City limits: Tony D’Souza visits Hiroshima

‘Hiroshima is a beautiful city.’

Hiroshima is a beautiful city. When I opened the curtains of my hotel room on the thirteenth floor, it was all spread out before me. It sits in a crescent bay, its extended arms seemingly holding the sea in a wide embrace. In the centre is the bay area, and the suburbs fan out among the wooded hills, which rise gently up from it. It is breathtaking.

But it was only when I walked around the city that it occurred to me that something was different. Something was missing. Where there ought to be huddled masses of historic buildings in the city centre, there is a strange vacancy. There are large flat areas of space everywhere.

When you go to the Peace Park, which is right in the middle of one of those spaces, you find out why. On the morning of Monday, 6 August 1945, a Boeing B-29 aeroplane dropped an atomic bomb on the city.  

The effects were devastating. You can see them at the Peace Park Museum. In a glass case there is an implement that looks like a boat hook. It is completely unremarkable until you read that it was used by one man to pull hundreds of bodies out of the river. Nearby are the front steps of a city bank, set behind glass. You have to look twice before you realise why. Then you see it. There, against the stone steps, is the clear outline of a human being who sat there on that fateful morning. The initial flash from the bomb imprinted their image on the stone forever, like a photograph. 

Within the first few seconds, the bomb killed at least 70,000 people. After a year, radiation sickness, live burial in the rubble, and other injuries, increased that total to 140,000 out of a population of about 345,000. Over ninety per cent of the people killed were civilians. The scientists considered the bomb very inefficient, with less than two per cent of its material undergoing fission. It’s a safe bet the scientists are making much more efficient bombs today.

I could not stand the Peace Park Museum for very long. I found the photographs too harrowing, so I went outside and sat on a park bench. What goes through your mind at moments like that? I don’t know. Maybe it’s what goes through your heart that matters. I felt the futility of war. I can’t really explain it in words but I’ll try. I have often struggled with our Peace Testimony. Was I a pacifist? It was once a question I could not answer, but maybe now I can.

Pacifism is not just a belief. It’s not just one of the testimonies to be ticked off before I can call myself a member. Nor is it merely the belief that war is evil (that’s obvious). It goes much deeper than that. It’s a deep understanding, an inner knowing, beyond words, that war is contrary to the inner goodness within everyone. 

George Fox told the Commonwealth Commissioners, ‘I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars and I knew from whence all wars did rise, from the lust… I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strifes were.’ 

That’s it in a nutshell. Fox was right. The end of war arises when we truly come to know the inner Life.

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Comments

A heartfelt ,and very moving article . Thank you for writing it .

By Neil M on 28th November 2024 - 14:38

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