Friday, June 13This morning was a very monumental experience, the kind you don’t expect to ever have, and the kind you will never forget. Never. And I share what I heard today so that others will remember what happened on August 6th, 1945.
I had the good fortune to attend a session called “Peace Education” and I listened intently with over 100 others to the stories told by Ms. Tomoko Yanagi, who is a Hibakisha, a second generation survivor of the bombing at Hiroshima, as well as the very personal story told by Keijiro Matsushima, a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, who was 16 years old and in school on the day the bomb exploded.
He lived in a dorm near Hiroshima Station on the borderline of the worst area on the south side. That morning, like usual, he went to school by the streetcar. School began at 8:00 am, so he was already inside a building two kilometers from the hypocenter before the bomb went off. As he said, had he gone later on the streetcar, he would have been “barbecued” because he later saw unfortunate victims smoldering in the remains of a streetcar.
He was in first period, math class, seated in the front of the room, on the Southside. At 8:15 he looked outside the window, casually, and saw two B29 bombers flying high in the sky, which seemed relatively innocuous. It was a beautiful sunny day; there was a soft breeze and blue sky, much like the morning of 9/11 when the planes hit the twin towers. He was “careless” about what he saw. He remarked that Japan had no more airplanes or anti-aircraft machine guns, so he really thought nothing of it. He glanced back down to the text book, and in that moment came the searing Technicolor orange flash, like a sunset dream. But he survived. And he doesn’t hate America. He opened by apologizing for what happened at Pearl Harbor, and believes that forgiveness is the only path to peace.
In his introduction he said, “I am a most fortunate survivor. I’m still alive today. So I thank Buddha. Buddha has kept me alive to share my story. And I forgive America for what they did to us.”
The following is a draft of a series of poems, or maybe it’s all just one long poem, I don’t know yet. They are mostly his words, but as he spoke them, this is how they came out on the page in my notebook:
We are good friends,
you and I. People
are people wherever
we go…
We want to run from
the past to make a
peaceful world
A future…
“A beautiful day”
They are beautiful against
the blue backdrop, those
blackbirds trying out being
God, so high in the sky
morning sun calming quiet
cherry trees in the courtyard
glancing back, the textbook
retinal savior: the searing flash
The shock wave
the heat wave
relentless onslaught
on the instant
The world turned sunset
everything decided for each
of them: the people wherever
they were; even in the shadows
Or not, making the difference
between life and death.
I covered my eyes,
covered innocent young ears
then hid under desk
“Afternoon midnight”
Huge noise
the whole world turning
pitch black like midnight
and me crawling around
on the floor in blindness
Huge noise
I cried to Buddha
I cried to my mother
I cried to my father
hearing nothing
Huge noise
that deadly quiet
70 boys in one room
in silence, solitude
for one or two minutes
Huge noise
then the light comes in:
the structure, the room,
the floor
they saved my frail life.
Whole body bleeding
from head to feet. Shards of glass,
clothes torn. Sticky blood.
Students all bleeding
some with many broken bones:
the walls saved our lives.
How can two small planes
screaming high in the sky
drop one thousand bombs
so quickly, in a moment?
Not knowing, of course then
what atomic weapons were.
At the end of the Aeneid,
Aeneas bravely, and lovingly
carries his frail father on his
shoulders out of the burning
city of Troy. In a similar way
Matsushima-san helped his
bleeding friend north, into town
towards the Red Cross center
only minutes after that apocalyptic
blast, passing on their way a streetcar
from which smoke whirled from
singed bodies, and everywhere
wounded people wandered, walking
from the central area of the blast;
yet Matsushima-san and his friend
continued to walk, not
knowing that the horrors
they continued to pass, moving ever
so slowly inwards towards
the hypocenter, had befallen
those sad, misfortunate doctors—
now blindly crawling around,
skin boiled and sloughing off
in great paper-sheets—who
needed aid themselves only the
divine could bring. And those
miserable people, the ones
walking from a fiery hell, smoked
from head to foot, charcoal
colored, hair standing straight
up, or burned off—corpses walking,
skin burned so badly it pealed
with the slight breeze—some
naked, or covered only in shreds
of clothes still falling off, while
others to the left and the right
were swollen like pigs, skin
dripping, revealing glistening red
muscle now as the dermis took flight
Zombies walking, all of them
without exception, arms stretched
out, straightforward, smoldering,
searching for a kind of reprieve
from pain, some salve to stop
the sizzling of skin. No help
from the hospital—
it was full of burned people,
doctors themselves burned and
circling in dirt for water, for balm;
wretched, helpless, needing help
themselves. Walking back from the
Red Cross we approached a river
bodies floating, seeking relief
dying. Bodies buoyed in water,
floating up and down in the river,
ebbing and flowing with the tide.
The miserable people—
wandering into schools
and shrines asking for water
in the dark—by the morning
they were dead—miserable
shadows, a mournful dirge
laying on the ground, now a
shadow in silence.
The effects of radiation were
high fever, diarrhea, boils:
I left the city soon after the blast,
I was exposed, but not as badly
as others. People outside the blast
who came into the affected area
the next day got ill; some died.
A-Bomb diseases: loss of hair,
fever, spots on bodies, and no one,
no one knew how to treat them.
the burns formed infectious puss
and maggots formed in the skin:
arms and legs and faces alive with
moving maggots.
A severe, horrible weapon.
I am a most fortunate survivor.
I’m still alive today. So I thank
Buddha. Buddha has kept me
alive to share my story.
Ten days later I returned to the
city where nothing remained—
a field of ashes stretching to the
ocean and to the island in the sea.
Memories are being lost;
the children now are indifferent:
we are trying to change that,
we are trying to keep the horrible
story alive, so that we learn from
it, and so it never happens again.
I had the good fortune to attend a session called “Peace Education” and I listened intently with over 100 others to the stories told by Ms. Tomoko Yanagi, who is a Hibakisha, a second generation survivor of the bombing at Hiroshima, as well as the very personal story told by Keijiro Matsushima, a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, who was 16 years old and in school on the day the bomb exploded.
He lived in a dorm near Hiroshima Station on the borderline of the worst area on the south side. That morning, like usual, he went to school by the streetcar. School began at 8:00 am, so he was already inside a building two kilometers from the hypocenter before the bomb went off. As he said, had he gone later on the streetcar, he would have been “barbecued” because he later saw unfortunate victims smoldering in the remains of a streetcar.He was in first period, math class, seated in the front of the room, on the Southside. At 8:15 he looked outside the window, casually, and saw two B29 bombers flying high in the sky, which seemed relatively innocuous. It was a beautiful sunny day; there was a soft breeze and blue sky, much like the morning of 9/11 when the planes hit the twin towers. He was “careless” about what he saw. He remarked that Japan had no more airplanes or anti-aircraft machine guns, so he really thought nothing of it. He glanced back down to the text book, and in that moment came the searing Technicolor orange flash, like a sunset dream. But he survived. And he doesn’t hate America. He opened by apologizing for what happened at Pearl Harbor, and believes that forgiveness is the only path to peace.
In his introduction he said, “I am a most fortunate survivor. I’m still alive today. So I thank Buddha. Buddha has kept me alive to share my story. And I forgive America for what they did to us.”
The following is a draft of a series of poems, or maybe it’s all just one long poem, I don’t know yet. They are mostly his words, but as he spoke them, this is how they came out on the page in my notebook:We are good friends,
you and I. People
are people wherever
we go…
We want to run from
the past to make a
peaceful world
A future…
“A beautiful day”
They are beautiful against
the blue backdrop, those
blackbirds trying out being
God, so high in the sky
morning sun calming quiet
cherry trees in the courtyard
glancing back, the textbook
retinal savior: the searing flash
The shock wave
the heat wave
relentless onslaught
on the instant
The world turned sunset
everything decided for each
of them: the people wherever
they were; even in the shadows
Or not, making the difference
between life and death.
I covered my eyes,
covered innocent young ears
then hid under desk
“Afternoon midnight”
Huge noise
the whole world turning
pitch black like midnight
and me crawling around
on the floor in blindness
Huge noise
I cried to Buddha
I cried to my mother
I cried to my father
hearing nothing
Huge noise
that deadly quiet
70 boys in one room
in silence, solitude
for one or two minutes
Huge noise
then the light comes in:
the structure, the room,
the floor
they saved my frail life.
Whole body bleeding
from head to feet. Shards of glass,
clothes torn. Sticky blood.
Students all bleeding
some with many broken bones:
the walls saved our lives.
How can two small planes
screaming high in the sky
drop one thousand bombs
so quickly, in a moment?
Not knowing, of course then
what atomic weapons were.
At the end of the Aeneid,
Aeneas bravely, and lovingly
carries his frail father on his
shoulders out of the burning
city of Troy. In a similar way
Matsushima-san helped his
bleeding friend north, into town
towards the Red Cross center
only minutes after that apocalyptic
blast, passing on their way a streetcar
from which smoke whirled from
singed bodies, and everywhere
wounded people wandered, walking
from the central area of the blast;
yet Matsushima-san and his friend
continued to walk, not
knowing that the horrors
they continued to pass, moving ever
so slowly inwards towards
the hypocenter, had befallen
those sad, misfortunate doctors—
now blindly crawling around,
skin boiled and sloughing off
in great paper-sheets—who
needed aid themselves only the
divine could bring. And those
miserable people, the ones
walking from a fiery hell, smoked
from head to foot, charcoal
colored, hair standing straight
up, or burned off—corpses walking,
skin burned so badly it pealed
with the slight breeze—some
naked, or covered only in shreds
of clothes still falling off, while
others to the left and the right
were swollen like pigs, skin
dripping, revealing glistening red
muscle now as the dermis took flight
Zombies walking, all of them
without exception, arms stretched
out, straightforward, smoldering,
searching for a kind of reprieve
from pain, some salve to stop
the sizzling of skin. No help
from the hospital—
it was full of burned people,
doctors themselves burned and
circling in dirt for water, for balm;
wretched, helpless, needing help
themselves. Walking back from the
Red Cross we approached a river
bodies floating, seeking relief
dying. Bodies buoyed in water,
floating up and down in the river,
ebbing and flowing with the tide.
The miserable people—
wandering into schools
and shrines asking for water
in the dark—by the morning
they were dead—miserable
shadows, a mournful dirge
laying on the ground, now a
shadow in silence.
The effects of radiation were
high fever, diarrhea, boils:
I left the city soon after the blast,
I was exposed, but not as badly
as others. People outside the blast
who came into the affected area
the next day got ill; some died.
A-Bomb diseases: loss of hair,
fever, spots on bodies, and no one,
no one knew how to treat them.
the burns formed infectious puss
and maggots formed in the skin:
arms and legs and faces alive with
moving maggots.
A severe, horrible weapon.
I am a most fortunate survivor.
I’m still alive today. So I thank
Buddha. Buddha has kept me
alive to share my story.
Ten days later I returned to the
city where nothing remained—
a field of ashes stretching to the
ocean and to the island in the sea.
Memories are being lost;
the children now are indifferent:
we are trying to change that,
we are trying to keep the horrible
story alive, so that we learn from
it, and so it never happens again.
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