By Stuart Wax
US citizen STUART WAX visited Hiroshima last year, on the 45th anniversary of the atomic bombing. Here he describes his impressions of the Memorial Peace Park.
Across the street from ground zero is a huge baseball field. A modern train system carries passengers, and it looks as though it's business as usual. However, I soon found myself standing in very special place.
The first structure noticed by a visitor to the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park is the Atomic Dome. This building was almost completely demolished by the explosion but somehow the shell of it remained standing.
Later, many of us held hands around the dome and sang.
Origami swans were the most common expression of peace. A necklace with swans wrapped together on a string was handed to me and my friend by a Japanese mother and her young child. They then thanked us for coming.
Cenotaphs are everywhere in the park: for young children, teachers, artists. There is a special place for those who died and were never identified.
Only last year did the government erect a monument to the Koreans who were killed. The Korean community in Japan and abroad worked for many years to let the world know that thousands of Koreans also perished in the blast.
The Peace Memorial Museum is a place where all the world can come and see for themselves what happened at 8.15 in the morning of August 6. Almost every conceivable piece of evidence found after the explosion is in the museum.
Many high school children were outside the museum, asking foreigners what they thought about peace. That's a tough question, I thought, and did my best to answer in my broken Japanese. Even in English, I hadn't a clue.
I left that day trying to figure out why the Japanese government was so pro-nuclear. Hadn't we learned a lesson? Didn't the lives of 100 thousand people who died on that day and 70,000 people who have died since taught us anything? Apparently not.
I was told that the government doesn't really want to remember August 6. That could affect their nuclear power policy. Right-wingers in America and Japan still claim the bombing was
necessary. It "saved" the starving Japanese and "saved" the lives of US soldiers. The logic still frightens me.
I took a lot of pictures that day, but I never smiled in any of them. I looked down and saw the shadow of somebody standing exactly where I was 45 years earlier and felt the shame that so many people in my country do not.