Greetings friends,
Today's post is going to be a little bit on the somber side. Ever since coming to Japan I had wanted to visit the place where the first ever atomic bomb was used in conflict. I wanted to experience standing at the epicenter of one of mankind's most heinous and cruel acts against itself, and I wanted to understand how humanity is capable of such disregard for human life. While staying in Osaka, I asked my brother if he was ok with a daytrip to Hiroshima and he immediately agreed.
We took the bullet train to travel the 330 km in a little under 1.5 hours, which was mind-blowing in itself, albeit for a different reason. From Hiroshima main station it is a short 17 minute ride by street car to the Atomic Bomb Dome, which in Japanese is called 原爆ドーム, or "Genbaku Dōmu". "Genbaku" means "atomic bomb" in Japanese, but the characters that make up the word individually have the meanings of "original" and "explosion".
The monument is kept in a state of arrested ruin, to look just as it had directly after the detonation. Metal beams are broken and deformed, and rocky debris still lies scattered in and around the husk of the building formerly known as the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The site is located in what once was the city's busiest district and today is the Peace Memorial Park. At its heart you can find the cenotaph for the direct and indirect victims of the explosion.
A concrete saddle protects from weathering a kind of sarcophagus containing the names of the over 140,000 people that had lost their lives. The view through the saddle centers the flames of peace directly in front of the dome. The inscription reads in English: "please rest in peace, for [we/they] shall not repeat the error". The subject is omitted. The Japanese language does not use pronouns you see, which is one of the reasons westerners like me struggle so much learning it.
Not far from the dome you can find the Atomic Bomb Memorial Mound. Here, the ashes of 70,000 unidentified victims are buried. Unfathomable.
Wandering through the park, ever so often you could hear the sound of a bell being carried throughout. It didn't take us long to find the source: The Bell of Peace.
Here a plaque asked us to toll the bell, as presumably many other visitors did as we could hear the sound so frequently. The inscription read:
Bell of Peace
We dedicate this bell
As a symbol of Hiroshima Aspiration:
Let all nuclear arms and wars be gone,
and the nations life in true peace!
May it ring to all corners of the earth
to meet the ear of every man,
for in it throb and palpitate
the hearts of its peace-loving donors.
So may you, too, friends,
step forward, and toll this bell for peace!
Tears were a common occurrence for me then as they are now while writing this post. I truly hope humanity will learn from its errors, but my confidence therein is constantly shaken. Unless we can cure the hatred between this world's peoples, we are doomed to repeat the uncountable errors of our history.
May the fourth be with you,
Nils
