Part I: About Last Night

It was my fault, really. Just shy of two weeks in-country, and I still haven’t gotten the hang of crossing the street. The best advice is PJ O’Rourke’s tip for driving in England — think of yourself as a well-dressed socialist: “Keep left, look right.” For the first couple of days I repeated this mantra to myself, and even felt comfortable enough with the traffic and pedestrian patterns here that I was happy to try jaywalking (some intersections that are signal-controlled here would barely qualify as a driveway back home, and I’ve been sorrily tempted to try jumping across rather than walking). But from time to time I’d get to an intersection where traffic would be coming from an unexpected direction, i.e., it was coming the wrong way. You step off the curb, as a North American, and you instinctively look left. It’s a kind of operant conditioning at work.

How it happened would be funny if not for the potential for serious injury. The Japanese drive like maniacs in the city; it’s a total miracle there aren’t more traffic fatalities here. (I say this knowing nothing about the incidence of road mayhem on Japanese highways.) I was crossing Aioi-dori, standing at one of the trolley platforms in the middle of the street, on the wrong side of the road as far as I’m concerned, and waiting for the light to change. It turns out I was standing just a little too close to the edge for safety’s sake, because a Hiroshima municipal bus came through the intersection at about 10 km/h. The mirror, sticking out from the side, caught me in the left shoulder.

I should stress I wasn’t hurt. The impact, however, spun me around and knocked me to the ground, to much gasping by the assembled knot of pedestrians. The bus stopped immediately, the driver hopped out, and much apologizing ensued from both me and him. Within minutes the police had arrived, summoned by.. I don’t know who, actually, but their response time — on foot! — puts Victoria PD’s to shame (that’s assuming there’s actually a member from the traffic section on, and they’re not too busy handling calls, and there aren’t injuries, and they actually feel like attending). Nobody spoke English, which made the whole thing hilarious; my biggest concern, and the thing I wanted to make clear to everyone, was that I was perfectly fine and didn’t need an ambulance or a trip to the hospital. I made the international sign for “OK” (note: not actually international; don’t try this in some parts of the middle east or you’re liable to get shot), waved my arm around, did some range-of-motion checks that were partly to demonstrate that I was fine and partly to establish to my own satisfaction that I was fine. I got a stern lecture from the senior police officer in what I’m sure was the importance of looking the correct (i.e., right) way before crossing the street. Like I said, it could have been a lot worse.

Part II: After The Fire

Here’s a good way to spend a day in Peace Memorial Park while the sun is out: Wake up. Realize feet do not want to move and that your body feels the way your 84 year-old patients who’ve broken their hips probably feel. Marvel at how if you were home you’d seriously think about spending the day on the couch watching football (or coercing other people into giving you backrubs). Spend too long in the shower with the water cranked up hot enough to make you look like a scalded and angry lobster while the 800 mg of ibuprofen you swallowed works its magic. Get dressed, pull your photo gear together, and leave the hotel. Walk the two kilometers or so to Peace Memorial Park (only about 1,000 meters as the crow flies but you can’t walk that way). Finish off two rolls of film by playing with deliberate underexposure and trying to punch the contrast on some B&W pictures way, way up there. (Here’s a hint: You’ll need to dial in at least one more stop overexposure than the TTL metering thinks you need when you’re working with a 25 filter to get its full effect — your camera’s meter gets confused because of spectral sensitivity. So set ISO 250 with 400 film and fire away.) Run into two Russian girls from St. Petersburg who want you to take their pictures, then spend an hour wandering around the park with them, chatting in Brokenglish and Frussian.

I thought about how strange it was to be in Peace Memorial Park, in this city once deestroyed by a nuclear weapon, wandering around with Russians. I couldn’t help think that twenty years ago their government would probably have been happy to blow my country up on general principles. (Anyone who thought Canada would have gotten out of that war unscathed was an idiot.) This was Lena and Natalia’s first trip to Asia, and they were having fun, even if their Japanese was worse than my Russian — which they were surprised to hear pop out of my mouth. It’s always fun to spot the tourists babbling to each other in another language, and then go up and say a few words.

(Here’s a mean trick I’ve started to play: Young Japanese kids figure out very quickly that you’re not from around here, and so every time I’ve sat down to watch them play, or walk through a park, I inevitably get yelled at in English. “How’s it goin’?!” is usually what they say. For a while I replied in English and gave a thumbs-up, but lately I’ve taken to replying either in Japanese or — better yet — Spanish. They have no idea what’s going on. I’d say the Spanish is more fun, but what do I know?)

My new Russian friends were, like every Russian I’ve ever known, fatalistic about their world. I asked Lena about Chechnya, Beslan, terrorism, and what she thought of Putin. “Putin’s a thug,” she said. “But what else are we going to do? It will either work or it will get us all killed.” Natalia piped up. “What good is a government that can’t protect you?” I opened my mouth to offer the standard libertarian reply to that comment, then closed it because I didn’t see how it could have made any difference. I can make that argument precisely because it is based on a history that these women didn’t share — Russians, Lena pointed out (in case I didn’t know), don’t have a tradition of democracy or freedom. Natalia was almost ready to write the whole democracy experiment off, but Lena was trying to stay optimistic.

“I worry,” Lena said. “But I don’t want to die, and I don’t want other people to die, either. The communists kept this sort of thing under control; it’s not hard to think they might be better.” I said I couldn’t really comment one way or another. “The only thing I know is what has worked for my country, and we’ve managed to do OK for ourselves by it — we’ve never had a terrorist attack, and aside from border skirmishes with the Americans, we don’t get attacked by other countries.” The women were surprised to hear about that, so I told them about the series of small wars British and American forces fought over Canada during the 19th century. I couldn’t tell whether it impressed them or not.

“Perhaps the reason no one attacks you,” Natalia said when I had finished, “is because you’re just not that important.” I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not, but she probably had a point.

Lena got hungry so I aimed the girls in the direction of the Sogo department store (“go up to the seventh floor”) and walked over to the Cenotaph, a saddle-shaped arch over a coffin that contains the names of all confirmed victims of the bombing, as well as an inscription I found oddly moving: “Let all souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.” Many of the smaller memorials in the park were about allowing souls to make the transition from this world into the next; I found the Korean Worker’s Monument especially telling in that regard, talking about the need of “the souls of our compatriots, brought to misery through force, [being] able to rest in peace.” How true, I thought. I shot some pictures and thought that perhaps my presence and incessant moving around was somehow a distraction from the solemnity of the place, but every time it came to mind I was confronted by Japanese tourists snapping pictures with their cameraphones or posing and waving in front of the arch, and promptly felt better about it.

Tracy saw me changing lenses and film on the steps in front of the Cenotaph and came over to talk. She was 24, from Eugene, and lonely. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone in almost a week!” she complained. I commiserated and told her about my ecstasy on arriving in Kyoto to find other Canadians to talk to. “I flew into Kyoto on Monday, and I’m still not used to this place.” How long was she here for? “A month,” she said. “I’m starting to think that was a mistake. It gets better, right?” She was confused by the culture shock — after having spent her 19th summer backpacking around Europe, she expected Japan to be a breeze, and was surprised to discover how much harder it was to survive here. “At least in Europe it’s basically the same alphabet, and if all else fails most people there at least understand English.” Tracy more or less repeated every complaint I had when I got to Tokyo, and I assured her that things do, in fact, get easier as time goes on.

We walked over to the Children’s Memorial. Tracy had some origami paper and she showed me how to fold a crane (I’ve never been able to do it, and promptly forgot five minutes later), which we left at the base of the memorial itself. Like most kids of the nuclear age, Tracy had been exposed to Sadako Sasaki’s story at an early age — in elementary school — and she and her classmates had at the time spent a week folding cranes to be sent to Hiroshima. So many cranes arrive, apparently, that the city has erected bus shelter-type booths to hold them all, and maintains a registry of donations. I pawed through them, looking for cards and tags to give clues to their origins but gave up after I realized I didn’t really care — the fact that so many people thought it was important was enough for me.

Tracy suggested we head over to the museum; we split the cost of an audio guide and wandered around for two hours looking at the exhibits. My guide book — well, all the guide books — will talk about how powerful the museum is, and how moving the displays are, and it’s true, but for me the saddest moments were the ones involving the personal effects of the victims. In the same way that the most moving part of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington are the small offerings left by friends and family at the wall (because they so clearly mean something to everyone involved even though the connection may not be obvious to the rest of us), the preserved possessions of those who died tell a different, more personal story than the physics or the chronology do. I was OK with it all until I came across Shinichi Tetsutani’s tricycle. He was almost four that morning, and had been riding his favorite toy in front of his house when the bomb fell. He died two days later, and his father felt that he was too young to be buried alone in a grave far from home, so Nobou buried his son in the backyard with his tricycle and helmet. Forty years later, in 1985, Shinichi’s remains were moved to the Tetsutani family grave, and Nobou donated the trike and helmet to the museum, where, in 2004, they managed to seriously screw me up for about ten minutes. Tracy caught up to me in this state and we stood there for a while, looking at the tricycle. I couldn’t explain it. She squeezed my arm and nodded, once.

You need a hug when you’re finished with the place.

The museum does a good job of showing what life was like that morning, and what it’s been like since. The parts about the reconstruction of Hiroshima are nothing short of remarkable — the speed with which the city was rebuilt, the heroism of those who rushed to help, the horrors of what they saw. (A part of me wonders what sort of stories are told about, say, the aftermath of the firestorms in Dresden or Tokyo, whether they are significantly different from the ones told here or not.) Especially well-done — well, ok, from a layman’s perspective — is the section on the physical and medical effects of the bomb. A very cool display explains radioactivity by letting you play with a G-M counter and a 37 kBq strontium-90 source. “Is this safe?” Tracy wanted to know. I pointed at the sign on the display that said it had been carefully designed to make it perfectly safe. “Yeah, but how do you know for sure,” she said, not really trusting anything with the word “radioactive” attached to it.

Me, I don’t worry about this stuff. “Strontium’s a beta-emitter,” I said. “You can shield against beta quite nicely with a few milimeters of Plexiglass. Which is what this is.” Tap tap tap. She was unconvinced. The display, though, was fun; you could move the sensing tube closer or further away from the source, and watch the count go up and down (a very good demonstration of the inverse square law, maybe the best one I’ve ever seen — actually, come to think of it, it’s the only one I’ve ever seen, since I’ve only ever been taught the inverse square law mathematically). Next to that was a description of how fogged x-ray film in the vault at Red Cross Hospital was instrumental in proving that the blast had been nuclear in origin.

(A very good book could be written about the work of Japanese scientists in the wake of the bombing who tried to figure out exactly what had happened. There’s a story I once heard about how they analyzed the fallout soon after the blast and determined, correctly, that it was impossible for the United States to produce enough U-235 to make more than one bomb every six months or so. It was just their bad luck that the Nagasaki bomb used Pu-239 instead. I have no idea whether this story is true or not, but it’s interesting nonetheless.)

A chunk of part of the museum (not a large enough part, in my opinion) is given over to the medical effects of radiation, including a lengthy explanation of the keloid problem in bomb survivors and what happens when a fetus is exposed to a lot of radiation (microcephaly with developmental disabilities, primarily). Cross-sections of keloids are on display, much as they would be in a pathology collection; the most frightening thing was the anterior section of what looked like T10 to L5 or so (I couldn’t tell exactly). Sliced down the middle it’s supposed to show what depressed bone marrow looks like. I doubt 99% of the people visiting the exhibit would be able to tell you the difference — but I could. Normal bone marrow looks like jelly. This thing looked like a sponge, the result of the hematapoietic cells having been destroyed. The micro slides were even worse — I’e seen some really depleted marrow samples, but this was something else. We’re talking about nearly complete suppression. Spooky.

One part that I would have liked to explore more (but coulding, owing to a language barrier) was the narratives told by the survivors. What stories do they tell? How is this event depicted in art? There were Japanese-language videos and animations available, but no English translations. Which is too bad, because the small fragments I did see made me think there were fascinating stories inside.

The museum’s message, over and over again, is that nuclear weapons are bad, and that we’ll all be better off without them. It’s an overly simple message, but one that’s hard to disagree with anyway. I was thankful that the museum wasn’t a lengthy denunciation of nuclear energy as a whole (though there were people on the bridge leading to the park who were happy to add place names like “Chornobyl” and “Tokaimura” to “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” in an all-encompassing complaint about nuclear). I mentioned this to Tracy, who seemed surprised that otherwise seemingly sensible people could be enthusiastic about nuclear energy. “Even if you set the power generating issue aside,” I said, “I’m willing to bet you that nuclear has saved more lives than it has cost.”

“How do you figure?”

“Think about all the applications nuclear has in medicine — everything from cardiac stress testing to thyroid scanning to cancer therapy to the simple x-ray is derived from the same science that made what happened here possible. It’s just technology.”

She conceded the point. “I never thought about it in those terms before.”

“Most people don’t,” I said. “Nuclear medicine is one of those jokes — two words that should never go together. But there are some very smart and very talented people who are making thousands of lives better because we figured out how to use the power of the atom. It’s not all weapons and power reactors, even though that’s what gets the press. But ask anyone who has had their cancer sent into remission by radiation therapy what they think of it!”

We walked over to the National Peace Memorial Hall, just northeast of the museum. Weirdly, I liked this place better — it wasn’t so interested in telling the overreaching story of the bomb as it was in telling the individual stories of the bomb. A beautifully designed hall of remembrance is your first introduction to the hall, with an exit leading to a 3×4 bank of video monitors. Each monitor shows nine pictures, nine victims, and the images change constantly. It’s brilliantly done. You get a pamphlet when you walk in, and there are scanners attached to terminals where you can scan the bar code and find out about “your” victim; mine was a 30 year-old woman who was caught out in the open 1,500 meters from the hypocenter and who died three days later. You can search the database of victims, and I learned that 12 Sugimotos perished that day (this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since it’s not exactly an uncommon surname here). Upstairs, more terminals tell more stories; I thought, again, that the most remarkable stories were the ones of the people who survived the blast by being far away, and who then streamed into the city to render aid — the soldier who found a crying four year-old and reunited her with her mother after a week of carrying her around on his back, the weatherman for the Japanese Navy who was pressed into service tending to the wounded and who developed problems later in life and concealed the fact that he had been at the bombing, the doctors and nurses who worked frantically in the face of futility to save those who could be saved, and to ease the pain of those who could not. Strangely, many of these stories are told in a voice that almost suggests embarassement — the equivalent of “you’re welcome” in Japanese is do itashimashite, which literally translates to “what have I done to deserve your thanks?” Many of these stories are told with that kind of phrasing in mind — they don’t seem to think they did anything heroic or amazing in the face of that kind of suffering.

Tracy was getting tired so we parted company at this point. I wished her luck on her travels northward; she thanked me for an enjoyable afternoon. I walked back past the A-Bomb Dome, past the hypocenter, and thought about what I had seen. This entire area had been completely destroyed, knocked flat and the rubble burned, killing thousands. How do I reconcile what I’ve seen with what I’m experiencing right now?

Part III: Ceremonies of Light and Dark

I disappeared underground to Sogo with this stuff on my mind, wondering about what it meant, and thinking about how strange it was to be in one of only two cities destroyed by a nuclear weapon. The abstract lessons of the Cold War, the clinically detached nature of physics, the mechanical precision of the engineering seemed to stand in stark contrast to what I had seen, and to the reality of being here. I bought dinner, walked underground and emerged into the night on Aioi-dori again. The sun sets fast here; I had gone underground with the sun low on the horizon, and twenty minutes later it was gone. I thought about how this spot, 500 meters from the hypocenter, would not have been a good place to be (although perhaps being underground might have offered some measure of protection — then again, maybe not). And I thought about how everything around me was very, very new.

And then it hit me: Everything around me was new. Atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, if you didn’t know you were standing in Hiroshima you’d never be able to tell. Sixty years is not all that long; it’s well within living memory, and the re-emergence of Hiroshima into a modern Japanese city, with all the bright lights and enthusiasm that implies, is not something that happened recently — it’s been in progress for a while. This city was flattened by a terrible, terrible thing.. and it has been reborn into something bigger, better, brighter. The people who live here do not seem to dwell on what happened, because the past is the past and it cannot be changed anymore. Life for them moved on long ago; Hiroshima residents worry about the future and the mayor complains at lengths every time a new nuclear test is conducted because the memory will exist forever.. but while the past seems to inform their approach to the present, and their outlook for the future, it does not define either.

Things change, it’s true. But we change too. We adapt, we learn, and we cope; life goes on, inexorably, unavoidably. We feel pain, but that pain fades; we suffer wounds, but the wounds heal, and we are able to talk about them, examine the circumstances that lead to them, work to prevent them in the future. The bombing was considered to be a knockout punch: It was said, in 1945, that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for 75 years. Some thought the city itself would never recover.

The 1.1 million people who live here would beg to differ on the latter.
And as to the former.. the hypocenter — this city’s Ground Zero — is surrounded by some of the lushest urban greenery I’ve ever seen anywhere.

They said the world changed forever in New York on 11 September, 2001. But the world changed forever here in Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945, too. I have a hard time believing the world that emerged from that event is worse than what had come before.

Lena and Natalia were right: This is a damn scary time to be alive. But we’re going to get through it. We’ve been through worse.

We’ll be OK.