Some Personal Perspective on Hiroshima

 

by Pa Rock

World Traveler

President Biden is in Japan this week meeting with the G-7 leaders of the world's most prominent democracies.  Their meetings are being held in the city of Hiroshima which was the first city in the world to suffer the direct carnage of an atomic bomb  -  a bomb that was dropped at the direction of another US President, Harry S. Truman.   Interestingly, Biden is not the first US President to visit Hiroshima, which is now internationally recognized as a living memorial to Peace.  Barack Obama visited Hiroshima and spoke in front of Peace Park's centerpiece, the Atomic Dome, on May 27th, 2016, seven years ago next week.

I have written about Hiroshima several times in this space because I was fortunate enough to visit the city in February of 1973, less than twenty-eight years after it was bombed by US forces on August 6, 1945.  My wife and I took a military hop (a free ride) from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa to an Air Force facility near Tokyo.  We spent a couple of days touring Tokyo and then took the famed Japanese "Bullet Train," which was then the fastest train in the world, south to the old Japanese capital of Kyoto.  The fast train ended in Kyoto and we had to get on what was derisively referred to as "cattle car" train that forced people to stand tightly packed together for the remainder of the long ride to Hiroshima. 

We spent a long weekend in Hiroshima - where people who spoke English were a rarity at that time - and did a thorough tour of Peace Park over a couple of days with a young Japanese man named "Hiroshi" who volunteered to guide us so that he could practice his English.   In the evenings we walked the streets of the city and visited the colorful, noisy, and ubiquitous pachinko parlors.

For anyone who would like to know more about Hiroshima and the way it was in the 1970's, I have exhaustive accounts of that visit in this blog on the entries of August 6, 2010 (the 65th anniversary of the bombing) and on August 6, 2020, the 75th anniversary of the bombing.  Those pieces contain lots of anecdotal detail and historical tidbits.  Also for anyone who would like a sense of what life was like in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, and the horrific impact that it had on the lives of the ordinary people who were waking up there on that day, I highly recommend John Hersey's "Hiroshima," a small, yet very powerful accounting of life in the city the morning the world changed forever.  It is an extremely moving sketch of the lives of six individuals who witnessed the bombing from ground level and lived to tell the tale.   

(I used Hersey's book in high school history classes.  That is probably something that would be frowned upon today in the rush to sanitize history.)

President Biden is at Peace Park today along with other world leaders.  I hope that each of them is able to take some time and walk among the monuments and read the messages of peace that have been delivered to the people of Hiroshima from the peoples and countries of the world.  It is quite a moving tribute and one that is well worth taking the time to fully appreciate.