"I Met With the Bomb"
By Chris Sorochin

WE ARRIVE IN HIROSHIMA late on a Friday evening in June; the rainy season is just kicking in. I had expected a palpable atmosphere; I had envisioned activists, or even Buddhist monks, directing traffic in streets named after Gandhi.

Nothing like that is evident as we leave the station. All I notice is a fountain shaped like two huge, conjoined mushrooms, raining water into a pool. "Mushroom clouds?" I wonder. "I doubt it," opines my traveling companion.

We locate our hotel and venture out in search of food, drink and local color. Unlike Tokyo, which stays open all night, Hiroshima rolls up the sidewalks early. The darkened streets look like something from a waterfront detective movie. Finally we locate a place festooned with the red lanterns that all over Japan signify sustenance. The clientele, decidedly proletarian, seem gladdened by our befuddled presence. It's like a tiny hometown bar in the states.

Over a dinner of assorted fish, vegetable and rice dishes, in a combination of fractured Japanese, English and sign language, we discuss U.S. and Japanese pop culture: cartoon character Bart Simpson and the singing group Shonen Knife. Then The Topic surfaces; without extraneous comment they tell us we can walk to the Peace Park. We leave without knowing whether any of them had relatives killed or injured by the Bomb.

Next morning it's still drizzling when we arrive at the Peace Park, its entrance guarded by the A-bomb dome, the shell of a huge exhibition hall left as a reminder of the destructive capabilities of atomic weapons. Throughout the park are monuments covered with garlands, wreaths and even pictures made of origami cranes, the folded paper birds traditionally associated with the Hibakusha (A-bomb victims).

I have with me poems by Philadelphia Plowshares activist Rick Sieber comparing the bombings to the crucifixion and relating both to the children suffering and dying in Iraq today. I place them in front of a suitable memorial. Just as we move on, I look back and see two young men, with the unmistakable hairstyles and bearing of U.S. military personnel, reading the poems. Maybe now they'll think more deeply about the things they may be ordered to do in their country's name.

We pass the eternal flame, which will be extinguished only when nuclear weapons are banished from the Earth. "I hope they have lots of fuel," says my friend.

Finally the museum itself. Among the many chilling exhibits are scale models of Hiroshima "before" and "after," pictures of horribly burned victims, samples of radiated skin and triumphal crowings from Harry Truman. Entire walls are covered with reproductions of letters; every time a nuclear power tests a weapon, the mayor of Hiroshima writes a letter of protest. There are also videotapes of Hibakusha relating their own memories of that day in 1945: "I met with the bomb," one exhibit tells us they say, as if any other words would be inadequate.

One of my tour books dismisses the museum as emotionalistic, lacking historical context and failing to recognize the sufferings of non-Japanese. All those charges are false. The books in the museum shop have far more graphic and heart-rending images than any on public display, and everything is presented in a very matter-of-fact way. The first floor shows the city's history as a naval base for Japanese imperialism, and there is a cenotaph in honor of the Koreans who were doing forced labor there at the time. There is also modest, but unmistakable, acknowledgment of Japan's atrocities in Asia. (Since my return home I've written to the publishers of the Insight guides asking whether their other volumes criticize the Holocaust Museum for being emotionalistic, the Pearl Harbor museum for lacking objective historical context, or the Vietnam Memorial for omitting all those Vietnamese names.)

By this time, I'm pretty choked up, a feeling not mitigated by being from the nation that perpetrated the outrage. When we walk outside, it's still raining lightly and I observe that the weather is perfect for the day's activities. "No," says my friend, "I wanted it to be sunny and see children playing and old people enjoying the warmth and couples strolling, to fully appreciate the weight of the evil that happened here." He teaches English in Japan and often thinks as he walks around: How could we view these people (or any others) as less than human, deserving extermination, as so much wartime propaganda described them?

After bracing machine-vended sake, we meander through a street market. I stop by a peace symbol bracelet at a jewelry stand and notice that I can also purchase a keychain featuring a cartoon character called Atom Boy. Ironically, Japan has one of the world's most extensive nuclear power programs; officials there are busily trying to put a distance between the memory of the radiation sickness from the Bomb and that which would result from an accident in this earthquake-prone, densely populated country.

The vendor, who lived in New York for some years, speaks fluent English. He gives me a free gold chain. We receive many more gifts from strangers that day, a lighter from a shopkeeper, kimchee from a cook at a tonkatsu parlor and beers from a man in a karaoke bar who doesn't stay to practice his English on us.

I have read that to this day the bones of the dead wash up on the banks of the seven rivers of Hiroshima. I conclude that the truly unique thing about the city is, like radioactivity, invisible but destined to remain for a long time.

[War Resisters League Website] [Nonviolent Activist Index]
September-October 1996: ["I Met With the Bomb"] [Blueberry Fields Forever] [International YouthPeace Week] [Rating the Websites] [Terror: A Pacifist Perspective] [News Notes] [Genocide & Imperialism]

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