Hiroshima: 'Let all souls here rest in peace,

for we shall not repeat the evil'

by Alan Pagliere, August 1984

Thirty-nine years ago today, an entire city was leveled by one "explosive device." At 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, a United States bomber released an atomic bomb over a city that had purposely been spared any previous attacks so the destruction could be more easily assessed. The bomb fell to an altitude of 2,000 feet where it exploded. As a result of that single blast, 200,000 people died, 70,000 quickly, the rest slowly. (other information about the Hiroshima bombing can be found here)

Two years ago, I visited Hiroshima, a place which has affected me more than any other. I wrote what follows in my journal.

May 6, 1982, a.m.: So, I'm on my way to Hiroshima to "blow my mind" to pieces, going to the Peace Park and Museum and try to deal with the subsequent mental and emotional fallout. I'm going because I feel it's a pilgrimage to a modern Mecca all people should make. Somehow, however, I don't fee quite prepared for it.

May 6, 1982, p.m.: Hiroshima. Did I ever think I'd really be here? Met Asakawa-san, an old acquaintance, at the station. He showed me around the Radiation Effects Research Foundation first, where he works. They do research there on blood protein mutations in bomb-survivors and their children (now in their twenties and thirties). The statistics show much higher rates of cancer and leukemia in these people than in the general population. Then he took me to the Peace Museum and Park.

The memory of this place is burned into me: from the description of the bomb's blast, the fireball, the instant bursting into flame of anything combustible within a two-mile radius, to the shadow of the man burned into the stone steps here, to the skeleton of the "A-Bomb Dome" (Genbaku-Doumu) one of the few concrete and steel buildings of the time, a building with a dome only a few feet from the hypocenter or ground-zero, which they have left just as it was that day to remind us.... To think that the place I'm now sitting was once, only 37 years ago, flattened, smoldering, radioactive.

Later, Asakawa-san took me to see Shukkei-en, a beautiful and peaceful garden, originally constructed in 1620, with trees, flowers, a small stone bridge over a lovely, clear pond. Because it was raining the garden was particularly colorful and calm. I saw pictures of it taken just after the bomb: charred sticks surrounding a dark pond, a pooling of the "black rain" that fell for days after the firestorm that engulfed the city had lifted the radioactive shards and ashes of homes, trees, bodies and the subsequent erratic weather patterns had dropped them again.

Then to Asakawa-san's home for a wonderful dinner with him, his wife and two children. As we sat around the low table, eating, drinking sake, we talked. I spoke about the destruction, the guilt, the anger it evokes. Asakawa-san spoke about the reconstruction.

The reconstruction. After the fire, which took whatever the initial blast did not level, died down days later, people from all the nearby villages and cities came to help - to clean up, to burn and bury the dead, to build new bridges, roads.... Within days they'd built a market, with buying and selling of food; within two months, roads, a handful of buildings and even the start of the Peace Park.

Just as the A-Bomb Dome stands as it was, as a reminder of that day, Hiroshima rebuilt, stands as a monument. The entire city, with all its people, trees, homes, streetcars, buses, shopping centers, is a monument. As home of the Peace Park - with memorials, statues and gifts from all over the world and the Museum with its specimens of ripped I-beams, human bones and bricks melted together, watches with hands frozen 8:15 a.m., pictures of people with burn patterns left by the fireball's flash, the glass fragments which still today are being expelled from the survivors' bodies by the body's natural healing process - the entire city is a living monument to the future, to the present peril we face, and to the natural healing process of the human animal. We can rebuild from wherever we find ourselves. Asakawa-san said, "When you think about Hiroshima, don't feel guilty or be angry or afraid. Just don't forget."

May 7, 1982: Went to to the Museum again today, this time to the Reconstruction Museum, which many people don't get to, where I also saw "the" movie (banned in the U.S. for years) showing footage of the city and survivors of the bomb. It showed some pretty gruesome details. I left and walked through Peace Park with tears in my eyes but feeling quite uplifted by the story of the reconstruction told in still pictures in this museum's exhibits.

When we think of death today, can we imagine 70,000 people dying at once? Each person's life is a history of friends, family, places, emotions, thoughts. Multiply one death by 200,000 and you come up with nothing less than a reluctance, or more likely, an inability to grasp the loss. But the Hiroshima bomb was minuscule in its power (a building at ground-zero still stands somewhat). The average nuclear bomb today has 2,000 times the destructive power of that bomb. The fireball alone would engulf a Hiroshima.

Today, at least today, think about Hiroshima - its destruction but also its present life. "Don't feel guilty or be angry or afraid. Just don't forget." We can rebuild some security even from the mad state in which we find ourselves today.

The stone chest in Peace Park where they keep the names of the dead as they still are being identified and counted reads: "Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil."


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