Tag: antiwar

広島: Bending Adversity (2)

city of 300,000

can we forget that silence?

in that stillness

the powerful appeal

of the white eye sockets of the wives and children who did not return home

that tore apart our hearts

can it be forgotten?!

Tōge Sankichi, 1951

It seems only logical to me that places such as Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, are designed to crush your soul in the face of indescribable cruelty and horror with the intention of getting their message across. I thought I knew this by now, and would be able to handle the Atom Bomb museum in Hiroshima, and yet again I found myself weeping before what I saw and learnt.

Hiroshima carries a far greater symbolic meaning in the Japanese psyche. Being the first location of an atom bomb being dropped on people, and with a far larger death toll (140,000 are thought to have died by the end of 1945), Hiroshima stands proudly today as a symbol of exactly what the Japanese way of life is about. Getting back on ones feet. Forgiving, but never forgetting. Rebuilding and reforming, with a mission and a purpose. The peace memorial with its simple grace represents not only the horrors of war and the sacrifice of thousands, but also as a worldwide flagship for peace and a gathering place for movements for the abolishing of nuclear weaponry. The museum is sobering, naturally, it does not hide the truth and is to the point. There are no frills here. Such a message has no time for frills.

It is also here that I learnt that the dropping of the bomb on the 6th of August 1945 also killed hundreds of non-Japanese; among the dead were also southeast asian exchange students, Korean and Chinese immigrants, and even American prisoners of war. The loss of the innocent in times is a result of the hideous nature of such indiscriminate mass murder. And while every day, innocent children, women and men still die every day in less fortunate places, the lessons still don’t seem to have sunk in. War seemed to be an adequate excuse for accidentally vaporising people who bravely bade their time in prisoner camps, only to die at the hands of the ones they serve alongside their enemies, and it still seems to be adequate today. It was all well and good to sentence Nazis to death in Nuremberg in the 50’s, but what is happily brushed under the carpet and excused by wartime circumstances is the unquestionable crime against humanity that is the birth of nuclear weapons.

The famous atom bomb dome on the banks of the Motoyasu river in Hiroshima should stand forever as a painful reminder of what these weapons of mass destruction do to families, cities and nations until nuclear warfare is outlawed and removed from the surface of this planet. If Prometheus was banished to infinite suffering for stealing the secrets of fire, then perhaps a nuclear holocaust is what humanity deserves for trying to meddle with things that they shouldn’t. 

A frail olive tree stands in the courtyard of the victim’s memorial, breaking its way through concrete towards the clouds with biblical determination.

The city of Hiroshima lives, just like Nagasaki, reborn and proud. Like every other Japanese city, the people of Hiroshima swamp the shopping streets, pile into pachinko parlours and crowd their local Okonomiyaki shops. This city lives for the future. I cheered myself up with a sushi lunch and followed it up by a trip to the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art – hidden on a forestry hill in the east of the city, where signs literally banned some entrances due to very real danger of the local hornet population.

And on the topic of Okonomiyaki, dinner that night at home greeted me with a portable flat iron sitting on the dinner table – Okonomiyaki, homestyle. I’d eaten enough Okomiyaki in my life and watched enough youtube videos to really impress my host family with my pancake flipping skills, but of course i didn’t admit that.

This is a long post. But it’s an important one. It’s also important to never forget who the real war criminals are, and important to remember that those people will never face trial for their crimes against humanity, and the thousands of innocents who have died in Japan at the hands of these monstrosities will never know justice, only pain and sombre remembrance.

長崎: Bending Adversity

“If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were to burst at once into the sky

That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One…

I am become Death,

The destroyer of worlds.”

As Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita upon witnessing the first successful test of the world’s first atomic bomb on July 15th 1945, little did he know how true those ancient and earth-shattering words would ring come August of the same year. And it is these words, and Oppenheimer’s sad realisation at his monstrous creation, that have been with me today as I walked the streets of Nagasaki. A sobering and humbling afternoon to put it simply.

 The train ride from Hakata did not prepare me for what I was about to experience. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are casually swept over in history class at school, always presented as the final victory and grand finale of the theatre of the Second World War. The reality is much different. The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb museum (原爆資料館) is only a couple of charming streetcar stops away from the station where my hostel is located, and the elegant and to-the-point museum is poignant and brutally blunt. It would have been impossible for me to have been in Kyūshu without coming face to face with the suffering and loss that was experienced here in Nagasaki. I wept for the 75,000 that were vaporised instantly in front of the testimonies of the survivors.

Testimonies of children who buried their mothers, husbands who buried their wives, and sisters who buried their brothers. The inhumanity of such an attack is unspeakable. I can only give credit to the museum for rightfully bringing me (and others) to tears over this act, not to mention over the thousands more who died in the years afterwards.

But it is the resilience of Nagasaki, and of the Japanese people in general, that struck me the most. The will to carry on, to never give up, something that I picked up on vaguely many years ago in David Pilling’s Bending Adversity (read it, it’s incredible). The beautiful peace park that follows the museum, and the sombre memorial to the dead along with the preserved hypocenter (ground zero) along a beautiful little canal, is testament to how much this city is committed to preventing conflict and to moving on upwards from disaster. It’s heartwarming to walk these lively and upbeat streets today knowing that underneath them lay a nuclear wasteland of suffering only 73 years ago. I anticipate to find very much the same thing when I get to Hiroshima in a week.

The will to carry on. That is what I have managed to summarise Nagasaki, Japan’s historical cultural front to the world and a beacon of hope and strength in the south of a once war-ridden country, in one short day. An impression that genuinely made me appreciate sitting in front of my kaisendon on the quayside tonight. 

I pray (using the term loosely) that my generation, my brothers’ generations and those to come never have to experience the horrors of war that I have seen today. I will leave this city tomorrow more grateful for my life and grateful to be living in security than I was before I stepped off the train this morning.

I implore you all – those who are reading this – to go tonight to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb museum’s English site and read for yourselves what you weren’t taught in GCSE history.

“What passing bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifle’s rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells,

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall,

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each, slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.” 

Wilfred Owen, The War Poems (1917)