Day 15: Hiroshima
It’s hard not to feel ungrateful when you’re mad at earthquakes for interfering with your plans to visit a luxury Onsen. The inconvenience of not making it to your first-choice spa doesn’t amount to much compared to the double whammy of disasters to hit southern Japan in the past week. And it doesn’t even register next to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which took the lives of 140,000 in 1945, and many more in the years that followed.
We met one of the survivors today. Mito Kosei’s mother was four months pregnant with him when she entered the blast site as it burned in Little Boy’s wake. She survived two serious illnesses, and still lives with her son in the city. Mito’s father died at the age of 93, relatively unharmed physically, but psychologically scarred by the atrocity of which he never spoke.
Most days, Mito can be found at the memorial which marks the bomb’s hypocentre. He’s a living witness, dedicated to educating visitors about the events of August 6th, 1945, the context in which they happened, the truth behind the conspiracy theories and the enduring risks posed by nuclear armament. He provides chairs, folders packed with unflinching details in many languages and, above all, testimony. You can read his story on his blog.
Mito’s base is the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, its ruins rebuilt as a reminder that the bomb was dropped not on a military target, but in the middle of the city’s liveliest commercial and residential neighbourhoods. A nearby Memorial Hall serves as a symbolic representation of the scale of the catastrophe, but the reconstructed trade centre is more impactful: the skeletal remains of a place where people worked and shopped, lived and loved, and, later, burned to death and lost entire families and developed new strains of cancer.
In the peace park, there are many such memorials, each dedicated to a different group of victims — like the students who were mobilised to clear fire lanes, in preparation for the worst bombing the city could then conceive of. Most share two things in common: an admission of Japan’s responsibility in provoking the attack, and an exhortation to end nuclear war for good.
Here, the far right resent this acceptance of guilt, going so far as to deface a stone which reads “Let all souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat this evil” (italics mine). And I can sympathise with that. The Japanese may have waged an unjust war in the Pacific, but no one deserves such brutal, inhumane and indiscriminate punishment. After the war, as if they hadn’t suffered enough, Japan paid the US reparations, and their leaders and many of their followers were sentenced to death.
America never accepted any blame, or suffered any real consequences; they’ve barely even paid their respects. In 2015, 56% of Americans still believed the bombing justified, and Obama is the only serving president to have ever visited the site (a few months after our visit). Can you imagine a plaque at Ground Zero that starts with, “Starting in 1979, the United States supplied Afghanistan with weapons…” and concludes with a call for forgiveness, plus a vow to cease all military actions that provoke terrorist attacks?
Putting our politics to one side, we ended our day at the stunning Itsukushima shrine on the nearby island of Miyajima, feeling lucky to be alive.
