship in the Pacific, arriving in Hong Kong the day after the Japanese had surrendered, etc. In addition, I grew up with, for want of better expression, pseudo-surrogate grandparents who were both Holocaust survivors (an older couple who were very close to my parents when they first emigrated to Canada). At my house, dinner conversation included things like a very heated discussion on whether or not the Americans should have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or whether or not ordinary Germans were complicit in the Holocaust (just for the record, the consensus was NO, NO, and ABSOLUTELY).

What I found at the War Museum was, for example, a life-size WWI trench that you can enter and walk through (it’s dark and has sound effects and is somewhat disorienting at first), a whole display on children during WWII and what it was like for them in terms of daily life (diet, air raids, clothing, etc.), and an exhibit on the origins and development of the Secret Intelligence Service (originally the Secret Service Bureau) including a whole range of early spying devices. There is also a fairly extensive Holocaust Exhibition, but we elected to not visit it that particular day because we were both in the U.K. at Christmas as a means of separating ourselves from grief and loss and it did not seem a good idea at the time. I will, however, make a point of going back the next time I am in London.

As is typical for most war museums, there is a fairly large display of the machinery of war (including a couple of airplanes suspended from the ceiling). I imagine that it is this that attracts many visitors to the museum (aircraft or tank buffs coming to look at the machinery in person), but there really is so much more on offer that it is worth it to go for the better part of a day.

Some photos to give you an idea of the place – next time you have a rainy day in London, check it out:

Atrium and aircraft in the main hall of the Imperial War Museum London

Propoganda poster at the Imperial War Museum

WWI trench simulation Imperial War Museum London