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７５年間は草木も生えない
This year, the ceremony in the Peace Park in Hiroshima City to commemorate the atomic bombing took place with only a few people in attendance. The yearly 灯篭流し (tōrō nagashi, "Lantern-floating") event was cancelled. A quiet way to mourn the 75th anniversary yesterday.
There aren't a lot of 被爆者 (hibakusha, "Atomic bombing survivors") left, and some of those left are starting to worry that after their gone, there won't be anyone to pass on their lessons anymore.
Though when I see their calls for America to apologize, I think of the article I read just yesterday about how 60,000 French civilians died in the bombings leading up to D-Day, something no one ever talks about. I think about the hibakusha I met in the Peace Park, who was angry about the very idea of Hiroshima as a city of peace because of Imperial Japan's warmongering. And I think of why some people think America should apologize for the bombing.
There's a tendency in Japan to treat the war as something that just happened to them, rather than something the Empire of Japan deliberately provoked and then committed atrocities that killed tens of millions during. You can see this often in Japanese fiction, too--places like Wutai in Final Fantasy VII, or Hai-Lan in Valkyrie Profile, where they're small and cultured and at the mercy of other nations around them, who often brutally attack them seemingly without provocation. Woe is us, it seems to say. Our tiny nation has suffered so, but we have endured. Why do they hate us?
No more nuclear weapons is a good message. They are too terrible to be used, and at least so far after WWII, that's held true. Whenever I think of the commemorations for the dead, I think of the faded black-and-white picture on my elderly Japanese tutor in Japan's family shrine, of a teenage boy in horn-rimmed glasses, who said that it was of her elder brother who died in the bombing. I think of stories like this one, or what I saw in the 広島平和記念資料館 (Hiroshima Heiwa Kinen Shiryōkan, "The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum"). But I think of that man in the Peace Park's anger when he half-shouted, "It was a military city! A military city!" He at least had reason to be dubious of peace this and peace that and why, exactly, there was a Peace Park in the first place.
世界に平和を広がるように. May peace spread across the entire world.
This post's subject is an excerpt from a poem, which in official translation reads:
There aren't a lot of 被爆者 (hibakusha, "Atomic bombing survivors") left, and some of those left are starting to worry that after their gone, there won't be anyone to pass on their lessons anymore.
Though when I see their calls for America to apologize, I think of the article I read just yesterday about how 60,000 French civilians died in the bombings leading up to D-Day, something no one ever talks about. I think about the hibakusha I met in the Peace Park, who was angry about the very idea of Hiroshima as a city of peace because of Imperial Japan's warmongering. And I think of why some people think America should apologize for the bombing.
There's a tendency in Japan to treat the war as something that just happened to them, rather than something the Empire of Japan deliberately provoked and then committed atrocities that killed tens of millions during. You can see this often in Japanese fiction, too--places like Wutai in Final Fantasy VII, or Hai-Lan in Valkyrie Profile, where they're small and cultured and at the mercy of other nations around them, who often brutally attack them seemingly without provocation. Woe is us, it seems to say. Our tiny nation has suffered so, but we have endured. Why do they hate us?
No more nuclear weapons is a good message. They are too terrible to be used, and at least so far after WWII, that's held true. Whenever I think of the commemorations for the dead, I think of the faded black-and-white picture on my elderly Japanese tutor in Japan's family shrine, of a teenage boy in horn-rimmed glasses, who said that it was of her elder brother who died in the bombing. I think of stories like this one, or what I saw in the 広島平和記念資料館 (Hiroshima Heiwa Kinen Shiryōkan, "The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum"). But I think of that man in the Peace Park's anger when he half-shouted, "It was a military city! A military city!" He at least had reason to be dubious of peace this and peace that and why, exactly, there was a Peace Park in the first place.
世界に平和を広がるように. May peace spread across the entire world.
This post's subject is an excerpt from a poem, which in official translation reads:
That autumn
in Hiroshima, where it was said:
'For 75 years nothing will grow,'
new buds sprouted
in the green that came back to life.
Among the charred ruins,
people recovered
their living hopes and courage."