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I first went to Hiroshima in the swelter of August, 1993, and every time I rode the
streetcar, I thought at any moment we'd round some corner or cross another bridge and
there would be the A-Bomb Dome, that preserved modern ruin. But we were so busy learning
what it meant to be the volunteer directors of World Friendship Center, we didn't get
to Peace Park and the Museum for many days. But when we first went, we were guided by
a woman whose was a so-called Mobilized Student, in fact, just 800 meters from the
hypocenter. Over 8,000 students were laboring in Hiroshima that day. In the summer
of 1944, as the burden of the ferocious war was turning fully against them, the
Japanese government drafted all students over a certain age. They were sent
to farms and factories to help bear that burden. And in Hiroshima, around 6,000
of them died. Our guide to Peace Park was Michiko Yamaoka. For years, her body was
so twisted, neighborhood children pointed at her shouting, "Monster!" Yamaoka-san
first took us to the point near Shima Hospital above which Little Boy was born. It was
an ordinary city place, but because of its continued meaning, it was also a
place of memory.
At the Hypocenter (I)
Behind a parking garage hauling cars upward
the flowers are really colorful paper
Behind the new hospital
folded into birds that cannot fly
Next to a stone lantern that gives no light
school children make an offering of memory
Under luxuriant camellia leaves
school children
After a brief tour of some of the more than 50 Monuments in Peace Park,
Yamaoka-san took us to the Peace Memorial Museum. She led us around the corner, through
the burning city which was the first scene one encountered, to a circular model of the
ruins. World Friendship Center, where my spouse and I lived and worked, was in that
blackened circle, although the old house survived the blast and raging fires. After
situating myself in that terrible circle, we saw the first series of personal effects;
Nobuko Shoda's clothes, Takashi Sanoue's belt, and the two that drew crowds, Shigeru
Orimen's famous lunchbox and Sakae Teshima's fingernails and skin, saved for his father
who was off in China; they are all from school kids, most of whom were killed by the bomb.
Every since that first reverent arrival to Hiroshima, whenever I visited
the Park, I was impressed with the number of school groups herded along by proper-looking
teachers. They sometimes asked me (they especially approach foreigners) for some peace
statement -a daunting request given the overwhelming context, the sheer number of them
swarming around, and the limitations of language. The students' presence was such a force
for me that they emerge in poem after poem. The Museum estimates that 400,000 to 600,000
students on field trips file past the silent witnesses to what happened at 8:15 in the
morning of August 6, 1945. In fact, many of the artifacts from that day document the
thousands of children in Hiroshima that morning, even though the youngest had been
evacuated to the countryside for fear of air raids.
The lives of many hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bomb), like Yamaoka-san,
are defined
by that one day. She re-lives it over and over by telling her experience, or
kataribe, to
groups or individuals. Many kataribe start similarly, "The morning of August the
6th was
bright and hot. Not a cloud was in the sky." Another hibakusha told me she looked up and
saw something shiny drop from the tail of the plane; now, like Yamaoka-san, Miyoko
Matsubara tells her experience as often as possible. Matsubara-san first toured the United
States with Barbara Reynolds who founded World Friendship Center. (Barbara was so tireless
a peace advocate that she was the first woman named an Honorary Citizen of Hiroshima.)
In all, Matsubara-san made at least seven trips to the US to tell her story. This poem
is for her.
Cosmos
Here you can follow a river
into the mouth of the Buddha,
enter its benevolent darkness
then emerge again at the sea.
The word no is so common
even I recognize its lovely
spiral back through centuries.
Here no can be possessive.
Many are surprised that the word
cosmos means the same thing.
Are these just games with words
or am I saying anything
useful? What can I say
to a twelve-year-old girl
who reaches for the sky?
At the end of her finger,
the size of her thumbnail,
a comma drops
from the belly of a plane,
and for the rest of her life
she says, "No," firmly,
flatly, over and over
to anyone who will listen.
This refusal, of course, refers to nuclear weapons. Some survivors
tell their experience every day in the busy school-excursion months, so their
testimony is recorded in books, movies, poetry, and other media. I'm impressed
by the courage it took to break the silence and tell what they experienced. But
for a long time Hiroshima as a city developed a kind of official story which
used to start with August 6th as if the atomic bomb were more like an earthquake:
no warning, no reason, no context. Hiroshima, the symbol for all atomic evil and
the still-potent threat hanging over our heads, has always been much more complicated.
Before I went there, I never knew how militarized Hiroshima was or how
totally the nation was geared into a war machine. My pilgrimage took me to the museum
on Etajima, a few minutes' ferry ride from the city, where Japan's Naval Academy is.
I walked through the military cemetery on top of Hijiyama which used to be the largest
in Japan. Even the rebuilt castle area downtown was the home of Japan's Imperial Army's
Fifth Division.
Perhaps I was getting jaded, but on a later visit to the Peace Museum,
I observed carefully the three wax figures -which on our first trip, Yamaoka-san couldn't
even look at. Scrutinizing those first few heart-breaking artifacts, I found myself
asking why these kids were in the city that day. When I looked at her blood-stained
blouse, I asked myself why was Nobuko-chan demolishing buildings? And who commanded
other kids to go to the munitions factory, the communications depot, and who answered
the mobilized girl student when she broadcast the first alert that Hiroshima was destroyed?
In his investigation of "Memories of War in Japan and Germany," The
Wages of Guilt, Ian Buruma levels a stinging critique of that one-sided view of the
atomic bomb. To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War.
All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word:
Hiroshima. But
it is more than a symbol of national martyrdom; Hiroshima is a symbol of absolute evil,
often compared to Auschwitz....In at least one novel about Hiroshima, the Japanese and the
Jews are singled out as the prime victims of white racism.
Of course, the Manhattan Project thought it was racing the Nazis, not the
Japanese, and the bombing of Dresden answers the racism argument, but the primacy of
Japanese victimhood still lingers. And it irks the victims of Japanese aggression,
especially veterans and those from Asian nations. One survivor who was instrumental in
developing peace education here said that while August 6th was a day of terror and sorrow
for the people of Hiroshima, we should never forget that it was a day of liberation for
many Asian peoples. Sora-sensei's courage in facing the past, both her own as well as her
nation's, continues to inspire me.
One of our duties as volunteers at World Friendship Center was to host
travelers in our guest rooms, and one guest spoke clearly about her experience looking
into the ruins of the Pacific War. "It's as complicated as I feared it was." To ease the
difficulty of taking in these complications, I'm realizing the necessity of seeing events
in their context. And while the fury over the Smithsonian's display of the Enola Gay in
1995 showed patriotism-gone-dangerous, there is some common ground between Hiroshima and
those vocal veterans.
On June 1, 1994, Hiroshima opened the Peace Memorial Museum's East Wing,
expanding the journey through history from one floor to five. It also expanded the
perspective on the past from a single day -August 6, 1945- to over a hundred years of warfare,
from Japan-as-victim to a more complicated mixture of aggressor and victim, and from an
appeal for peace that focused only on nuclear weapons to a broader elimination of war.
Mr. Buruma never saw this part of the museum.
One panel shows this expansion of vision clearly; it reads, "But we must never
forget that nuclear weapons are the fruits of war. Japan, too, with colonization and wars of
aggression, inflicted incalculable and irreversible harm on the peoples of many countries. We
must reflect on war and the causes of war and not just nuclear weapons."
In the time I lived in Japan, two high-level Japanese Cabinet Ministers were
forced from their posts because of comments about Japan's war history. Mr. Nagano claimed the
Rape of Nanking -which was reported in world new at the time- was a "fabrication," while Mr.
Sakurai said Japan's colonization produced many benefits for those nations. Before the Museum
expansion, such comments had no answer from official Hiroshima, but now the school kids get
quite an education. Still, the complexities can be overwhelming.
The Night Café
after Van Gogh
Others drink until their heads
knock the tabletop;
I'm ruining myself
counting red. The lines
in the points of my eyes,
poppies wagging
their heads in the fields,
a frame limiting
a perfect Japanese print.
The doves' amber eyes
do not count,
so when they fly off
I begin again.
And when they land
on a bridge in Hiroshima
that's enough of red.
Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Museum makes it clear that the entire nation was in
a state of war, and when countries go down that path, people lose a piece of their humanity.
This is why, after a while, I started feeling like being against nuclear weapons is like
being again famine -who is for it? Even those who advocate nuclear weapons don't want them,
but feel they are needed or justified. In war, we lose -or refuse to exercise- that ability
to see others as human beings. Visitors filing through the Museum see the lantern parade
in Hiroshima celebrating the fall of Nanking. The placard explains that many thousands of
civilians were killed when that Chinese city fell. Visitors also see a photo of Korean
workers erecting a dam, workers forced to come to Japan from their annexed homeland.
At another point, the museum informs visitors that Asian nations know the war history
very well and that by studying Asian textbooks, Japanese can learn how they are perceived
even today.
This is the legacy of war. No matter what weapon is used, the discrimination
and hatred is the same. And in order to wage war, nations must restrict freedoms. The
individual slowly becomes a part in a machine, and those parts that resist or refuse are
tossed aside. Or maybe those defective parts need to be re-ground so they do fit. Soon,
people surrender their freedoms willingly. We saw this shift happen with the approach of
the Gulf War, as public opinion in the U. S. turned like a switch and suddenly conversations
became evaluations. It was even more dramatic, swift, and official after September 11, 2001.
Questions were not tolerated. "Once we decide to go in," people said, "we should do it right.
Not like in Vietnam." It was subtle, sure, unlike Japan or Germany during World War II, but
it is along the same continuum. Image the abuses of freedoms needed to continue feeding the
war beast if it lasts 10 years or more.
At the Fiftieth Anniversaries --of the atomic bombings, of Okinawa, of the death
camps, and all the wretchedness humanity dished up in World War II --we crossed a threshold.
We passed from the realm of memory, personal and communal experience recalled regardless of
will, into the realm of history, decisions to choose and order that experience and interpret
its meaning. You can see this tension most clearly in the controversy over the Smithsonian.
Just as those who survived Nanking or Auschwitz, of course, are outraged when people claim
it did not happen, those who survived those wretched battles don't take kindly to having
their suffering omitted. We must get to the point where we are all outraged enough to prevent
more suffering rather than allow one to justify or motivate more.
As for Hiroshima, Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature,
claimed in his Hiroshima Notes that "while the realities of the Auschwitz holocaust perpetrated
against the Jews is well known around the world, the Hiroshima experience is not so well or
widely known, even though the scope of the misery in Hiroshima far exceeds that of Auschwitz."
I am shocked that someone as intelligent, as moral, as Mr. Oe would rank
misery in such a way. This only serves to isolate one extreme event from another, which may
be how the witnesses feel, but it actually cuts them off from others who suffer, and it even
puts them on a strange pedestal: survivors of the "worst misery" in history. We must make
bonds of our common suffering, bonds stronger than nation, religion, or the myth of race.
Further, I am also a bit surprised at Mr. Oe's analysis because, as one of our guests pointed
out, "no one's going around denying that Hiroshima ever happened." There was a recent scandal
in Japan because a fairly reputable magazine printed a long article claiming Auschwitz was a
fabrication. No, Hiroshima is not denied. It faces a much more difficult task: some say their
suffering is real, but justified. This argument quickly plunges into a slippery historical
battle of wits, measuring one atrocity against another in order to bolster the unspoken
assumption, what Jim Wallis calls "the big lie" behind every war. "The big lie behind all
murder, from the random street killing to the efficient ovens of Auschwitz, to the even
more efficient hydrogen bomb, is that the victims deserve to die." Samuel Owener in his
book The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe claims that one simple
trait separated those who saved from those who did not: rescuers saw people outside their
own family or group as human beings like themselves.
Origami
Folded by an old woman, silver bird
what do you know? Your paper body
is slippery. You give the light back.
At the flash she dropped like a rag.
A single day; a single bird. The day
that repeats itself with each crease.
The hours stretch out like crows' wings.
Samuel said he wanted to come here
to help people forget the past. My eyes burn
with the day's unrelenting length.
My life is brief and my sight short.
No wonder she keeps turning paper
in her creased but unburned hands.
This is my second poem about Izawa-san, who was 28 and a kindergarten teacher
when the bomb exploded over her city. She has folded an unimaginable number of paper cranes;
she visited World Friendship Center one day shortly after we arrived with a lea of pink, red
and orange cranes. On the tag in the strand, she had a message: "With the wish for the
complete abolition of all nuclear weapons and a prayer for world peace." But when we asked
her what affect the bomb had on her life, she said it didn't have any. Yet, she goes on
folding, wishing, praying. Her humble message is sincere and important. We with whom she
entrusts it must realize that the simplicity of opposing nuclear weapons must confront
the fears and hatreds -often based on their own suffering- that cause some to justify their
use and their continued production.
Having justified Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the end of the war, many didn't
realize how those events also began the Nuclear Age, and with it came those powerful weapons
born in the minds of human beings. With their tests came disease and death in a household of
suffering.
The Crying Fish
1954: Tuna caught by the Daigo Fukuryu Maru had
already been brought to market, but were thrown away after radiation from a hydrogen bomb
test at Bikini was detected. They made such a noise reacting to the detector they were
called "crying fish."
Darkness to them
was not darkness.
And light was not light.
How terrible and sharp
this sun is. If you taste
their feathered lungs
you will understand why ice
is dry as dust and you’ll be able
to breathe them both.
If you eat their eyeballs
you’ll see with the clarity of salt water.
As we swim through light
they swim through sorrow.
Carole Gallagher came to Hiroshima in August of 1994 and exhibited some of
the photos from her excellent book, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War. She spent
ten years interviewing atomic veterans, people living downwind of the Nevada Test Site, and
others affected by this deadly preparation for atomic Armageddon. And the results are a
punch in the gut: the portraits are often tender while the interviews seethe. The suffering
is palpable, but the government's lies are so sinister because they are cloaked in patriotism
and its accompanying sick fear of the enemy, who is denied their humanity. The struggle of
the people to oppose this process is ennobling to all of us who read.
Eventually, I arrived at that point, again, where I can see the atomic bomb
as the evil that it truly is. I never thought I would think any other way, but the evil of
the war itself grew in my consciousness; the perverted mode of thinking that justifies any
means for the ends seeped into me. This is why the presence of the swarms of school kids,
often in their blue uniforms -visual echoes of military outfits- is so central to my experience
here in Hiroshima. Any militarist or nationalist can take time-honored values like
"family," "loyalty," "courage," and "faith" and direct them toward brutality, a process
seen so clearly in Japan during the war. Unfortunately, Japan is not the only example.
It is wrong for any nation to wage war -especially to use or threaten to use weapons that
are indiscriminate, all-consuming, and inhumane. It is a crime against humanity, and to
consider it okay in some circumstances shows how true Pope John Paul II was when he said
we need a "moral about face."
Albert Einstein said that "The unleashing power of the atom has changed
everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
We shall require a substantially new mode of thinking if [humanity] is to survive."
Shortly after arriving in Hiroshima, one of the most eloquent voices and deepest thinkers
about the post-Hiroshima human condition, Ichiro Moritaki, died. I never met him, but his
flame of white hair and rock-steady position in front of the Memorial Cenotaph were famous.
After each atomic bomb test in any place in the world and by any nation, at noon, he sat for
an hour in protest. He was 92 years old when he did this the last time, in Hiroshima's beating
July heat, 1993. Moritaki-sensei was a teacher during the war. On August 6, 1945, a
glass-shard entered his eye, blinding him. He spent a full six months in the hospital.
"This is a most, most important time in my life," he said in an interview with Robert
Del Tredici in 1984, "because I was thinking and thinking about modern civilization.
Modern civilization -material or scientific civilization- has begotten terrible things
like the atomic bomb. If we go on in the same direction, mankind will perish."
Splitting A Dense Element
IN MEMORIAM-Ichiro Moritaki
One eye was a flash in the sky.
The other waits for thunder.
A burden to listen to,
an hour of silence
is another dense element.
One eye is for the children:
a slit burned closed.
The other is also for them:
an ancient cave-dwelling.
This concrete arch
is a poor heritage.
It offers the souls
little comfort, little protection.
A burden to look at,
a man sitting alone
cannot be ignored.
"Can you stop it by sitting?"
One eye was split.
The other watches for a reaction.
Maybe with the START Treaties, the end of the not-so-cold war between East and
West, and the rise of baffling local wars, even amidst the edgy threat of terrorism, people have
lost that sense of impending nuclear Armageddon of the 1980s. Or maybe that anxiety is transferred
to the environment. Or maybe we're growing more psychically numb about all these matters. For the
hibakusha, this warning is the purpose of their living. Our mode of thinking will lead us to our
own doom, not because we have the means, but the means have shown so clearly the faults in our
civilization. What we need is a moral about face, a turn toward a deep recognition of our common
humanity. To achieve this, we will need something far stronger than politics.
Moritaki-sensei: "I criticized modern civilization as a civilization of power. If
we are to continue to live, we must take another direction, and that is a civilization of love.
A civilization of agape. At that time, I reflected on the eternal teachers, Buddha, Christ,
Confucius; all of them denied the principle of power and emphasized the principle of love."
© Edward A. Dougherty
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