Lest We Forget
Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
The First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
August 8, 2010
Lest We Forget
Prelude: “By the Rivers of Babylon”
Words of Gathering:
“The world is now too dangerous for anything but truth; too small for anything but brotherhood.” These words remain as prophetic today as when they were written by Adlai Stevenson in 1959, less than fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. Today, our planet is only more interlinked, interdependent, and bound together to the same fate; either the well-being of all, or the destruction of all. It is too small for self-righteousness, and too dangerous for historical amnesia. This morning, as we approach the 65th anniversary of our nation’s use of atomic weapons of mass destruction, we are called an act of an-amnesis; a deliberate remembering, the refusal to forget.
Fewer and fewer of us remember the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 as a personal memory. Some of us were alive then, but too young to remember it ourselves. Others of us had not yet been born. I am in this latter group, for whom the memory of Hiroshima is not personal, but collective. It is the preservation of memories in this way, through their being passed on by story and reflection, that the history and self understanding of a community is built.
What happened in Hiroshima and later in Nagasaki is not a pretty memory. It is not a gratifying piece of self knowledge, especially as our government continues to set itself up to enforce upon the rest of the world what weapons are acceptable. But the community which preserves only happy and flattering memories of itself is superficial at best, and at worst evil in its willful blindness. There is as much or more to be learned from the memory of suffering and failure as there is from the memory of success and grandeur. In the experience of destruction we learn the limits of our power to make the world the way we would have it by force.
In this awareness, I invite us to join together in the words of our chalice lighting, as we seek to illuminate the darker pages of our shared history.
Chalice Lighting:
As a sign of our commitment one to another
As a symbol of our message of love and hope
As a witness to the light of truth within and among us
In the spirit of building and celebrating our human community
We kindle this flame.
Responsive Reading: “The Battle of Blenheim” Robert Southey
It was a summer evening,
Old Kaspar's work was done,
And he before his cottage door
Was sitting in the sun,
And by him sported on the green
His little grandchild Wilhelmine.
She saw her brother Peterkin
Roll something large and round,
Which he beside the rivulet
In playing there had found;
He came to ask what he had found,
That was so large, and smooth, and round.
Old Kaspar took it from the boy,
Who stood expectant by;
And then the old man shook his head,
And, with a natural sigh,
"'Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he,
"Who fell in the great victory.
"I find them in the garden,
For there's many here about;
And often when I go to plough,
The ploughshare turns them out!
For many thousand men," said he,
"Were slain in that great victory."
"Now tell us what 'twas all about,"
Young Peterkin, he cries;
And little Wilhelmine looks up
With wonder-waiting eyes;
"Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for."
"It was the English," Kaspar cried,
"Who put the French to rout;
But what they fought each other for,
I could not well make out;
But everybody said," quoth he,
"That 'twas a famous victory.
"My father lived at Blenheim then,
Yon little stream hard by;
They burnt his dwelling to the ground,
And he was forced to fly;
So with his wife and child he fled,
Nor had he where to rest his head.
"With fire and sword the country round
Was wasted far and wide,
And many a childing mother then,
And new-born baby died;
But things like that, you know, must be
At every famous victory.
"They say it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun;
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.
"Great praise the Duke of Marlbro' won,
And our good Prince Eugene."
"Why, 'twas a very wicked thing!"
Said little Wilhelmine.
"Nay... nay... my little girl," quoth he,
"It was a famous victory.
"And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win."
"But what good came of it at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why that I cannot tell," said he,
"But 'twas a famous victory."
Reading: from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been 1964 or so – whatever the last year was for the New York World’s Fair.
I met his nice wife, Mary, to whom I dedicate this book. Mary O’Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to be. I sensed that Mary didn’t like me, or didn’t like something about that night. She was polite but chilly. She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice cube tray in the stainless steel sink. Then she went into another part of the house. But she wouldn’t sit still. She was moving all over the house, opening and shutting doors, even moving furniture around to work off anger.
I asked O’Hare what I’d said or done to make her act that way.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.” That was kind of him, but he was lying. It had everything to do with me.
She finally came out in the kitchen again for another Coke. She took another tray of ice cubes from the refrigerator, banged it in the sink, even though there was already plenty of ice out.
Then she turned to me, let me see how angry she was, and that the anger was for me. She had been talking to herself, so what she said was a fragment of a much larger conversation. “You were just babies then!” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You were just babies in the war – like the ones upstairs!”
I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.
“But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” This wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.
“I – I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies -- like the babies upstairs.”
So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.
So I held up my right hand and I made her a promise: “Mary,” I said, “I don’t think this book of mine is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away. If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.
“I tell you what,” I said, “I’ll call it ‘The Children’s Crusade.’”
She was my friend after that.
Readings: “Voices”
1. Steven
Like most homes in this part of Japan, the house consisted of a wooden frame and wooden walls supporting a heavy tile roof.
Its front hall, packed with rolls of bedding and clothing, looked like a cool cave full of fat cushions.
Opposite the house, to the right of the front door, there was a large, finicky rock garden.
There was no sound of planes.
The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant.
Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky.
Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills.
It seemed a sheet of sun.
Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror -- and both had time to react (for they were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the center of the explosion).
Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps into the house and dived among the bedrolls and buried himself there.
Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden.
He bellied up very hard against one of them.
As his face was against the stone, he did not see what happened.
He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him.
He heard no roar.
(Almost no one in Hiroshima recalls hearing any noise of the bomb.
But a fisherman in his sampan on the Inland Sea near Tsuzu saw the flash and heard a tremendous explosion.
He was nearly twenty miles from Hiroshima, but the thunder was greater than when the B-29s hit Iwakuni, only five miles away.)
2. Kendyl
President Harry Truman, announcing the introduction of nuclear weapons;
The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.
We won the race of discovery against the Germans.
We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.
We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war.
3. Dave
All day, people poured into Asano Park.
This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited refugees –
partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only buildings;
partly because the foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the estate's exquisitely precise rock gardens with their quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure;
and also partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic urge to hide under leaves.
Mrs. Nakamura and her children were among the first to arrive, and they settled in the bamboo grove near the river.
They all felt terribly thirsty, and they drank from the river.
At once they were nauseated and began vomiting, and they retched the whole day.
Others were also nauseated;
they all thought
(probably because of the strong odor of ionization, an "electric smell" given off by the bomb's fission)
that they were sick from a gas the Americans had dropped.
4. Teresa
The sole uninjured doctor on the Red Cross hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki.
After the explosion, he hurried to a storeroom to fetch bandages.
This room, like everything he had seen as he ran through the hospital, was chaotic - bottles of medicines thrown off shelves and broken, salves spattered on the walls, instruments strewn everywhere.
He grabbed up some bandages and an unbroken bottle of mercurochrome, hurried back to the chief surgeon, and bandaged his cuts.
Then he went out into the corridor and began patching tip the wounded patients and the doctors and nurses there.
He blundered so without his glasses that he took a pair off the face of a wounded nurse, and although they only approximately compensated for the errors of his vision, they were better than nothing.
(He was to depend on them for more than a month.)
Dr. Sasaki worked without method, taking those who were nearest him first, and he noticed soon that the corridor seemed to be getting more and more crowded.
Mixed in with the abrasions and lacerations which most people in the hospital had suffered, he began to find dreadful burns.
He realized then that casualties were pouring in from outdoors.
There were so many that he began to pass up the lightly wounded; he decided that all he could hope to do was to stop people from bleeding to death.
Before long, patients lay and crouched on the floors of the wards and the laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the corridors and on the stairs, and under the porch, and on the stone front steps, and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside.
Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together.
Many people were vomiting.
A tremendous number of school-girls - some of those who had been taken from their classrooms to work outdoors, clearing fire lanes - crept into the hospital.
In a city of two hundred and forty-five thousand, nearly a hundred thousand people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a hundred thousand more were hurt.
At least ten thousand of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had only six hundred beds, and they had all been occupied.
The people in the suffocating crowd inside the hospital wept and cried, for Dr. Sasaki to hear, "Sensei! Doctor!"
and the less seriously wounded came and pulled at his sleeve and begged him to go to the aid of the worse wounded.
5. Steven
Dr. Taro Takemi, the immediate past president of the Japan Medical Association and a Tokyo physician,
who was studying nuclear physics in Tokyo on August 6, 1945, when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
writes that "it was most regrettable that the bomb was used for war,"
and he casts doubt on the need for the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki.
Yet he adds, "The military had driven Japan to a stage that if it could not win, it would not surrender.
(Japan) surely would have lost the war, and many people would have starved if the atom bomb had not been dropped.
When one considers the possibility that the Japanese military would have sacrificed the entire nation if it were not for the atomic bomb attack, then this bomb might be described as having saved Japan.
"This is what I currently think, although I did think differently at the time...."
6. Dave
Outside the gate of the park, Father Kleinsorge found a faucet that still worked –
part of the plumbing of a vanished house –
and he filled his vessels and returned.
When he had given the wounded the water, he made a second trip.
This time, the woman by the bridge was dead.
On his way back with the water, he got lost on a detour around a fallen tree,
and as he looked for his way through the woods, he heard a voice ask from the underbrush, "Have you anything to drink?"
He saw a uniform.
Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with the water.
When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men,
and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.
(They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel.)
Their mouths were mere swollen, puss-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot.
So Father Kleinsorge got a large piece of grass and drew out the stem so as to make a straw, and gave them all water to drink that way.
7. Kendyl
Prayer of Chaplain William Downey, blessing the Enola Gay before its mission against Hiroshima:
We pray Thee that the end of the war may come soon,
and that once more we may have peace on earth.
May the men who fly this night be kept safe in Thy care,
and may they be returned safely to us.
We shall go forward, trusting in Thee, knowing that we are in Thy care, now and forever. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
8. Teresa
Late in the afternoon, when he went ashore for a while,
Mr. Tanimoto, upon whose energy and initiative many had come to depend,
heard people begging for food.
He consulted Father Kleinsorge, and they decided to go back into town to get some rice from Mr. Tanimoto's Neighborhood Association shelter and from the mission shelter.
Father Cieslik and two or three others went with them.
At first, when they got among the rows of prostrate houses, they did not know where they were:
the change was too sudden, from a busy city of two hundred and forty-five thousand that morning to a mere pattern of residue in the afternoon.
The asphalt of the streets was still so soft and hot from the fires that walking was uncomfortable.
They encountered only one person, a woman, who said to them as they passed, “My husband is in those ashes.”
9. Steven
Among the first Americans to view Hiroshima after the bombing, Tactical Sergeant Bob Speer made this report:
We came to Hiroshima quietly, awaiting something we expected to be huge.
We were not prepared for what we found.
No human being could anticipate the reality of what happened to Hiroshima.
Whether soldier or scientist, no expert in the works of war could have been even slightly prepared for Hiroshima.
There are no words at all.
A man walking through what was the city is stricken by an immensity too great for tears.
We were the first Americans to visit the city-that-was
--we AAF men and correspondents.
We watched silently as we drove past desolation too big for the mind to grasp.
Acres and square miles of emptiness.
We rode in a rickety bus past the numb survivors picking at the wreckage.
They were a burned, scarified, bandaged and speechless people
poking idly at the frightful flatness that had been their homes.
Too overwhelmed for hate, they stared back at us without perceptible bitterness.
Their only preoccupation was with a past now gone beyond memory,
a pitiful effort to regain remembrance
of something effaced as surely as by the hand of God.
10. Teresa
A comparative orderliness, at least, began to be established at the Red Cross Hospital. Dr. Sasaki, back from his rest, undertook to classify his patients (who were still scattered everywhere, even on the stairways).
The staff gradually swept up the debris.
Best of all, the nurses and attendants started to remove the corpses.
Disposal of the dead, by decent cremation and enshrinement, is a greater moral responsibility to the Japanese than adequate care of the living.
Relatives identified most of the first day's dead in and around the hospital.
Beginning on the second day, whenever a patient appeared to be moribund, a piece of paper with his name on it was fastened to his clothing.
The corpse detail carried the bodies to a clearing outside, placed them on pyres of wood from ruined houses, burned them, put some of the ashes in envelopes intended for exposed X-ray plates, marked the envelopes with the names of the deceased, and piled them, neatly and respectfully, in stacks in the main office.
In a few days, the envelopes filled one whole side of the impromptu shrine.
11. Dave
Bob Speer concludes his account:
We Americans who were first to visit Hiroshima went to our cars and left.
One of the airmen brooded for a while as the cavalcade drew away
from the unforgettable empty shape of Hiroshima
and the unforgettable smell of Hiroshima.
"They should make everybody go to this goddam place," he said.
"All countries. They should run tours for all of them. Especially the diplomats."
12. Kendyl
As she dressed on the morning of August 20th, in the home of her sister-in-law in Kobe, not far from Nagatsuka, Mrs. Nakamura,
who had suffered no cuts or burns at all, though she had been rather nauseated throughout the week she and her children had spent as guests of Father Kleinsorge and the other Catholics at the Novitiate,
began fixing her hair and noticed, after one stroke, that her comb carried with it a whole handful of hair;
the second time, the same thing happened, so she stopped combing at once.
But in the next three or four days, her hair kept falling out of its own accord,
until she was quite bald.
She began living indoors, practically in hiding.
On August 26th, both she and her younger daughter, Myeko, woke up feeling extremely weak and tired,
and they stayed on their bedrolls.
Her son and other daughter, who had shared every experience with her during and after the bombing, felt fine.
At about the same time –
he lost track of the days, so hard was he working to set up a temporary place of worship in a private house he had rented in the outskirts –
Mr. Tanimoto fell suddenly ill with a general malaise, weariness, and feverishness,
and he, too, took to his bedroll on the floor of the half-wrecked house of a friend in the suburb of Ushida.
These three did not realize it, but they were coming down with the strange, capricious disease which came later to be known as radiation sickness.
13. Dave
Greg Mitchell, editor of Nuclear Times, writes:
The residents of Nagasaki do not accept the official explanation for the bombing of their city.
They can not understand why destroying one city and 100,000 of its citizens in one fell swoop was not a sufficient demonstration of U.S. superiority over what had become a second-rate power.
Why couldn't the United States have waited more than three days after Hiroshima for Japan to surrender?
The reason, offered in Nagasaki (and by some historians elsewhere),
is that the United Slates was bent on field-testing the plutonium bomb.
It had been tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16. 1945,
but in that case it was detonated on the ground.
There was no proof that such a weapon could he exploded in the air.
The uranium bomb was used first at Hiroshima, because it was considered fail-safe.
But making the uranium bomb was far too time-consuming and expensive.
The plutonium bomb was clearly the weapon of choice.
Without a field test, however. the scientists wouldn't know if it would work,
or what the effects might he.
And it was, in fact, the plutonium bomb that was built and tested exclusively after Nagasaki.
Hiroshima was the last casualty of World War II.
Nagasaki was the first victim of the Cold War.
14. Teresa
Because Miss Sasaki’s leg did not improve, but swelled more and more,
the doctors at the school bound it with crude splints
and took her by car, on September 9th, to the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima.
This was the first chance she had had to look at the ruins of Hiroshima;
the last time she had been carried through the city's streets,
she had been hovering on the edge of unconsciousness.
Even though the wreckage had been described to her, and though she was still in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her,
and there was something she noticed about it that particularly gave her the creeps.
Over everything - up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks –
was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green;
the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses.
Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones.
The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact;
it had stimulated them.
Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot,
morning glories and day lilies,
the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew. Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration,
not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant,
but pushing up in new places among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt.
It actually seemed as if a load of sickle senna seed had been dropped with the bomb.
15. Steven
From UUA president Bill Sinkford’s report to delegates at GA 2003:
While I was in Japan, I took a day to visit the Hiroshima Peace Park, the memorial to the 250,000 Japanese who were killed when we dropped a weapon of mass destruction on that city.
And at a wonderful dinner at the Tsubaki Grand Shrine after our ritual Misogi cleansing, I finally found the question I needed to ask our Japanese hosts.
“How could you possibly have forgiven us for our use of the atomic bomb?”
A member of the Grand Shrine Board, a retired nuclear physicist named Mr. Feruda, responded. “First, thank you for asking the question. No one has ever asked us that before.”
After thinking for a moment, he said: “Despite the horrific death toll and the devastation, we actually have come to see our loss as a blessing.
You see, if we had not lost that war, the military government would probably still be in power and we would still be out colonizing and appropriating resources to fuel our industrial machine.
If we had not lost, the attitude of arrogance that was a part of Japanese life during those times would still be with us, the belief that because we had the might, we had the right to do as we willed.
“You see, if we had not lost… we would have become you. We would have become you, and it would have crippled the soul of our nation.”
16. Dave
It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima.
On the surface, their recollections, months after the disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure.
Toshio Nakamura, who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience,
and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Noboricho Primary School:
"The day before the bomb, I went for a swim.
In the morning, I was eating peanuts.
I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister's sleeping place.
When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram.
My mother and I started to pack our things.
The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding.
Hataya san told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother.
We went to the park. A whirlwind came.
At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river.
We stayed in the park one night.
Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami.
They were looking for their mothers.
But Kikuki's mother was wounded, and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”
17. Kendyl
V-Day
Savor the hour as it comes. Preserve it in amber.
Instruct the mind to cherish its sound and its shape.
Cut out the newspaper clippings. Forever remember
The horns and the ticker tape,
The flags, the parades, the radio talking and talking,
Ceaselessly crying the tale on the noisy air
(But omitting for once the commercials), the sirens shrieking,
The bulletins in Times Square,
The women kneeling in churches, the people's laughter,
The speeches, the rumors, the tumult loud in the street.
Remember it shrewdly so you can say hereafter,
“That moment was safe and sweet.
Safe was the day and the world was safe for living,
For Democracy, Liberty, all of the coin-bright names.
Were not the bomb bays empty, the tanks unmoving,
The cities no more in flames?
That was an Island in time, secure and candid,
When we seemed to walk in freedom as in the sun,
With a promise kept, with the dangers of battle ended,
And the fearful perils of peace not yet begun."
18. Steven
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, and thus we drift inevitably toward a catastrophe beyond comparison.
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive.
--Albert Einstein
Story: School Caps (A True Story) by Kyoko Mon
June, 1990. My aunt, Michiyo, and I are visiting the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, almost forty-five years after the atomic bomb exploded here. Neither of us remembers that day. She was only a baby, living in another city. I had not been born yet.
The rain begins as soon as we enter the park - not a downpour, but the early-summer rain that falls like handfuls of long threads. Our path weaves among many memorial statues and plaques. The largest one is a rock surrounded by flowers that is dedicated to all the people who died in the bombing. The prayer carved on it says, "Please rest in peace. The mistake will not be repeated."
At the end of our path, Michiyo and I go into the memorial museum. Inside the small exhibit rooms, the shelves are lined with things saved from the day of the bomb: watches that stopped at the exact moment of the explosion, burned clothing of the victims, broken windows, a piano with its wires snapped. Large photographs show collapsed buildings and injured people. Michiyo has visited here many times before, because she and Uncle Shiro, my mother's younger brother, live in Hiroshima and their guests often want to see the museum. Still, her face looks sad and serious. We don't talk as we move from one room to the next.
In the third room, we catch up with about twenty schoolchildren in navy blue uniforms. They are standing in orderly double rows while their teacher, a young man, points at the various things on the wall and explains what they were. The students are all boys, no older than second or third grade.
When the teacher is done, we follow the group into the next room, which is very dark. In a roped-off area, two mannequins, mother and daughter, are posed under an eerie orange sky. The mannequins' kimonos are tattered and singed. Cuts and burns mark their faces. Their feet are covered with ashes and rubble. A hush falls over the children ahead of us. They keep walking in their double rows, staring straight ahead. Their heads, under the navy blue uniform caps, scarcely move to either side.
Those caps, made of felt except for the wide black bill, are a sign of discipline. They go with the navy blue blazers with brass buttons, the matching trousers, and the white shirts that must be ironed and starched for weekly inspections. The uniforms have not changed since before the War, when my father's younger brother, Tsuyoshi, was in middle school. I never met Tsuyoshi. I only know two stories about him, one of which is about his school cap.
In 1945, Tsuyoshi lived in Hiroshima with his parents and his sister, Akiko. At his school, classes were often canceled and the students taken to factories to make guns, bullets, and soldiers' uniforms. Young men only a few years older than the students-had gone to fight. Everyone had to help their country win the war, Tsuyoshi was told.
On the morning of the atomic explosion, Tsuyoshi was in a factory down-town. His parents and Akiko were at their home in the suburbs. When they heard about the bomb, they immediately set out to look for Tsuyoshi. The factory where he had been working was unrecognizable. The downtown was full of burned buildings, hurt and dying people stumbling around. There was no sign of Tsuyoshi or his classmates. Still, they kept looking every day, rising early to walk all over the city and coming home at dusk.
One evening in the second week of their search, the family returned home to find an old man at their gate. The stranger walked straight up to my grand-mother, Kiku, bowed deeply, and handed her a blue school cap. Kiku turned it over. On the inside rim, she found Tsuyoshi's name and address, which she had embroidered for him. Kiku stared at the stitches, unable to speak. The man bowed again, this time also to my grandfather and to Akiko, who were standing behind Kiku.
"There was nothing I could do for your son," the man said in a choked-up voice. He had met Tsuyoshi the day after the bomb, when both of them were walking by one of the rivers, looking for help. A few hours later, Tsuyoshi fell down from exhaustion and died. All around them, people were dying. The man, who was burned and sick, had no choice but to go on. He took Tsuyoshi's cap, hoping to look for his family later.
"The moment I saw you," he said to Kiku, "I knew I had come to the right house. Your son looked very much like you."
A few weeks later, the family moved back to Kyoto to join my father, who was going to high school there. They never went back to Hiroshima, even to see the memorial park and the museum.
The last room of the museum has watercolor pictures painted by the survivors of the bomb. They show fire, dead bodies, rivers full of blood. At the door, watching the children file out ahead of us, I think of the children during the war.
At my mother's middle school in those days, the principal unveiled the emperor's picture after his morning lecture. The students had to close their eyes as soon as the veil was lifted. Seeing the emperor's holy likeness, they were told, would blind them. My mother kept her eyes open and found out that she did not become blind.
Though my mother was able to discover the lie about the emperor's picture, she believed in many things that later turned out not to be true. When she and her classmates went to factories to sew the soldiers' uniforms, she believed that the Japanese soldiers were like pure white cherry blossoms, falling for their country. She felt great pride in helping them carry on a war that she was taught was necessary. Every day on the radio she heard patriotic songs and felt moved by the sacrifices people were making to win the war. She had no idea of the terrible things the Japanese troops were doing to people in Korea, in China, all over Asia. She knew nothing about what had caused the war, why it was necessary. Swept away by her feelings, she did not learn to ask the right questions. She came to regret that very much.
In their somber blue uniforms, the children keep walking in their double rows through the park. Walking behind them, I am not sure if we have made much progress since my mother's time. To be sure, the children now are taught that war is bad. But that isn't enough. The anti-war message now appeals only to our feelings, just as the pro-war message had appealed to my mother's feelings. Though the exhibit of the museum promotes peace, it still does not encourage us to ask questions: why so many countries decided to resort to the violence and destruction that led to the Second World War, how each country was responsible. If I were eight or nine, a Japanese child, I would go away from this museum thinking of my country as a helpless victim. I would not know that we, too, had destroyed other people and their homes. I would know little more than my mother had.
Michiyo and I retrace our steps on the path, past the largest memorial stone. Again, I read the prayer carved on it. "Please rest in peace. The mistake will not be repeated." I am disturbed by the vague words. What do we mean by the mistake? Another world war? The atomic bomb? Or all war? And whose mistake was it, anyway?
The saddest thing about Tsuyoshi's death is that he died for the wrong cause. He was in a factory making bullets for the soldiers who were killing other people somewhere else. That is not his fault in a direct way; he did not deserve to die for that. Still, he died believing in war, working in his small way to continue it. If I look away from that painful fact, I would not be doing him justice.
If I could carve a prayer on the memorial stone, I would say, "Please rest in peace. We understand your tragedy. You were killed in the war you believed in without thinking. We promise to ask the right questions, to think critically, to find peaceful solutions to problems so that we will not use violence against other people and they will not use it against us. We will not repeat your mistake. You have taught us this."
Perhaps that would be less poetic and much too long to fit on the rock. Still, if Tsuyoshi were alive, I think he would approve.
The second story I know about Tsuyoshi is about his counting stars. When Tsuyoshi was in fourth grade, he began to have trouble reading the blackboard. He found himself squinting at his books. Right away, he went to see a doctor.
"You are becoming nearsighted," the doctor told him. "But you are very young. It may not be too late to improve your eyesight, to train yourself to see better again. Every night before you go to bed, look at the sky and try to count the stars."
For a month, Tsuyoshi counted the stars for half an hour before going to bed. When he went back to the doctor, he did not need glasses.
I hope that is what he would have wanted me to remember: that our near-sightedness, caught in time, can be reversed. I hope, too, that he enjoyed counting the stars, even if he did it just to make his eyes better. His life was short. I want to believe that he found as much beauty in it as possible.
Meditation:
It is the same promise that repentant survivors always make to those who die in the horror and tragedy of war. Every time, they say it: “Rest in peace,” they say. “We have learned the lesson, finally, painfully, at this too high cost. The mistake will not be repeated. We will not do this again. Your sacrifice has accomplished that.”
Every time they say it, and they mean it. It is no self-serving lie, but the bitter truth. They know better now, those bereaved survivors, with their empty arms and hearts; those veterans with their scarred bodies and scarred memories and scarred lives. THEY will not do it again.
And yet always they are wrong. “Rest in peace,” they say. “The mistake will not be repeated.” Ah, but it will. It is. Pride and greed, violence and folly lead us again and again to this terrible abyss. The libraries still lie in ruins in Baghdad, women and children die every day in the refugee camps of Darfur, Taliban soldiers execute western medical workers among the hills of rural Afghanistan. In Kosovo, in Rwanda, in Gaza, in New York, the grass comes up, as it always does -- purslane and sickle senna and the hairy-fruited bean – then falls away, and melts back into the soil, but the tragedy and suffering remain.
Yet still the promise rises before us, that same, constant promise; neither wholly empty nor fully kept. Never again, we swear. The mistake will not be repeated, we pledge. But which mistake is that? Atomic and nuclear weapons? Targeting civilians? The madness of war itself? The human capacity for violence?
Perhaps, given the kind of biological creatures we are, we may never wholly lose our capacity for violence and unreason; and given a finite and unfinished world, it may always be necessary for us to respond to threats made against what we love and what we value. And yet, our evolution is not complete; we have grown beyond some of the terrors of our cultural infancy – human sacrifice, chattel slavery. Might we not, one day, view organized and sanctioned war, the building of weapons of mass destruction, nation against nation breeding generations of hatred and cruelty, as a thing unfit for humanity? Might we not, one day, indeed learn to think critically, to ask the right questions; to find, if not perfect, at least peaceful resolutions to our conflicts? On this anniversary, is not that a hope worth cherishing?
And if some day, why not today?
Closing Words:
With malice toward none;
with charity for all;
with firmness in the right
as we are given to see the right;
let us strive on to finish the work we are in;
to bind up the wounds of earth; and to do all
which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
among ourselves and with all nations.
