1945 – Little Boy
A visit to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is a confronting, painful, emotional but necessary experience if you want to understand and come to terms with the end of the Second World War in Japan and its aftermath. In what had once been a thriving commercial and residential centre for Hiroshima, the Park is dedicated to three purposes: to act as a memorial to those killed by the atomic bomb that fell on 6 August 1945, to offer testimony to the horror of nuclear war, and to act as a centre for advocating world peace. Nearly two million people go to the Park Museum every year. At a time when international belligerence and aggression is on the rise, I wish it could be many millions more. It is too easy to forget the horiffic impact of these bombs, as well as the longer-term, demeaning and excruciating consequences of radiation after effects.
The facts are familiar. The United States detonated two atomic bombs over Japanese cities in that August, and, ‘lest we forget’, did so with the required consent of the United Kingdom. In Hiroshima, an earlier air raid warning had been cleared at 07:31 am, and many people were outside, going to work, getting children ready for school, pursuing all their usual morning activities. The bomb, Little Boy, was released from the Enola Gay at 08:15 am, falling for less than a minute before reaching its detonation point at 1,900 feet. The bomb was aimed at the Aioi Bridge, but a cross wind deflected it, and it exploded directly over the Shima Surgical Clinic.
Some 70,000–80,000 people, around 30% of the population of Hiroshima at the time, were killed by the blast and resultant firestorm, including some 20,000 military personnel; another 70,000 were injured. A U.S. survey estimated that 4.7 square miles of the city were obliterated; the Japanese calculated 69% of Hiroshima’s buildings were destroyed and another 7% damaged. While the figures will never be clear, it is thought at least a further 90,000 died after the bombing from injuries, many of them from radiation poisoning, in part a result of the bomb’s inefficient design, with less than 2 lbs. of its 140 lb. enriched uranium core undergoing fission.
When you go to the Peace Park, the first and very striking sight is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the ruined remains of what had been the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The force of the bomb was downwards, and this allowed the walls of the hall to stand, and even the skeleton of the dome on top. Standing on the eastern side of the Motoyasu River, it faces the main park area on the island where the river divides. It is the iconic image of the Peace Park, a concrete remnant, devoid of life, an empty shell.
The Peace Memorial was controversial for many years. One party saw the building’s shell as an essential reminder of what had happened, many of these the hibakusha, explosion affected persons, a carefully chosen designation, rather than describing them as seizonsha, survivors.[i] This group wanted the ruin as a dedicated symbol, a vestige from the bombing, particularly as it stands close to the river which had been full of dead and burnt bodies. Another group wanted to get rid of what they saw as a depressing sight, the land cleared and rebuilt, just as had been done for so much of the city. Eventually it was, I think, a kind of Japanese wisdom that decided to simply leave the ruined building as it was, knowing the tower and the walls would slowly crumble of their own accord over the years. So far, it has changed very little in 75 years.
Most visitors cross over the Motoyasu Bridge to walk into the main park area. As you come off the bridge and turn right, to the north you see the Children’s Peace Monument, dedicated to the children who died when the bomb exploded. The monument is a statue of a girl with outstretched arms and a folded paper crane rising above her. It is based on the true story of Sadako Sasaki, best known through the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Sadako Sasaki was a radiation victim from the atomic bomb, suffering from leukemia. In the updated and full version of the story, written by her brother Masahiro Sasaki (with Sue DiCicco, founder of the Peace Crane Project), Sadako was inspired by the legend that if you complete 1,000 origami cranes, you will have your wish granted. [ii] She folded 1,400 cranes, but wasn’t able to realise her wish to be in her school’s running team. Her family has donated some of her paper cranes to various museums around the world.
After her death, Sadako’s friends and schoolmates published a collection of letters in order to build a memorial to her and to all of the other children who had died from the effects of the atomic bomb. In 1999, the statue was unveiled. Paper cranes are often left at the statue, and every year, on Obon Day, thousands of people leave paper cranes to remember ancestors. [iii] At the foot of the statue, a plaque reads: “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace on Earth.”
A short distance from the Children’s Peace Monument is the Peace Bell, a large Japanese bell which anyone is encouraged to ring for world peace. It has a lovely deep and sonorous tone. The surface of the bell has a map of the world, with three inscriptions. One is in Greek, and is from Socrates, “Know yourself”, (the bell was donated by the Greek Embassy). The second is the quotation repeated in Japanese. The third is in Sanskrit from the Longer Sukhävatïvyüha Sütra, a Buddhist text. This extract has been translated as “The lord of vast light, incomparable and infinite, has illuminated all Buddha countries in all the quarters, he has quieted passions, all sins and errors, he has quieted the fire in the walk of hell”.
There are many other moving and impressive monuments in the Park. One of the most important is the Memorial Cenotaph, which holds all the names of the people killed by the bomb, and the site of the memorial ceremony held every 6 August. Shaped rather like a saddle, it is aligned so you can look from the Cenotaph to the Peace Flame, and then on to the Peace Memorial. The cenotaph carries a Japanese epitaph which translates as “please rest in peace, for [we/they] shall not repeat the error.” The sentence could be interpreted as either “we shall not repeat the error” or as “they shall not repeat the error”. The wording was chosen to recognise the victims of Hiroshima without politicising the issue. The author, Professor Saika, provided an English translation, “Let all the souls here rest in peace for we shall not repeat the evil.” To resolve any ambiguity, on November 3, 1983 an explanatory plaque in English was added in order to convey the author’s intent that ‘we’ refers to ‘all humanity’, not specifically the Japanese or Americans, and that the ‘error’ is the ‘evil of war’. Any call for peace requires such sensitivity.
Rather than continuing to write a visitors’ guide, I hope I have said enough to convey how the Peace Park is both memorable and profoundly moving. Among the many buildings and memorials, one more, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, is particularly important, and especially hard to confront. To quote from the Museum’s English guide:
“The Peace Memorial Museum collects and displays belongings left by the victims, photos, and other materials that convey the horror of that event, supplemented by exhibits that describe Hiroshima before and after the bombings and others that present the current status of the nuclear age. Each of the items displayed embodies the grief, anger, or pain of real people. Having now recovered from the A-bomb calamity, Hiroshima’s deepest wish is the elimination of all nuclear weapons and the realization of a genuinely peaceful international community” [iv]
If anything, the brochure understates how challenging it is to go through the museum. Unsparing in what it shows, no wonder that in 1982, the Mayor of Hiroshima called for ‘Mayors for Peace’.
Mayors for Peace introduces its role by observing
In August 1945, single atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki instantly reduced them to rubble, taking more than 210,000 precious lives. With more than 70 years since the bombings, many survivors (hibakusha) still suffer from the physical and emotional aftereffects of radiation. To spread throughout the world the hibakusha’s ardent wish symbolized in the message that “no one should ever suffer as we have”, and to ensure it is passed on to future generations, Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain steadfast in our assertion to the world that nuclear weapons are inhumane and continue to call for their abolition.
On June 24, 1982, at the 2nd UN Special Session on Disarmament held at the UN Headquarters in New York, then Mayor Takeshi Araki of Hiroshima called for cities throughout the world to transcend national borders and join in solidarity to work together to press for nuclear abolition. Subsequently, the Cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki established “The World Conference of Mayors for Peace through Inter-city Solidarity” (now, Mayors for Peace), composed of mayors around the world who formally expressed support for this call. [v]
On August 5, 2001, the organization had changed its name from “The World Conference of Mayors for Peace through Inter-city Solidarity” to “Mayors for Peace”.
By 1 June 2020, 7,907 cities from 164 countries and regions had signed up to join Mayors for Peace, committing to its aim to abolish nuclear weapons. Included in that total are 90 cities in Australia (including Melbourne), an astonishing 1,017 in Iran, 682 in Germany, but only 218 in the US. The relatively poor level of commitment shown by American cities is reflected in the participation from North Carolina, which includes the major university towns of Chapel Hill and Durham, and Creedmoor, a tiny city close to Durham, but not included are Raleigh, the state Capital, nor Charlotte, the largest city in the state. You can draw your own conclusions.
To move away from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, a very different insight into the bombing comes from reading Robert Jay Lifton’s book, Death in Life. [vi] Lifton was trained as a psychiatrist, but became increasingly interested in the relationship between psychology and historical change, especially in China and Japan in the aftermath of the extreme events of the middle of the 20th Century. He spent some months in Hiroshima interviewing hibakusha, and explores with great delicacy the complexity of their responses. He is very frank about his own reactions to what he heard: “I found the completion of each of these early interviews left me profoundly shocked and emotionally spent.” He relates how he had to focus on seeking patterns in responses and build some distance between himself and those being interviewed, concluding “The experience was an unforgettable demonstration of the ‘psychic closing-off’ we shall see to be characteristic of all aspects of atomic bomb exposure, even of this kind of ‘exposure to the exposed’. It also taught me the importance of ‘making sense’ of the event, of calling upon one’s personal and professional resources to give it form, as a means of coping with it.” [vii] Would that more analysts of human affairs would be so open.
Lifton provides an account of the anniversary events on 6 August 1962, seventeen years after the atomic bombs devastation. In part it is a beautiful account of symbolism and ritual, with one thousand doves release at 8.15 am, the time the bomb exploded, through to the evening when Folded Crane Club lanterns bearing the names of children who had died are released down the river. At the same time, the day was characterised by protests and arguments, a major concern being that this day should be about more than the events in Hiroshima, but part of a broader push to stop the use of nuclear weapons across the globe, especially from those wanting the day to include condemnation of Russian continuing testing. Lifton noticed that within the formal day’s activities, there were many small, private ceremonies taking place within the park. He also saw the impact of reporters and journalists, and summarised the ceremonies in four words: “incense, fantasy, politics, cameras”. [viii] I don’t know how the media cover these ceremonies today.
Tourism figures tell us visitors to the Memorial Museum reached 1.8m in 2019, out of some 13m tourists visiting Hiroshima, of whom around a half are from overseas. Attendance at the Memorial Park on 6 August is around 50,000. I am torn between saying I wish many more came to Hiroshima to learn what happened, while wanting the attendance on 6 August to remain small, a private day for the people of the city. Perhaps the graphic poetry of Hiroshima’s Sankichi Töge can reach those who don’t visit the Peace Park:
How could I forget that flash of light!
In an instant thirty thousand people disappearing from the streets
The cries of fifty thousand more
Crushed beneath the darkness [ix]
Lifton reports Töge’s work has been one of the rallying cries for Japan’s peace movement.
How apt the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was called ‘Little Boy’. The US President is a little boy. He’s immature, menacing, destructive and insensitive to the consequences of his actions. I can imagine him in Hiroshima, although it is hard to believe he would actually visit the city and the Peace Park. Would he go through the museum? Would he linger at the Memorial Mound and Cenotaph? Would he be in tears as I have been on each of my visits? Or would it be a photo-op, a brief speech followed by a quick return to Tokyo, the aftermath of the bomb’s devastation left unseen. As for the desire to prevent this from ever happening again, he’d miss all that because he simply wouldn’t understand. Yes, he is another extremely dangerous little boy.
[i] Robert Jay Lifton’s book, Death in Life, (see later) explains the importance of this choice, see page 7
[ii] The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes, Tuttle, 2020. The original, familiar and slightly inaccurate story is by Eleanor Coerr, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, Putnam, 1977.
[iii] When my wife died from cancer, our youngest child, with friends, folded 1,000 paper cranes, some at her wake, some at a cancer fundraiser She took them to the Peace Park on a school trip, and placed them at the memorial.
[iv] From the Museum brochure, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_Peace_Memorial_Museum
[v] http://www.mayorsforpeace.org/english/outlines/terms.html
[vi] Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967
[vii] Ibid, page 10
[viii] Ibid, page 287
[ix] Sankichi Töge, August 6th, quoted in Lifton, op cit, page 441. Töge was a hibakusha, and died in 1953, aged 36
