Hiroshima: Reflections
06/06/2007 (later that day):
The rain kept me inside for longer than my patience would stretch, so when the clouds changed from ominous to merely foreboding, I dashed outside only to be driven into a restaurant around the corner by the next deluge. It was well past lunchtime and looking for local delicacies in this weather had lost its appeal. So I stayed for the time it took to smoke a cigarette and consume a hamburger with teriyaki sauce and rice, using chopsticks.
It was still raining when I left, but I figured what the hell. In a way, the weather fitted my mood.
The peace-tourism rush leaves a funny taste in my mouth. Images of the aftermath of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become ingrained in my nightmares since my youth, ever since I got Brighter than a Thousand Suns out of the town library and began asking a few questions; ever since I heard about the people whose skin melted in the blast, about the human shadows burnt into walls, about the horrible symptoms of radiation sickness. I joined the peace movement shortly after that, twenty-five years ago now.
There is nothing jolly about a visit to the Peace Memorial Park—about remembering what happened here; what could so easily have happened to all of us. So the leaden sky reflected my mood perfectly.
I wandered around the park, slowly getting soaked under my umbrella while staring at the skeleton of the A-bomb dome, one of the most iconic—and haunting—images of the twentieth century. I learned about the significance of paper cranes at the Childrens Peace Monument: 
Sadako Sasaki was exposed to the bomb when she was two years old and ended up at the Red Cross Hospital ten years later, with radiation-related leukemia. 
In pain and desperately hoping for a cure, she tried to fold a thousand cranes.
Origami cranes bring luck and folding a thousand is supposed to make your wish come true, but Sadako died eight months later, her task unfinished. It was completed by her classmates, and to this day children from all over the world are folding paper cranes in a similarly valiant—but doomed—effort to bring about peace.
Standing in this place, at the other end of the world, I could not stop thinking about the bomb factory on my doorstep, the new buildings mushrooming at its centre and the skeletal arms of lifting cranes reaching into the grey sky just like the tower of the dome that overlooks the park.
AWE Aldermaston is twenty-five times the size of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
Thoroughly soaked and with the light getting dimmer, I turned my back on the jagged ruin and hurried across the street to the bright lights on the other side. It was like being teleported to another planet: a web of malls and brightly lit alleys bustling with twenty-first century commerce. There were Multi-storey computer stores, clothes emporia, countless restaurant and shops and even a German bakery. Unable to make a choice where to eat, I was swept along with the crowds and—needless to say—got lost again.
Tags: Hiroshima, Japan without a Clue, Travel, Tag Index
Denni