3 months ago
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It was a still, quiet morning with rays of sunshine filtering through dappled clouds, on the day I visited Hiroshima. November 2019, just before the onslaught of COVID-19 changed our reality. Having taught dedicated, appreciative Japanese students English as a second language in Melbourne over several years, I was elated to finally be visiting their homeland – but nothing could have prepared me for the day I spent transfixed, at the Hiroshima Memorial Park.
I grew up learning about the indescribable terror inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the atomic bombings of 1945, which ended World War II.
I found it chilling to be standing on the site of such savagery inflicted on innocent civilians, which tragically, in all likelihood, could have been avoided, had Japan surrendered earlier. The magnitude of the terror rained down on this vibrant city was impossible for my mind to grasp (as it had also been a year prior, when I walked the blood-stained earth of Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland).
A woman pays respects at the arch inside the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, Japan.Credit: Jean Chung
Now, as we approach the 80th anniversary of those notorious days – August 6 when the United States detonated the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and August 9, over Nagasaki – it remains for me an impossibility to comprehend such brutality. More than 100,000 lives were lost in the blink of an eye, and another 100,000 in the devastating aftermath, from gruesome burns and injuries, or radiation poisoning. Such numbers can become just statistics: but each is a husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, young and old alike subjected to hell on Earth, as they went about their daily routine.
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The Hiroshima Peace Memorial offers excruciatingly distressing, graphic evidence of the cruelty and annihilation of the cataclysmic event that occurred on this meticulously restored site. Foremost in my mind have remained the heart-wrenching testimonies of the few survivors still able to share their harrowing tales these decades later, as they sit on the tortured ground of Hiroshima surrounding the memorial – supported by passionate descendants and anti-nuclear activists, many of whom have made it their life’s work to preach the futility of violence and war.
But, as I sit and stare, motionless and aching at the never-ending coverage of the barbarism around our world today, I ask myself if humanity is actually capable of change. Could there ever be a day when the world can be at peace, in which megalomaniacs aren’t able to wield such power, in which people of different religions, race and ethnicity can live side by side in harmony?
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History teaches that such a day will likely never come, but we here who enjoy the relative calm of life, geographically distanced from the horrors across the world, must not look away. Rather, we share the responsibility to make our world a better place.
