Hiroshima Day Commemoration 2018 has just passed but its powerful memory lives on. I went to Hiroshima 16 years ago on a short vacation from teaching duties at Yes School in Sanda. I was hunting through some old letters we sent back to Australia in 2002 and publish an extract below. I think it sums up my complicated feelings about this awful event. Lest We Forget.


April 2002

"Nobody can enter this city without the knowledge, buried sometimes deeply in the psyche, that this is a special place. I entered Hiroshima with something of that feeling that I had when I first came into Dachau. Passing through Dresden I had the same sensation. How can I explain it?

We had no bookings for Hiroshima and I was a little worried. This was a city of over a million and we had a few listings for accommodation in our travel guide, but no detailed map. Nadia tried the first couple of hotels on our keitai but they were booked solid. The youth hostel was full. It was getting dark and the traffic was heavy. Finally, we secured lodging in a minshuku, very close to Peace Park. A little expensive, but very central.

In our meanderings, we had crossed several rivers and seen the cherry trees in full bloom. We were overjoyed – the city looked beautiful with large boughs weeping white petals into the rivers. On another wide boulevarde, trams ran up and down. Hiroshima felt European on first glimpse.

After settling in (our room had a tatami floor and roll up beds!), we set out for a brief evening foray into Hiroshima. We passed through adjacent Peace Park, which is the central symbol and rememberance for the catastrophic atomic bombing which took place on August 6th, 1945. This single incident informs both the past and present mindset of residents here – there is no avoiding the singularity of it.

I remember in school debates (about the merits or otherwise of dropping the bomb), that the central argument advanced by the affirmative ( a line also propagated by the Allies in WW2, then and since) was that it saved millions of lives. A necessary evil to stop a greater evil. This argument is shot to pieces by more recent scholarship that demonstrates that Japan was very close to surrender anyway and that the real reasons for dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had more to do with American fears of the Soviet Union than the defeat of Japan. A demonstration of US power for its new post-war foe.

It is impossible not to empathise with the people of Hiroshima, whose personal circumstances changed forever at 8.15am on that clear morning, over fifty years ago. I wonder whether the Americans gave thought to the 20,000 Koreans who had been forced into service and who perished in a flash. Or the ten of thousands of women and children who dived into the river to drown, so painful were their burns. I doubt it.

I could go on, but no. We walked through the park to the cenotaph, past the peace flame(that will not be extinguished until all nukes are gone from the earth), towards the monument to children who perished in the conflagration. This is really a tribute to Sadako Sasaki, the brave girl who died from leukemenia a decade after the war ended. Many of you will be familiar with her story; her abiding belief that if she folded a thousand paper cranes, she would be healed. Fifty of those cranes are in the adjacent museum – tiny, delicate, colourful. Ten years ago I walked to the Tower of London to see the crown jewels and wondered what the fuss was about; today I would go on my knees to Hiroshima to see these jewels of the heart.

Sadako fell short of folding the thousand cranes before she died, but ever since, children from around the world (though especially in Japan) have been folding them and laying them at this monument.

Very close by the monument, though across the river, is the remains of the Industrial Progress Hall, the gaunt shell and skeletal dome a mute reminder of the fatal blast. I can't even begin to describe the impact of Hiroshima on the traveller; I can only say, come and see for yourself. I'm starting to think that it might be the single most important place on the planet."