March 7, 2009
So today I went to Hiroshima.
I wasn’t even sure I was going to go, but ultimately decided I would be sorry if I didn’t. Especially after watching Peter Jennings’ Why the Bomb Was Dropped on Hiroshima in class, I felt I had to go.
My father, who was born 7 months after the end of World War II, once said to me at the beginning of my Japanese studies about how he was raised to fear and hate the Japanese, and that he thought it was interesting (to say the least) that both of his children had become engrossed in the culture and studied the language (we even took a family vacation to Japan in 2004). He probably doesn’t remember telling me this, since my fascination with Japan began long ago. His father immigrated to America from Ecuador and served in the Navy during the end of World War II, and he was also who I was thinking about prior to my trip today. I felt I owed it to both of them, my grandfather the veteran, and my father the historian, to go on this trip to Hiroshima.
I’ll admit I was nervous, but Hiroshima Station and the surrounding area looked like every other Japanese city I’d been in. I had been mentally preparing myself, but had let my guard down momentarily prior to getting off the tram at 原爆ドーム前 Genbaku Dome Mae (literally "in front of Genbaku Dome"). As soon as I stepped off, the ruins of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall (now better known as the A-Bomb or Genbaku Dome) completely filled my field of vision. I thought, Ah. This is it. and drew a shuddering breath and stepped closer.
It is haunting to see this blown-out skeleton of a building in the midst of green trees by the riverbank, surrounded by your normal, everyday, modern Japanese buildings and busy streets. Later, in the Peace Memorial Museum, I saw replicas of the area surrounding the Genbaku Dome (which was almost the hypocenter of the explosion) after the bomb was dropped, and with the exception of a small handful of other structures, everything else was completely obliterated, absolutely flattened by the bomb. It is remarkable to me that anything could survive such a powerfully destructive force that could yield no mercy, yet those who survived and the Genbaku Dome stand in defiance of that logic.
Emotionally, I held myself together while walking through the museum and listening to 被爆者 hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) Ms. Mieko Matsubara’s speech, but the phrasing of why Hiroshima decided not to tear down the Genbaku Dome but rather preserve it brought tears to my eyes. I don’t have the exact sentence, but what really struck me was the last word: forever. Hiroshima as a city has decided to keep the Genbaku Dome as it is as a reminder of the horrors of warfare and to promote a message of peace forever. It is a word so lasting, so permanent, juxtaposed with the unrelenting cruelty of the purposeful destruction of human lives, that said to me, Even though we are mortal, even though we inevitably die and our buildings are reduced to rubble, our wish for peace can never be destroyed.
Although this might sound a little strange, I am glad that Hiroshima as a city has been able to take this horrible tragedy and use it in order to promote peace and call for the disarming and destruction of all nuclear weapons. It offers some faint glimmer of hope for the future, even in the face of mankind at its absolute worst.
To which I would like to add, I'm really glad I went back to Hiroshima for a second time. I was pretty traumatized by the Peace Museum, and did not have the emotional energy to really think of fun things I wanted to do in the area. So I was glad when Andy was stopping over there to rendezvous with his mom who has joined him on his biking journey, because I wanted to go back and try and deal with the city as a whole. Also, the city itself is beautiful.
Since the dome is in a central location and also is a stop in the middle of the major tram lines, it's difficult to miss, but I'm glad it's there. I even found myself looking out for it whenever we crossed a bridge in the area. I don't think Hiroshima's experience of being the first city to have the atomic bomb dropped on it should be covered up or ignored, least of all by Americans visiting the city. I won't say that I came to terms with it, because it's not mine to come to terms with, but after spending a few days there, I gradually came to recognize that it's something the city carries, and it does it well. It's intense, but I'm glad it's there. It made me ask myself what I am going to do for this world.
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