It’s not possible to visit Hiroshima, and its Peace Memorial, without being moved – to tears. It’s not possible to be here without examining all kinds of moral questions. Questions within yourself, and questions about humanity as a whole.
How could human beings be so cruel? That’s the first question you ask when viewing the remnants of the moment – a quarter after eight on an August morning seventy years ago – when tens of thousands of people were incinerated in an instant. – People with names and families. People whose clothing and lunch boxes and eyeglasses survive in tattered, deformed, disarray inside museum glass as testimony to what happened in that twenty seconds of time when a violent force of nature was unleashed by one group of humans on another. People who’s only record of life is the shadow their body left when it burned into the stone steps where they sat at the moment the bomb exploded, 600 meters above a t-shaped bridge over the bayous that pulse through the center of this city.
140,000 people died directly – and sometimes slowly – within the first four months of that Monday morning in August 1945. Another 60,000 died within the next eighteen months. This event is the single greatest acute act of cruelty in human history. To consider it is to weep. To consider it is to face something deeply sad about humanity. To consider it is to be deeply humbled, and then profoundly grateful for the short lives that we, the living, still have. To be grateful for the opportunities to love, to laugh, to work, and wonder. To do something with the energy that we, the living, still possess - for however long we have it. To do something good. To carry on for those who can’t, or never got the chance to.
And therein lies the thing – the thing about Hiroshima. After you weep, you look around and you see a vibrant, alluring, modern, city. Orderly, clean, polite, intelligent. Full of art and beauty. Surrounded with green hills and waterways winding their way to the Pacific a few kilometers to the east. A charming, friendly city, reverent of its place in human history and looking to use its past in the best possible way. Looking to use the past to change the course of this world’s future. This town of 1.2 million people is not about tragedy – it’s about resilience.
As we completed the emotional trip through Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum, the last words we read on the wall were these:
That autumn
In Hiroshima where it was said
“For seventy-five years nothing will grow”
New buds sprouted
In the green that came back to life
Among the charred ruins
People recovered
Their living hopes and courage
There’s no spot on this earth that inspires me more than this place. I think that I will be forever changed by the few days that Christine and I have had here. 140,000 souls linger here – perhaps just for that purpose.
— with Christine Phillips at Hiroshima Peace Memorial.
10 May 2015, Hiroshima, Japan
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