Hope in Hiroshima

HIROSHIMA moves you. Fifty-five years after the atom bomb was dropped on the city at 8.15 on a bright, cloudless morning. Hiroshima troubles you. Decades after August 6, 1945, when millions of men, women and children were burnt to ashes, their homes destroyed, and their beloved city took on a ghostly form. Hiroshima pierces your conscience. A long, long time after man's savagery exploded in that flash of light which wiped out hope and trust, nay a civilisation built up over hundreds of years.

Hiroshima began as a castle town in the closing years of the 16th century, and grew into an extraordinarily prosperous city. When Emperor Meiji moved the imperial headquarters to Hiroshima in September 1894, it added to the region's stature. Even when the king left Hiroshima a year later, it did not make much of a difference. It continued to progress and shine, and even became an important military base. These were perhaps the reasons why the U.S. chose to target Hiroshima.

But it was the innocent who suffered and lay writhing in pain as the "Little Boy (as the atom bomb was then called) descended from the skies. More than 140,000 people died a terrifying death. Buildings caught fire and crumbled within minutes of the bombing. Trees and plants disappeared as the heat from the blast touched a horrifying million degrees celsius. And as the mushroom cloud rose into the air, Hiroshima lay in ruins - flattened and devastated.

For years, the effects of the atomic radiation continued to cripple the young and the old. Body sores and wounds never healed. Hair never grew. Cancer struck. An entire community was annihilated.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Park show these horrors. The iron shutters bent by the blast, the melted glass bottles, the charred lunch boxes and the burnt school uniforms reveal how cruel man can be. The ruins of what was once the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall - now called the A-bomb Dome - remind one of the evil power of nuclear weapons.

But what really hits you is the statue of Sadako Sasaki and her mother in the Park. Exposed to radiation when she was two, she developed blood cancer 10 years later. Despite intense pain, she folded bits of paper into cranes in the fond hope that a belief will come true. Japanese think that folding 1000 paper cranes will cure one of any disease. But little Sadako died eight months later with a paper crane in her hand.

There are other stories, as sad as Sadako's, that make us feel helpless in the face of mankind's madness. Machiyo Kurokawa was 16 when the tragedy occured. What he saw was a nightmare: "I looked up to see a figure in front of me, burn over her entire body, with not a hair on her head. As I looked carefully at this apparition, I saw that it was a friend of my younger sister's, a pretty pink-cheeked child. It was impossible to reconcile yesterday's image with what I now saw before me."

There are many other such stories: of a mother running away from her infant daughter, who lay trapped under debris, because she was afraid of being devoured by the advancing fire; of a student finding his entire skin hanging like shreds of cloth and ....a

Unfortunately, this ghastly event seems to have been forgotten by a world that refuses to destroy its nuclear bombs. Professor Naomi Shohno of Hiroshima Jogakuin College says in a book: "The nuclear weapons in existence today are said to be the equivalent of 20,000 megatons of TNT, or 1.33 million bombs of the kind exploded over Hiroshima". These are more than enough to finish humankind.

But in the midst of all this darkness, I saw hope when I visited Hiroshima and the Peace Memorial recently. That afternoon I saw hundreds of school children there, patiently reading every inscription on the exhibits and taking down notes. Their teachers were explaining the importance of a nuclear free world.

These children will probably grow up fully aware of the threat of extinction. But is it not time that the others elsewhere realised that the abolition of nuclear arms is the touchstone of basic human values?

G. B.

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