It was an odd coincidence. E-mail from a professor I had never heard of reached me at my hotel in Kyoto earlier this month on the day I visited Hiroshima.

It asked if I would sign a petition protesting the Smithsonian's upcoming display of the Enola Gay, the plane that on Aug. 6, 1945, dropped the first atomic bomb on an enemy. Gen. John Dailey, director of the National Air and Space Museum, has rejected offering any discussion of the historical context or consequences of the bombing. He claims that the plane will be exhibited only as a "magnificent technological achievement."

I was in Kyoto to give some lectures about the United States. I am not an expert on Japan, nor had I ever visited the country. But I wanted to visit Hiroshima. The Peace Museum there explains what happened the day that this technological achievement became part of world history. It shows in words, photographs and artifacts what remained of Hiroshima near the hypocenter of the bomb's explosion. It tells about the 70,000 men, women and children dead in the first hours, and the more than 200,000 dead over time.

What the museum by itself does not convey, but visiting it does, is that a bustling metropolis thrives around the Peace Museum. Peace Park, lined with memorials to different groups of victims, is not only a place for pilgrims and tourists but for locals who stroll, jog or walk their dogs. The baseball stadium is a 10-minute walk. My 22-story hotel was 10 minutes in the other direction, just across from Starbucks. Hiroshima has a tragic and fateful meaning to the world but to the people who live here, it is home. It is home for the men and women who take the trolley or bus to work each day, and for the teenagers on their bikes and with their cell phones who crowd the shopping arcades at night.

It is hard for a visitor not to look up at the sky and know that this place was also a home in August 1945, just before it became a hell.

The city of Hiroshima, knowing how in an instant the Enola Gay transformed the everyday into the infernal, took on as its mission ridding the world of nuclear weapons. At the Peace Museum, two walls of letters of protest from successive mayors of the city are on display, each letter prompted by a nuclear weapons test by the United States or the Soviet Union or one of the other nuclear powers.

There is no self-pity in Hiroshima, only conscientious witness. There is a sense of obligation to history (something Japanese textbook writers might learn from when they minimize the brutality of Japan's aggression in Asia from 1931-45). A city has forged a cosmopolitan role and a global consciousness as it reflects upon its own past.

So I signed the petition, responding to an e-mail that I might have quickly deleted had I not been in Hiroshima. How could I not sign? How could I not wish that my own country demonstrate some of the vision and some of the hope for a better world that Hiroshima has shown? How could I not want my national museum to fulfill its educational task?

Technology can be magnificent but, let's be honest, the Enola Gay has no interest to anyone apart from Aug. 6, 1945. It ushered in the nuclear age. It helped close World War II. It was the opening act in the U.S.-Soviet contest whose name, "the Cold War," seems an ironic joke when we recall that one reason for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to end the war quickly enough to prevent Russia's taking a role in post-war Japan.

Japan is no wiser about the globe than we are, although the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have a view of it like no other. But the American story needs to be told, too, by a serious commitment to educate new generations. If we have faith in our children, and faith that the truth can instruct them, then they may be able to improve upon what people do with magnificent technological achievements.

Hiroshima's mayor, Tadatoshi Akiba, recently wrote to the Air and Space Museum. Akiba spent his senior year at Elmwood Park High School in suburban Chicago, returned to the United States for a doctorate at M.I.T. and lived here for many years. So there is knowledge of and warmth toward our nation when he writes: "The Air and Space Museum is filled with exciting and valuable displays like the Wright brothers' first airplane. Children visit your museum and go home filled with dreams of becoming a pilot or an astronaut. It would be extremely regrettable if your wonderful museum chooses to present the restored Enola Gay . . . as simply another exciting step in the technology of flight. . . . I urge you . . . to find the courage and wisdom to make sure that the Enola Gay exhibition is accompanied by a description of the tragic consequences of nuclear weapons, including the simple truth that a nuclear war could annihilate the entire human race."

Interested readers can find the full letter on line. You will learn more there than the Smithsonian dares teach.

Michael Schudson is professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego and author of "The Good Citizen: A History of American Public Life" and "The Power of News."

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

###