This paper I did for a class has been translated into Japanese by a friend and shared with many in the US and Japan. One comment was "I always wanted to know what an American would feel visiting this place". The ultimate failure to communicate is expressed by our greatest inhumanity to one another.
I stood on a bridge upriver from the peace dome in Hiroshima and witnessed a black fireworks display at ground zero, where the first nuclear weapon was deployed against humans a month and many years ago. Little did I know what this would symbolically come to represent in my own life. In a sense, I was reborn there. In order to be reborn though, a part of me had to die, just like the city and the multitudes in the firestorm I would try to fathom from 1945. Hiroshima was just supposed to be a day trip on my visit with friends in a nearby town; instead it became much more. As a former sailor, I felt an obligation to go there as I had been to Pearl Harbor many times and sailed past the USS Arizona, which is symbolic of America’s entry into the war with Japan. I thought Hiroshima would be the logical place to visit to balance some cosmic sense of fairness from how I had been led to view Pearl Harbor. I was not prepared for the reality of the situation, to say the least.
Having stayed in a traditional town that would have been similar to Hiroshima the day the bomb was dropped, it became easy to see how people would have lived. Beginning the day with laughing uniformed children walking to class in small groups and ending after the evening meal with a walk through the narrow, winding streets, with the velvety musk from the sewers laying lightly on the evening air, a voice in song accompanies the faint clinking of dishes as the evening chores are done; the time and place could be here and now, or a distant time outside my own grandmothers kitchen in the United States; timeless and placeless, I could be anywhere. Like me, soldiers, sailors and samurai have historically joined the military knowing there is a certain risk of life associated with the service to ones country, but here I perceived a great difference.
Hiroshima was a civilian town of women and children, not a military target of war-machines like Pearl Harbor. Going through the peace museum, there was a before and after model of the town. It was eerily similar to the village I had been staying in. A child’s lunchbox, recovered from the aftermath, hit me harder than a mugger slipping silently from an alley with a steel pipe. The lunch, so carefully packed for a child who never had the opportunity to enjoy it, was still waiting, untouched, as the owner was burned to ash at ground zero. I could only imagine the child clinging desperately to the box, a gift from his long dead father, as he flew though the air, his clothing, then his flesh, burning from his little body. He lets out a silent agonizing scream for his mother as he becomes nothing more than ash blowing through the burning husks of shattered buildings. This lonely, uneaten meal was the only monument to acknowledge his very existence. I staggered, and if not for a stranger to steady me, would have been a new exhibit of an entirely different nature lying on the floor of the museum. After I left, I had to figure out the true magnitude of what we did in this place.
I walked the miles across the zone of destruction, comparing it to the barren topography of the photos I had copied. I walked beyond my feet blistering and bleeding, I could not comprehend the very scale of what was done to the people here. I went to Kyoto and visited many places, but everywhere I went Hiroshima was there as well, haunting me as if the tens of thousands of dead held me personally responsible for their slaughter. I went to the oldest Zen temple and prayed for guidance. The answer that was presented weighed on my soul like a death sentence; I had to go back to Hiroshima and face mortality on a scale that is unimaginable, even in my nightmares.
I walked past the places where the hundreds of schoolchildren had died on the bank of the river where they ran looking for water to quell their terrible pain, burned to death. I walked along the river that, were it filled with the tears of all who had died needlessly, would surely overflow its banks and sweep me away. Kazuki, a Japanese friend from a nearby town with whom I practiced English, came to meet me along the river and I asked him to show me one thing in this city that survived or I cannot be redeemed. I had died at this point, drowned in my own past pride and self-righteous ideology. We went to Shukkien, the oldest park in Hiroshima. One of the groundskeepers showed us around. Miraculously, not everything was killed.
In the middle of all of the destruction, two ancient ginkgo trees had survived. At their base were more markers where dozens of people had been buried that died from the blast. Rebirth and life can come even after something of this magnitude. I looked at the park through my friend’s eyes. The groundskeeper showed us where the people, as injured as they were, had set the stone carvings back upright in a last effort to leave behind some sense of order before they died. They became a monument to human perseverance.
I saw the beauty emerge in my friend’s eyes as though it was sixty something years ago and the first flowers were blossoming among the blowing ash of the countless people that would never be recovered. I found what I needed to live again. We made our way back to the memorial as I wanted to say good bye to this haunting place.
As I sat on a bench next to the dome where the ashes of thousands who died are interred, I took off my blood soaked shoes and socks and finally allowed myself to acknowledge the injuries to my feet. As I cut the torn skin from the bottom and heels of my feet, Kazuki actually cried as my blood dripped into the sand in this place. I had no more tears to cry; I had no right to cry. There is no coming to terms with our past. We simply have to move on. After my feet were bandaged with gauze, tape and a fresh pair of socks, Kazuki asked, “How can you go on?”
I had worn my dog tags for twenty eight years, from the time I had entered the navy, through everything that had happened until that day, at that moment. I took them off and walked over to the river, but did not throw them in. It would have been dishonorable to leave anything else of that nature in this place. I died that day, just like the thousands in the blast. Ascribed status, earned status, nothing meant anything in the face of such inhumanity: Nearly half a century of living was burned away as if the blast itself were frozen in time, hanging in the air like the fireworks I had first witnessed. I imagine a phoenix rising from the flames of its own demise has simple thoughts and simple wants as it enters its new life. Like the phoenix, I go on because I must. I came away clinging to only one simple desire to carry me the rest of my days: to be recognized as a human being, nothing more, nothing less. If we all strive for this unifying goal, we can achieve peace and Hiroshima will never happen again.
