Hiroshima

Visiting Hiroshima today is a sobering experience on three different levels. One, you get chills thinking that 61 years ago, a bomb named Little Boy exploded 500 meters above the spot where you're now standing, obliterating the city and killing about 80, 000 people. Roughly 60, 000 more would follow, succumbing to their injuries and dying of radiation poisoning. Estimating the dead is a tricky business, but it doesn't matter: one look at a photograph taken a few days after the Little Boy airburst says more than any numbers could. A building's skeleton here, a building's skeleton there, and the rest....just gone.

Two, the Japanese don't sweep their history under the carpet. The Atomic Bomb Dome stands high, and the Peace Memorial stretches for hundreds of yards along a river. There are Peace Bells, Peace Clocks, eternal flames, and plaques of every size and description, etched in Japanese with the English translation printed directly beneath. It is surprising how soon the monuments went up, one of them being dated in 1951. New York City had better stop arguing and get to monumenting. Hiroshima was wiped out like no city had been wiped out before, and yet they managed to come to grips with it and put up a memorial to their dead in relatively no time at all.

The third and perhaps most sobering thing about visiting Hiroshima is how absolutely naive and foolish the people are who visit it. I'm not talking about the Japanese. If you want an exercise in how to face your own past and perhaps a few inner demons, I invite you to visit the children's memorial. It's about three hundred yards away from ground zero. It stands thirty feet high. It is fairly nondescript: a cone of concrete, a couple of statues at the top, one of them a woman with arms spread, vaguely reminiscent of the cross. In the center of the cone, a bell. People are invited to ring the bell, and say a prayer for the children who were killed in the bombing, as well as pray that children will be safe from such acts again.

While the tourists gawk and the cameras click, the Japanese say their prayers. They handle the tourists with the panache of an old Hollywood star: they ignore them completely. There's nothing particularly solemn here. The Japanese don't rope the area off, give the evil eye to a tourist that chews gum, or tell anyone to keep quiet.

I watched as an old man approached the bell. He had two children with him, a boy and a girl, both under the age of five. The man who designed the children's monument must have had a sense of humor, because the rope for the bell ends four feet above the ground, well out of the reach of small kids. The old man dutifully picked the little boy up, and the boy rang the bell. He put the boy down and they said a five second prayer. Or rather, the old man did; the kid seemed to be complaining that he wanted to ring the bell again because he's a kid, and ringing a bell is fun, if you'll recall.

Next, the little girl. Heartbreak time for everyone watching. It's a touching sight, seeing a very old Asian man stoop over at the waist, pick up a beautiful little girl, and hold her against his chest. He turned her around to face the ropes, her tiny blue dress riding up and showing off her diapers. The girl reached out her little arms and grabbed the ropes. The old man said something in her ear. The little girl grasped the ropes tightly. The old man rocked his body back and forth, helping her. There was a solemn gong. The kid loved it. Smiled, laughed. The old man put her down. No, no, no, and back up again, the old man holding her out to the ropes and gong, one more time. Then they stood side by side and the man prayed for a few moments. The little girl looked up at him and clapped her hands together beneath her chin, mimicking him. Then they walked away.

The dignity in that act was astounding, and it was repeated over and over throughout the morning, men and women hauling boys and girls up to face the ropes and ring the bell. The dignity lay not in their faces or their prayers, but in their very concept of the site. If this had been Canada, the US, Egypt, or any other country besides Japan, there would have been velvet ropes, and a guide to keep order, and sanctimonious worshipers whose only purpose for being there was to be there: to be seen worshiping, and to revel in that worship. The Japanese don't mind the cameras, the tourists, and the noise that comes with them because those things just don't matter. They are irrelevant.

For the Japanese, this worshiping of the dead and the past does not seem to have the rest of the world's affectation of 'look at us mourn, look at us pray.' The memorials in Hiroshima are not a Wailing Wall, a Mecca, or a tomb of an unknown soldier. Not much happens here beyond prayer. Nobody's protesting anything. It is, to those of us used to watching violence mixed with remembrance on the TV news, boring.

It took me a while to figure out why the Japanese are better at remembrance than we are. It didn't take long. Listening to the Westerners around me, I learned that most of us are pretty dimwitted when it comes to matters of history and death.

There was the woman who told her friend that they bombed Hiroshima because the Enola Gay was flying around and it was a clear day over the city. Not too much planning went into it. There was the man who said that if more people came to a place like this, there would be peace on Earth. There was the European who told his American friend "This is all your fault, you know." There was the American man who said, "Isn't it amazing how forgiving the Japanese are?"

No, not really. I don't think the Japanese even look at it as a matter of forgiveness. The very fact that they have so many monuments here tells you that they teach to truth in school: Pearl Harbor was a bad idea. Perhaps when they pray to the dead, they ask forgiveness for themselves.

And they look at WWII for what it is: history. They've erected their monuments, and they pray for their dead, but I get the impression from the way they pray that they know two things: they got themselves into a conflict a long time ago, and it was an act which led to massive death and destruction on the homefront. The second thing I know is that they harbor no grudge, they want no re-match of any kind, and never have. They live with their history, they hold their children up to ring its bells. They don't hide from it, and they don't use it as pretext for hate.

It is refreshing to see a people that can get on with their lives. It is alarming to see us visiting their monuments and blaming our own peoples for acts which the Japanese no longer look at as political. Someday, maybe, we will let ourselves off the hook for being right once in a while, and for doing the right thing. The Japanese today are a beautiful, gracious people, but the atomic bomb wasn't dropped on them. It was dropped on people that cut off the heads of innocent civilians and downed pilots, that used brutal slave labor, that bayoneted POWs in the stomach for the dishonor of surrendering, that made the Bataan Death March three of the most vile words in the language.

"This was a tragedy," a man said to me as I was ready to leave the memorial.

"No, it wasn't," I said. "It was a victory."

And it's in the past.