Hiroshima
We’re on a 12 day tour, part of a 12 person group and we have been hurtling through Japan, much like the bullet train that speeds by so quickly you cannot catch it on film. We’ve spent incredible days in Tokyo, with lovely people, the four ladies from Perth, the retired bankers from Wall Street, a tech guy from Rhode Island, a Mic Jagger wannabe in jean jacket from Austin, Texas, to name just a few. From temple and shrine hopping, fish market searching, garden exploring with quick stops to transform our faces onto lattes, squeeze through the teenage haven of Harajuku Takeshita, climb the tower at Scrambled Crossing, zoom onto public transport -over and over again: day hops on subways, trains, gondolas, buses and ferries.
Then we head north to Hakone and Takayama, where we soak in onsens, spring water baths, investigate saki bars and try local bean paste delicacies, chase one another through narrow alley ways; it’s breathless and fast and we feel our feet are always moving, moving, going, going, keeping pace, chatting with our companions, hectic, rarely stopping for a breath: faces, crowds, shops, sometimes a blur except perhaps to notice a trendy lady in louboutins fantastically put together or pop a black egg into our mouths in hopes of a promise of extending our lives seven years. Or maybe noting in a UNESCO preserved site how thatch has been forever transformed into houses and ice cream made from Hida milk is lighter, more delicious than one might have thought possible. This trip is so loaded with culture, different foods, on and offs, early risings, brief discussions. It is a breathless whirlwind of experiences.
Until now.
Now is Hiroshima. And the world falls away so we must pause in respect and horror, for they had no choice but to pause- when Enola Gay dropped the A bomb August 6 at 8 o’clock 1945.
We go to the peace garden and it’s huge and envelops not just us tourists, but all travellers, their total bodies and minds, but above all, their souls. Of course we have read accounts, listened to, been attentive to the plight, the birth of the explosion that would change and corrupt innocence forever, particularly as the recent Oppenheimer film redirected our attention to the creation of the bomb. And we learned again the randomness of life : that Hiroshima was chosen over Kyoto because Secretary of War Harry Stimson and wife had visited the city and were charmed by it, so altering the lives and future generations to come. At least, that is one explanation. Just a simple decision- when the war was all ready won, but a final stand to demonstrate power. A way to pound your breast in triumph?
But to stand at the epicentre of the explosion and imagine the world shaking, crumbling, disappearing to rubble and stone for the ordinary, everyday population who were waking up that morning,en route to the grocery shop, communicating with their neighbours, walking their child to school. As they turned their faces to the blast and because they were thirsty, opened their mouths to the poisoned black rain. So, too, one in our group described the white ash that tumbled down the day of 911 as her eyes froze on the second plane crash into the World Trade centre while people fell. Too terrible. Ironically, black and white ash, both poisonous, both deadly.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum presents burned people, keloded skin, missing limbs, melting wads of flesh, dislocated eyeballs, all manner of desecration of those maimed survivors caught, but who remained alive as collateral damage and evidence in the turmoil. Here records the human nightmares displayed in variations of grey, remnants of once pink healthy flesh. But so too evocatively etched in stone is the residue of one person who was sitting at the entrance of Hiroshima Branch of Sumitomo Bank. It is also known as Human Shadow of Death or simply the Blast Shadow, symbolising forever the ones who were reduced to the merest of shadows, compromised to the faintest of outlines of what was once exuberant life; and the lives of human beings in a city decimated in a second. No pamphlets fell to warn families to escape; or more likely, no desire or thought given to the desecration of crushing, destroying families, traditions.
It’s easy, the Nazis knew, that as well, when there are no specific details, you need not think of details, of individual people, repercussions : a ponytail, laughter, a rocky path strewn with flowers, a single cherry blossom caught in the wind. Here in the commemorative museum, a burnt tricycle speaks for a photographed child who would never stretch her legs to balance precariously on the seat or her proud Poppa who would cheer at his child’s graduation. Only fragments of a toy never to be played with, left to rust in disuse: a testament to the loss of not one but too many, vaporized away that August day.
The photographs in the museum are grey, rubble, devastation, collective agony. The solemnity is only infrequently alleviated by some colourful drawings, made more horrible, by depictions of the horror that juxtaposed these gruelling unbearable artefacts. And the documentation continues around walls, blistered bicycles, melded metals, bits of pottery and everywhere destruction. Recalling again the artifacts of 911 housed in New York’s decimated trade centre.
Outside of the museum walls, in Hiroshima Peace Garden,the immense garden with its monuments, peace bells, flowers, statutes, arches, flames and pathways that remind us life can continue, but most sadly and terribly for me, the story of little Sadako emerges, the young girl who believed that if she made 1000 cranes she would be cured of leukaemia incurred by the blast when she was only two years old.Her friends tell her that the crane, a sacred bird in Japan, lives for a hundred years, and if a sick person folds 1,000 paper cranes, then that person will soon get well.
After hearing the legend, Sadako decided to fold 1,000 cranes in hopes of regaining her health. But of course, she did not. A statute honours her memory: the child cast in stone who holds aloft the framework of the bird that will never fly, just as Sadako Sasaki herself had imagined dreams and hopes that would never be realized except- as a sad sad story like Anne Frank’s: once again, a child unable to fulfill a potential: as an artist? a pioneer of health technologies ? a dreamer ? an aunt? a traveller? Protected under glass are the additional cranes created by her classmates, evoking the plight of a child who desperately wanted to survive. But could not.
Nearby there is another statute recalling “the red bird stories” by Japanese author, Miekichi Suzuki, distinguished author of Meiji and Taisho period and considered “the father of children’s literature” here. Another boy and girl sit listening, quietly, side by side frozen in stone forever. And what of their dreams? Their future?
Our catapulting through the streets of Japan ceases as we wander carefully, contemplatively, through the wide spaces here. There is that eternal flame and stunningly huge red tulips and the peace bell. And a story of the Japanese American artist Noguchi whose design for peace was refused. The rock and roller in our group says it’s the same bell used in AC/DC Back in Black and he pulls back the gong strongly, more interested in the sound , I think, than the association with the past and peace. My husband almost tenderly pulls back the gong and you can hear the tone vibrating through the layers of time and grief, providing voice for those in ashes. My husband remarks at the solemnity of this place and the others, such as Barack Obama, who stood in this hallowed tarnished place, performing the ritual to all those ghosts hovering.
They say within three days trams ran after the blast and work was eventually focused on rebuilding. The human spirit rising to create order and re- establish life as it was known, set right the wrongs, the destruction . One story I follow on the museum walls describes a man caught in the blast who left a makeshift hospital, twisted and wracked with pain, his family dead, his wife soon succumbing and engulfed by his own strong desire to commit suicide. But he does not, and continues, feeling he must continue on in life.
It’s indescribable to come to Hiroshima and wonder about the Hiroshima Prefectoral Commercial Building at the edge of the peace Park by the river Motoyasu the near missed target of the bomb. Designed by a Czech architect in 1915, the building somehow almost withstood the blast and remained upright, not totally destroyed as did the bank building in the nearby market that was untouched somehow by the evasive hungry bomb. The tiniest of miracles and yet they persisted , to endure: even now, a slap against the desire to destroy the city.
And at Himeji, too, the last Samurai Palace that also stood in spite of the bombing of WWII that levelled all around. Strange and magical, isn’t it? And like the man who decided against suicide, they shook, but remained upright, and carried on.
I’m in a tram in Kyoto, back into the hustle of this trip, when a woman besides me enquires of my age. In spite of months of Duolingo, I am useless in the Japanese language but she is able to communicate with me. She asks where I’ve travelled, and I respond, Tokyo, Hakone, Takayama, Kyoto and … “Hiroshima”.There is a second of frisson I experience and her somewhat searing look. Something has happened. Conversation ends but as she’s about to disembark at her stop and with a wane smile she murmurs, “Enjoy.” Is it ironic? Well meant? Did she lose someone dear in the flames ?When the news of Hiroshima finally arrived in Kyoto, did she reach up her arms to her mother for a hug, not understanding the cloud that engulfed her dear one’s face?
What to say about Hiroshima? A place forever associated with the bomb, death and radiation? Maybe the spirit of anime breathes new life into the country, a new generation severing themselves from a world that preceded them, wiping away their parents’ memories to forge a fresh beginning, a world of cartoons, of freshness, I’m pondering, hopeful.
Yet nothing is black or white, deceptively simple. Anime said to have been born with Japonisme in the 19th Century,( See Van Gogh in Arles) but found its flowering in the 70’s. Artists did draw on their own families’ personal experiences such as in Barefoot Gen with the narrative graphic depiction of the impact of the bomb on one single family. And as well, the aftereffects and the long term vestiges of the bombs, some still felt today: children left parentless, having to become adults too early, bereft of parents and grandparents, others permanently disfigured or crippled by radiation, babies’ mutated bodies with encephalopathy, missing, twisted limbs, scars, etc etc. .In anime and manga, I gather radiation has been transformed into extraordinary powers, abilities to fly or assuage doom or harm to others, much like AstroBoy. For these reasons, anime films depict children surviving on their own , alone.
“In essence, what we have seen is that the atomic bomb indeed affected Japan to the point that the works of artists such as Tezuka and later artists inspired by him reflect on the bomb’s effects on families, society and the national psyche. Much like the cycle of life, or the immortal Phoenix in Tezuka’s case, Japan was able to reinvent itself and come back strong as a powerful world player capable of starting anew, but with the idea that mankind must learn from its mistakes and avoid repeating history… The bomb became a particular obsession of Tezuka’s. His films and comics both address themes like coping with grief and the idea that nature, in all its beauty, can be compromised by man’s desire to conquer it…orphaned kids, radiation sickness, a loss of national independence, the destruction of nature – would also influence the genre, giving rise to a unique (and arguably incomparable) form of comics and animated films. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – along with the firebombings of Tokyo – were traumatic experiences for the Japanese people. It’s no surprise that for years, the devastation remained at the forefront of their conscience, and that part of the healing process meant returning to this imagery in literature, in music,and in art. “The Conversation: The deep influence of the A- bomb on anime and manga.” Published August 6, 2015am EDT.Updated August 3, 2020,9:51 am EDT.
There’s so much to absorb. I’m a visitor to this place who only can stand and witness the gong of the peace bell, the evocative reverberating sounds. In my mind the words “ the horror…the horror” run over and over and through my thoughts. Ironically, I think on William Blake’s poem that fills my head,
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.
And Eternity in an hour
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