Hiroshima, Yet Still War

At times I ask my Korean students “What do you think about the atomic bombing of Japan?”

“Very good,” they reply in unison, “very good.”

More than ten years ago, my classmates and I folded origami paper cranes in my country school. After the multi-colored birds were folded, they were sent on to the Peace Memorial Park as part of the Children’s Peace Monument, in Hiroshima, Japan. The cranes symbolize peace in connection to Sadako Sasaki, who was two years old in 1945, when America dropped the bomb. Ten years later Sadako was dead from leukemia caused by the radiation. Now, approximately 10 million cranes come each year to the park.

A dozen years later, this February, I stood at the display of the paper cranes and photographed men and women ringing a gold crane bell for peace. The sound carried out loud and resonant, and it sounded good, but I wondered to myself as I stood there, who was it for, and who really heard it?

“Talk not of the good of war to those in Hiroshima or Nagasaki,” Chris Hedges writes in War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Hedges, a war correspondent for many years in many countries, says: “There is a spiritual collapse after war. Societies struggle with the wanton destruction not only of property and cities but of those they loved.”

From the surface, Hiroshima looks and feels rebuilt. That late winter day it rained as I walked to the pinkish metal and brick A-Bomb Dome. The building was closest to the epicenter of the bomb and is left as it was the day it fell.

Preserved as a shell of brick and twisted metal, the tree that grows over and around it is larger and more luminous. Standing there I couldn’t help but think about the way the grass and flowers and plants grew in the days and weeks after the bomb. Those there in the aftermath say they sprouted bold and green in thick life--stimulated by the radiation.

In Hiroshima, John Hersey writes: "Over everything--up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks--was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew."

That rainy day Hiroshima looked healthy and alive. Modern buildings, streams of cubish Honda and Toyota models they don’t sell in the States, clean fashion-driven people walking with umbrellas. Save for the park and the shattered rubble of the A-Bomb Dome I saw no real evidence of the act of war.

I spent a good four hours in the park. Watching digital cameras flash over the pools and burning torches. Sleeping on a bench under a tree. Listening to the Peace Bell ring. Once I awoke, I walked through Hiroshima, thinking about the cost of war. About how many lives are immediately touched, then, more importantly, how it ripples through generations and history.

Wars don’t end. The bloodshed stops. Bombs and guns are put away, but the effects last far beyond the last bullet fired, the last flash of light.

After the bomb there is the fire; after the war there is the lesson. What have we learned, class, about pride and nationalism?

Another hour passed and I still couldn’t shake my confusion. I had waited to write about this trip with the hope that time and distance would help me gain perspective. It didn’t. I’m still confounded by the reckless decisions of the U.S. administration.

How did we create another war?

How does it continue?

Eventually, I left the park for sushi (it is better in Japan) then stopped for coffee to process the Park. Sitting alone, lost in thought, a man, about 50 or 55, came and sat down with me. He had learned English for business. We talked in simple sentences. He told me his parents were killed by the bomb. He said in college he had studied nuclear engineering.

Maybe he chose that as his course of study for the same reason I chose psychology—to try and better understand the incomprehensible. In the end, I’ll never understand the human mind. That man will never understand the Bomb. Surely, we’ll both never completely understand war.

Before I end, here’s Hedges once more: “The cost of war is often measured in the physical destruction of a country’s infrastructure, in the blasted buildings, factories, and bridges, in the number of dead. But probably worse is the psychological and spiritual toll. This cost takes generations to heal.”