This week it is 80 years since the Americans dropped two atomic bombs, the first on the 6th of August, onto the city of Hiroshima and the second three days later onto the city of Nagasaki. These are still the only occasions when nuclear weapons have been used, but in the intervening decades several states have built up a terrifying nuclear arsenal of over 10,000 weapons, many much more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. The message which the survivors of those two cataclysms, who are very, very few now, have always pleaded is that never again must such destruction and suffering be unleashed in the world. Preparing for today I watched the two documentaries which Sue has posted in the Weekly Update. What I’m going to tell you about here is what I felt and thought when I went to Hiroshima thirty years ago, to visit the Peace Museum and to go to the iconic ruined dome of the building which I had seen in photographs of the ruined city. In the photographs it is the only building still standing in the vast unmitigated expanse of utter devastation; everything else around it is flattened, grey ashes, the city having been razed by fire after the initial explosion. This building still stood because it had been at the epicentre of the bomb, very near to the bridge over the river which had been the landmark for the gunner to sight as his target.
I walked from the station, surrounded by densely built, large, modern buildings, on the pavement beside a multi-lane city street with its frenzy of traffic. I was taken aback to think how this city had emerged from the ruins I’d seen in the photographs of fifty years ago, soon after the bombing. Suddenly I found myself looking at the ruined building, its carcass only a few paces away from the extremely wide highway. The city seemed to fall away as I left the main highway. I walked round the building until I was looking at it from the riverbank, by some young willow trees, and I remembered reading how people had wondered if anything could ever possibly grow again in Hiroshima. I noticed that the building was propped up on the inside with girders, and that made me wonder about memorials; how long do you keep a ruined building going, and why? Might it be better and more appropriate to let it crumble into debris, like the rest of the area around it had on that day? What exactly was being preserved and respected, with the modern city insistently rushing by so close?
I felt disconcerted that now I was here I was thinking in this clinical way and I wondered if I’d had a preconceived and facile idea of the emotions I’d feel. As I stood under a tree, I started to think about the 6th of August 1945. It had begun like any other day, with the families and workers bustling about their ordinary routines, as an innocuous silver aeroplane flew high above over the city. The bomb released from that aeroplane hit the ground at 8:15, obliterating the innocence of the ordinary. I thought how there is Before August the 6th 1945 and there is After August the 6th 1945: that the world was changed that day, when inconceivable suffering was unleashed into it, as horror and terror and death and pain and sorrow and contamination rained down on Hiroshima, vaporising, incinerating, killing, maiming and poisoning multiple thousands…on and on into the future.
I stood stock still, now feeling gripped by being in the presence of this building which knew the annihilation of that day. I no longer wondered about the propriety of propping it up because something about it had changed for me and somehow the ruin felt holy. I was no longer aware of the modern city’s buildings and its traffic. I was on my own but I felt in the presence of Place and Time: and Sorrow. I wanted somehow to give this revelation an image. I’d called the building an iconic ruin and now I wanted to take a photograph of it as an icon; but there is deep symbolism involved in creating an icon. Then standing under the tree, looking at the building through its leaves, it seemed to me that it was as if the willow leaves were raining down from the sky onto the building and I imagined they were weeping, raining sorrow. I took just one photograph, from under the tree, through the leaves, to commemorate my homage.
Then I turned away and looked at the river behind me. In the museum I’d seen a wristwatch recovered from the river, stopped at 8:15. I remembered reading how people had flung themselves into this river, trying to ease the agony of their burning flesh. And I thought how the river on that day and the river on this day are both the same river, but utterly different; a river ever flowing. I thought how the building had stood still and how the river had never been still, whilst the city around them had disintegrated. As I was looking at the river through the same curtain of willow leaves, watching it flow, I thought of all the other places on Earth which have also known tragedy. And I remembered how I’d felt something similar to this in Glen Coe. I took one more photograph and that has also become an icon for me, which I have looked at every day since then.
The BBC 1 documentary about Hiroshima 80 years after the bombing, which was aired this week, was filmed at the place I’ve been describing. I saw that the space around the ruined building has been opened up in the thirty years since I was there and has been made into a formal Peace Park. I thought how the people coming to pay their respects there now are coming to a very different place from the one where I’d stood. The site is now very architectural, with a spacious, calm layout (watching the film, I had no sense of the city rumbling nearby); I saw the river and I noticed how the willow trees have matured over three decades. Obviously, I cannot stand under one, but they seem groomed now and I don’t think they’d be shedding their straggly tears for me any more. The ruin looked well cared for to me, and I thought how it being propped up inside with girders has now just become part of its structure as a monument. This Peace Park is a smaller version of the larger ones I’d visited in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the atmosphere in them all is of formal reverence. This has made me wonder if the way of paying respect needs to alter as time moves on; whether the longer time elapses from an event, the more a need for formality emerges. Although there are very few people left now who experienced that actual day, there are very many for whom its effects linger, in myriad ways. It made me contemplate again how events linger on in places: and places in people’s memories. I thought how each person who has come there over these 80 years has brought their own interpretation of what the place means to them, and that its value as a memorial will be in how they carry that into their lives.
I was surprised when I saw the photographs of people praying at the site in the Guardian on Wednesday morning because for me it was first thing in the morning and the pilgrims had already paid homage, but then I thought how Japan’s time happens eight hours before ours. I thought of 1945 and I realised that, with the wartime double summer time, when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at 8:15 am on the 6th of August it had been 10:15 pm on the 5th of August in England, when I was asleep. This has made me think of the bombing happening now as I sleep, especially in Gaza and Ukraine, and of how the photographs of their ruins affect me while I feel I can do nothing about it. When I think of what was involved to rebuild Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and so many many more cities and communities) and I contemplate what lies ahead for Gaza and Ukraine, I feel such a need to stand quietly SOMEWHERE and find a way to be aligned SOMEHOW with the suffering that is raining down ‘while I sleep’. Of course it’s not enough, but the photographs I took of the ruin and of the river in Hiroshima have helped me to acknowledge the impotence I feel in the face of suffering, and to try to build from that, to transform what I can.
“Hiroshima | Why The Bomb Was Dropped (ABC Documentary)” on YouTube