A Pilgrimage of Reckoning: Hiroshima

In spring of 2013, at the peak of sakura season, my mother and I traveled to Hiroshima on a pilgrimage. As an American living in Japan at the time, I felt it my moral duty to pay witness.

There is a difference between knowing and seeing, between being aware and witnessing. I had seen the A-Bomb Dome in photographs, but the physical presence of the structure is undeniably palpable. It sits as a ghost on the landscape, evidence of the city that was, the carcass left after the destruction, and the resilience of the new city flourishing around it. Once contested as a symbol of despair, it now offers some solace, some comfort in our ability as humans to continue. The physical realities of the structure demand from the witness an honest memory. 

In Peace Memorial Park there is a grassy mound formed out of the ashes of around 40,000 unidentified human beings. There is a monument to the Korean dead. To the students who were killed. The Memorial Hall takes you underground, step by step, removing the distractions of the modern city as you lower yourself into a panoramic view, made up of the same number of tiles as the estimated death toll at the end of 1945, of the annihilated city, while hovering overhead is a clock face telling you, with unparalleled specificity, the exact time to which you have been transported.

The Peace Museum confronts you with further artifacts: a melted tricycle, a watch face frozen in time at 8:15, human shadows in concrete, not to mention the vast photographic catalogue of human misery. As an American, the experience of this part of the museum cannot help but recall The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. But there is a very important difference. The museum also displays numerous letters from the roughly 600 pages of declassified documents from the U.S. Government officials, military leaders, and scientists, showing the thought processes that led to the decision to drop the bomb. These letters make it undeniably clear that the justifications for the bomb given to the American people by President Truman, which are still very much a part of the American psyche, are no more than propaganda. (You can sort through these documents at your own discretion here, or read analyses of their contents here, and here.) It is a very humbling experience to be confronted with so much suffering, and to know your government was responsible, to know that what you were raised to believe about the nature of the acts is false, a myth baldly dismantled by the words of the very man who propagated it. And yet, not a single sitting U.S. President has ever visited Hiroshima. Not one. And of the former Presidents, only Jimmy Carter has been.

In the park, in front of the museum, is the Memorial Cenotaph, marking the names of those who died from the bomb. It rests under a concrete saddle-shaped monument, designed as a space to house the souls of the dead. My mother and I, both students of design and art, commented in brief moments of levity during our visit, on our dislike of the style of this monument. But as we approached the Cenotaph from the museum, on foot, at the end of our visit, the power of the monument's design became clear.

This is just one of countless photographs that show how the monument frames the A-Bomb Dome, the eternal flame, and the Cenotaph. There is a difference between knowing and seeing, between being aware and witnessing, though. To stand before the monument, having traveled through one's own personal experience of the horrors commemorated and on display, and to read the words of Saika: it is not just a visual trick, a clever site-specific gimmick; there is a coalescence of thought, of meditation, and emotion that is encapsulated under the thick concrete structure. And it is not something that can be experienced from afar. A pilgrimage is necessary.

The words of Saika are translated thusly:

"Let all the souls here rest in peace for we shall not repeat the evil."

In Japanese, very rarely do you use specific subject markers. This does not translate to English, so the vague subject of "we" was chosen. Saika's intent was to indict humanity, rather than any particular nationality, with responsibility not just for the tragedy, but for a dedication to peace hereafter.

To visit Hiroshima is to hear the demand for an honest memory. For Japan, this means confronting war crimes and the extreme nationalism that justified such crimes. For the U.S., the same confrontation is called for, but we refuse to answer.