Day Twenty Seven: Hiroshima

I was up and out of the internet place sometime around 7am. I asked again where my hat had gone, and nobody knew.

in order to grieve the lost of my beloved fidel castro hat, I walked back to the gembaku dome, the atomic bomb dome. on my way, I walked by a memorial that looked like it had been created for the children victims of Hiroshima. there was a small group of elementary school students who had created a thing made of a thousand cranes to have placed in these plexi-glass cases behind the statue. they reverently sang a song and presented the cranes to a woman working at the memorial.

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I went and sat on a bench that overlooked the river that it sat beside and fell asleep for about three hours.

an old Japanese lady came over and started raking leaves where I was sitting and I woke up and scared her half to death. she said she was sorry for waking me up cause she could tell I was enjoying myself. she was a pretty decent old lady. I asked her if she knew where my hat was and she didn’t.

places like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto and nara are literal gathering places of groups of school kids. at the place where I was sitting, when I woke up, I found I was surrounded by these kids who all gather around this certain marker to have their pictures taken as a group.

I took the opportunity to have fun with the kids, I made balloon animals, showed them up with a rubiks cube, and taught them animal names in English. it was great fun and it was all smiles, but after all this is Hiroshima, and as much as I wanted to smile, the thoughts of what happened at the very spot where I was sitting sometimes made it difficult, especially with all these kids around.

I just sat there and played with the groups of kids as they would pass through, making balloon flowers for the boys to give to their “girlfriends” and all sorts of things.

about noon I walked around some more, took in the sights and sounds of the Hiroshima peace park and then went into the museum.

it was much like the museum at Nagasaki, the first part dedicated to the bombing of the city itself and then the second devoted to the history of the atomic bomb.

the things in the museum were also just as devastating. I found myself crying more and more as I would walk through the corridors, listening to testimonies of survivors of the bombings, looking at old charred or melted artifacts and seeing the remarkable stories of those people who survived the bombing only to die years later from the radiation.

one particularly graphic image was a photograph taken of three people, it looked like a mother and two children, their faces had been burned and their hair sat bushy on their heads. their skin was melting and hanging off of their hands and arms as they walked towards the photographer.

the final story in the museum was the story of sadako sasaki, who had barely survived the bombings at the age of two, but at the age of ten, about seven or eight years after the bombing, was diagnosed with leukemia. she is credited as being the girl who began the paper crane phenomenon. although the legend has been around hundreds of years, she was the girl who spent months while in treatment, meticulously folding cranes hoping that it would heal her. she was only able to make it to a thousand, and continued to make more cranes.

at the age of twelve, she died.

she was buried with her thousand cranes. the final image i saw walking from the museum was this girl shortly before her burial, surrounded in her coffin by heaps of flowers and a thousand cranes.

the memorial that I had seen in the morning where the children were singing was the one that was created to honor her memory and the memory of all the bombings lost children. people now create these weaves made of a thousand cranes hoping for a wish to come true.

I did more walking around the area and recognized that based on the facts and figures, around 140,000 died at Hiroshima and 70,000 died at Nagasaki, bringing the dead of two bombings to 200,000, with hundreds of thousands severely injured.

aside from the thousands killed by these bombs, many more were killed by fire bomb attacks from the allies and some cities were almost completely burned. 500,000 perished being burned to death with millions left homeless in cities all over this country.

these are levels of death and destruction that I still find barely comprehensible. but events like these bombings, the mass slaying of six-million in the holocaust, and many other tragedies remind us of the need for peace in this world.

I left Hiroshima after more balloon animals and another walk around peace park.

for me, hiroshima had a completely different feel from nagasaki. there wasnt the same intensity for me. as opposed to creating a special spot for a marker for the hypocenter of the bomb, they just put a post on the side of a road that said "the first atomic bomb explosion in the history of mankind happened 500 meters above this spot"

it seemed that while the citizens of nagasaki were striving to create almost a spiritual atmosphere, the people of nagasaki almost felt an obligaition to remind people of the bombing rather than a duty.

this of course is probably far from the real intention of the people of hiroshima, but it is what i felt.

I was on shinkansen for about three hours and then a connecting train towards kanazawa and a city called takaoka where I would be staying.

the first treat I had was to be able to meet some missionaries when I got there, and don’t that beat all, they were Nagoya missionaries. my own mission turf.

the man letting me spend the night was named Marcelo arisawa, a guy known for being good with hooking up the missionaries. he has a really nice place and as we talked over dinner. he offered to take me to the mormon temple in Tokyo the next day.

there was an offer I definitely could not turn down.

so I went to bed in the guest room thinking about the next days four hour trip to the temple in Tokyo.