Monday, November 29, 2010

Hiroshima

Note - I haven't had Internet access for a few days, and the place I'm staying at in Kyoto now has access through its electrical wires. It's horribly slow. So I won't be able to upload pictures for at least another day. Stay tuned! :) Im going to post here about Hiroshima and add pictures and other posts later.



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Hiro, JaneAnn, Dave and I arrived in Hiroshima in the late afternoon and took a train to our hotel to drop off our stuff. We stayed at the Hiroshima Grand Intelligent - our room was small with a prefabricated bathroom and twin beds that were separated by a drawer that had knobs on the front for each of the lights in the room. The drawer also had an old looking analog clock with dials for minutes and hours, and buttons for 5 radio stations. It made me wonder when exactly the room was made, and if it was ever state of the art...it felt like it was prefabricated then plopped down in its entirety onto the 10th floor.







Hiroshima is known throughout the world as the first city that experienced the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Our first visit was the A-Bomb Hall, the only large structure near the epicenter that remained standing after the blast. It has been repaired over time to make it look like it did immediately following the explosion - a shell of a place. We then visited the Peace Park, and the Peace Memorial Museum. With such history, it's impossible not to pause and reflect about who we are. I've collected my thoughts and will try and capture them here.





Timeless Lament


We are in awe of beauty from disaster. It is something essential that makes us human - larger than the sum of our biological parts. Long before the age of 24-hour news channels, when something horrible has happened, our hearts have rushed to find out more, to understand how something so staggering could befall us. We cannot help but ask "why". Then, after the initial event is over, we show how strongly we want to persevere. Perhaps this is the best answer we can craft to the question. Disaster has always occurred in our universe, and is central to our existence. If not for the event that killed the dinosaurs, say, we would probably not be here today. Everything that we hold dear could be traced to this act of wanton destruction. There are other examples. One wonders what preceded the Big Bang; was something destroyed to make way for all of the seemingly endless space, including stars, galaxies, and planets, in particular our own pale blue dot?



One day, the life-giving star we call our own, that for so long our best minds considered the center of the universe, will fade. It will sputter and flicker and quiver into oblivion. But until the sun dies, this place will be our home, and our instincts will cry for beauty and see it in the face of horrible things. There will be no shortage of disaster in our future, but there also won't be a shortage of a beautiful shared humanity across culture and other boundaries. It will continue to make us wonderful, special creatures in the universe.



The Peace Museum in Hiroshima is a sad place. We spent a few hours walking its halls and looking at the videos, pictures, artifacts, and dioramas. In significant detail, the exhibit went over the history of the city leading to the event, the reasons Hiroshima was chosen to bomb by the US, and the effects of the bombing. It did not seek to address larger rationales about the war, and for the most part refrained from judgments outside of one major conclusion: nuclear weapons are almost unimaginably horrible, are an existential threat, and should be dismantled at any cost. They are a fundamental threat to everything we hold dear. Hiro said the new exhibition at the museum was controversial because it was much less gruesome than the previous version. The reality of what happened should not be lost on us, and sad as it was, the place is something everyone should visit once.





Diorama - Before




Diorama - After


I may write more about this later, but I don't have time now. There's much to see and do today!



The rest of the evening was fun - we got drinks and Okonomiyaki at a popular place in downtown Hiroshima, and sang karaoke at a random small upstairs hostess bar. I sang "My Way", among other things, which seemed to be a crowd pleaser. All you can drink for 70 minutes served us well!



The following day, spent on the island of Miyajima, was wonderful in many ways...there's much more to beauty than sad contemplation. More to come later; I'm pressed for time now. BlogBooster-The most productive way for mobile blogging. BlogBooster is a multi-service blog editor for iPhone, Android, WebOs and your desktop

1 comment:

  1. A beautiful sentiment from both heart and mind! Keep sharing! Leigh

    ReplyDelete