Buildings
near ground zero reflected in the early a.m. Josh Krist
To
say that A-Bomb Dome survived is to say that the outer shell is recognizable,
but whole walls are crumbled and you can see inside to an empty space.
It is like the guts and bones were sucked out of the body.
We sat next to the
dome and waited for sunrise. A drunken Japanese woman wearing a miniskirt
and black schoolgirl socks stumbled up to us and told us in confusing
Japanese that peace is something we should do, not something to come
and look at. She told us to look for it in our hearts, not in books
or monuments.
Then, she asked us
to take a picture of her and smiled in front of the dome. "Real
Japanese girl!" she told us.
As the sun rose we
snapped some pictures of the dome and wandered over to the flame that
will not be extinguished until there are no more nuclear weapons. When
I recount the trip to friends, in a kind of unconscious cynicism I often
accidentally refer to it as the eternal flame.
We saw the memorial
to Sadako Sasaki, someone that for reasons I'll soon explain already
had a big impact on me.
Sadako was two when
Hiroshima was bombed and fell ill ten years later on the track field.
She was a runner, soon dying with Leukemia, what the Japanese at that
time called the atom bomb disease.
In Japan and other
Asian countries, cranes are symbols of longevity. Sadako believed that
if she could fold 1,000 paper cranes she'd be granted her wish to live
a long life. She folded 644 before she died.
Her schoolmates made
the other 356 as a gesture to her departed soul. When the story got
out, school kids all over Japan started folding paper cranes and sending
them to Hiroshima by the box load. That morning, I saw millions of them
draping her memorial in thick curtains of interconnected origami. It's
hard to find an A-bomb memorial in Hiroshima that doesn't have at least
a few paper cranes resting in a corner.
Seeing Sadako's
memorial was special to me because when I interned in Paris for the
Associated Press I would read the wire all day looking for things to
rewrite into English or put a spin on for the readers at home or whatever.
One day I read about a whole field full of paper cranes that was set
on fire a day before the Aug. 6 anniversary of the bombing.
The article
gave the quick rundown on the history behind the cranes and I was struck
by the story. It was something I thought about for years afterwards,
and it was a full five years before I was able to see Hiroshima for
myself, five years to let it try to sink in.
We stayed
at a peace activist hostel and the Quaker proprietors introduced us
to a survivor. In Japanese, they are literally known as bomb-affected
people because some of them are uncomfortable and downright guilty as
the lucky few amongst so many dead.
"He
took out a book and showed us a picture of a school girl."
Matsushimi-san,
the survivor we met us, was 16 years old when the bomb dropped. His
engineering school was right outside the main 4-sq.-kilometer circle
of destruction.
He started school
at 8 a.m., 15 minutes before the bomb dropped. If he would have been
late that day, as he had been a few times, he would have been in the
middle of town crossing from his dormitory on the other side.
I can't begin to
tell his story but there are a few interesting things he said that are
worth noting. His English was good, but he'd describe things as non-native
speakers sometimes do; with unintentional poetry.
After the bomb he
ditched engineering to become an English teacher and lived a few years
in Chicago. He explained to us that after seeing what war could do,
he wanted to build connections between people through language, and
saw his government-encouraged pursuit of an engineering degree as a
vestige of what he called the Japanese war machine.
When he saw the B-29s
overhead, he didn't think much of it as there were always "B-San"
flying reconnaissance for the fire bombing that affected many Japanese
cities. The family home of my Japanese teacher was burned down by one
of B-San's bombs, I later learned.
"I thought they
looked very nice, the silver American bombers. They were like ice flying
across the sky," he told us.
He had no idea they
had dropped anything. When they were out of view there was a huge flash,
like someone had turned on a tremendous orange and yellow light bulb.
He instinctively crawled under his desk but was still cut up by the
window panes flying like a thousand small bullets across the classroom.
Like many in Hiroshima,
he thought that a conventional bomb had landed near him. He was shocked
to see the whole city destroyed as he walked across town to get his
things from the dormitory. He told us everything was flattened, and
his sense of time was screwed up because it looked like midnight because
of the dust and smoke that blocked the sun.
"It was like
seeing a procession of ghosts. I didn't understand. They were black
and their skin was falling off them, walking like ghosts with their
hands in front of them."
He said he was lucky
that the war ended when it did because one of his brothers was scheduled
to fly a kamikaze mission a few weeks later. Another brother was in
the last naval military engagement of the war and the Americans sank
his ship. Luckily, the ship was in the harbor so when the bottom touched
everyone was still safe on the dry deck.
Matsushimi-san
was surprisingly happy as he told his story and smiled often, but told
us that seeing the people walking away from the World Trade Center on
Sept. 11th brought back unhappy memories. He said it reminded him of
the procession of ghosts he saw in Hiroshima.
It was the only time
during our hour conversation he seemed emotional. Everything else seemed
very much in the past, for him, though he said he had a few operations
on his stomach and still has strange stomach problems that he thinks
are radiation-related.
I was prepared to
break down at a shrine or something during my stay, but there was only
once, when I thought about something Helene did. As Matsushimi-san told
us about the ghosts, he brought out a book and showed a picture of a
school girl whose face had melted right off the skull. On seeing it,
Helene gasped in surprise and started crying, and I thought it was one
of the most honest and sincere reactions I'd ever seen.
So, I was thinking
about honest reactions in a coffee shop later on. I thought about the
girl who thought she could save herself with 1,000 paper cranes. I thought
of her hope in the face of futility, the destruction of her young body
that even a million paper cranes could not stop.
It was Sadako's honest,
hopeful reaction to her plight that got to me. In a better world, I
thought, maybe.
See, I had been looking
for some sort of overwhelming epiphany in Hiroshima, some understanding,
some guilt, even. But it's hard to feel any of these things in a nice
new city built on a sandy delta with rivers every few blocks. The survivor
I talked to blamed the Japanese war machine more than anyone else.
In my reading on
Hiroshima, I was surprised to learn that many of the affected citizens
blamed their own government, as well. But, still, if we had lost the
war my bet is there would have been Americans standing where Milosevic
is today.
Before speaking to
Matsushimi-san, we went to the Peace Museum, which just proved to me
that the very fact of the bombing is more disturbing than any physical
evidence.
Trying to conceive
that moment, being cooked in your skin, seeing your city disappear (unless,
according to John Hersey's "Hiroshima," you were a soldier
whose job was to watch the sky and your eyes boiled out of your head),
that's worse than any grainy black and white photograph.
Without trying to
honestly conceive that moment, all the museums and exhibits offer only
a surface understanding, a false absolution.
I've started to think
of real Japanese girl, as she called herself, as an inadvertent messenger.
I can't change the past, but I can gain my small measure of responsibility
by trying to understand it and by trying to find that peace that was
obviously missing in some hearts.
At the least,
I can insist on remembering days like Aug. 6, 1945, and cities like
Hiroshima. In that memory, I hope there is some small redemption.
Josh
Krist is the publisher of InsideOut Travel and is
31 years old.
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