InsideOut Travel--Hiroshima

DESTINATION: HIROSHIMA


	Sadako and the Real Japanese Girl
	by Josh Krist Helene and I took the overnight bus to Hiroshima from Kyoto, where we were living, and arrived at ground zero at 5:30 a.m. last February. I went because I felt that somehow it was my responsibility as an American to understand what happened on Aug. 6th, 1945. People try to say that as an American born before the bomb was dropped, I have no responsibility. But if I don't eat my miniscule pie-slice of responsibility, who will?				Not most of the men who dropped the bomb, that's for sure. Not the American public at the time. Not the politicians. If anyone was willing to shoulder the blame, I found, it was the victims themselves. “Sadako believed that if she could fold 1,000 paper cranes she'd be granted her wish to live a long life.” Since it was February, the sun wasn't up when we arrived near Peace Park, a close walk from where the overnight bus dropped off Helene and I. Peace Park used to be one of the busiest commercial districts in Hiroshima. It was right under the hypocenter of the A-bomb, Little Boy, as it was called. A-Bomb Dome, once a government building, is the centerpiece of Peace Park. It is one of the few buildings to not be flattened by the successive wind blasts. The first from the heat of the bomb, the next from the scorching winds that bounced back from the mountains ringing Hiroshima. more >> << home
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