Charlotte Writes for World Peace

[merimask]

My daughter Charlotte gave me permission to post her paper about Hiroshima here.  It was her final assignment for a college level WW2 course she is taking in high school.

The kids were given a list of books about WW2 to choose from as inspiration, and were supposed to write a narrative based on the book's subject material.  Char chose a book about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, but she was having a hard time fabricating a story about it.  I suggested that rather than create a fabrication, she should write about her real experience in Hiroshima.  She'd spent a day there while touring Japan with her People To People Student Ambassador group, and it affected her profoundly.   I thought perhaps the aftermath of the bomb was at least as relevant as the actual day of the attack, and she agreed.

Apparently her teacher agreed too.  The same teacher who, at the beginning of the semester, announced that he never gives perfect "A" grades or 100%, gave her 105% on this paper.

It's a long essay, but worth a look.  Keep in mind she is fifteen.  I have added nothing to this, and I haven't edited it either; these are her own words.

 Voices From Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not a novel in even the most general sense of the term. It is not a book filled with prose in the form of fictional characters who’ve led fictional lives with fictional families. Voices is, rather, a compilation of accounts from the real Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the story of real innocent men, women, and children caught in the crossfire between countries at war, and their memories of those two fateful days of the devastating American attack upon their homeland.

The book not only immortalizes their memories of the bombing, but how their lives and the lives of their family and friends were forever changed.

It was these written memories of the survivors’ life-changing experiences that caused me to think back to my own life-changing day in Hiroshima, when I walked along the same streets that others had walked over sixty years before me, still shocked by the "white flash" that had turned the streets around them to rubble.

Today, the buildings lining Hiroshima’s streets are no longer piles of gray rubble representing the lives destroyed by the nuclear bomb. Homes and business class buildings alike were eventually rebuilt as the city modernized and people slowly moved past the pain war had brought them, though it was never forgotten. Plants and trees clumped along the sidewalks also reflected memories from the bombing. It was once said that, "The soil of Hiroshima will never again hold the roots of flowers and trees." The world jumped to its feet in response to this statement’s apparent truth, donating plants and soil from nearly every corner of the world to restore the city’s former green luster, and today these plants still thrive in the soil that has become Hiroshima’s.

My journey started along the river that the American bomb was dropped over on August 6, 1945, taking me past world famous symbols of peace such as the A-Bomb Dome and through Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum. Those few hours I spent tracing the paths of millions of people before me have changed my life forever.

This is my story.

 

I sat in one of the many comfortable gray seats lining the inside of a huge, gleaming white Japanese tour bus that had faithfully taken us across nearly every corner of Japan.

My feelings about the beauty and the reverence for it within this country stayed with me even as I sat with my friends around me laughing about, perhaps, Japanese pudding or the like, as we waited to reach our next destination. I cannot speak for everyone, but to me, Hiroshima had always been synonymous with World War II. My mind’s eye wandered to images of mushroom clouds and scratchy black and white movies of men working busily on metal torpedo shaped bombs with "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" lovingly inscribed on their sides. To me, these images were a symbol of the pain and suffering of Japan, but more importantly they symbolized our victory at successfully ending an even more painful war.

The din of our conversations lulled as the bus rolled to a stop in a narrow strip of shade next to a small garden that blocked the majority of the scorching midday sun. We watched in quiet wonder as a very small woman jauntily hopped up the stairs from the sliding door of our bus to the cramped the main aisle. Her attire reflected the severity of the heat outside and the fact that it was the height of the Japanese summer. She sported a wide-brimmed straw hat, a white but loud florally printed button up shirt, and a pair of huge circular red sunglasses that made her reminiscent of a small bug. She enunciated very carefully in clear English as she briefly introduced herself as our tour guide in Hiroshima and launched into a story filled with facts about the bombing of her city. It was heavy with numbers and we were all itching to get off the bus, so while I can’t quite remember the details of her soliloquy, I’m sure it was a very good introduction to Hiroshima before our disembarkment.

We all filed off the bus and stood obediently beside the stone walls along a glittering cerulean river that effectively cut the city in half. A little wooden boat was floating on the far side of the river, resting in the broken shadow of a huge dilapidated building that our tour guide called the "A-Bomb Dome". She continued on to explain that the Japanese had decided to preserve one of the only buildings that had even remotely survived the bombing as a testament to the horrible things that had happened that day.

The details of the Dome came more clearly into view as our group shuffled closer to it, crossing a low bridge and retreating into the shade of a small grove of trees besides the building. The stone that had previously made up the walls of the A-Bomb Dome was all but gone, with only the bare minimum left to hold up the structure. Holes in the walls were large enough to allow us to see straight through the building to the statues of angels on the other side. The ground inside and just outside of the Dome was covered with a layer of debris and chunks of stone that had been blown off of it. While slightly melted steel rods that had previously been the reinforcement holding up the building could be seen sticking out of the largest of these chunks. But the most alarming aspect of the A-Bomb Dome was the dome itself, which marked the structure’s highest point. The bulk of the dome had disappeared, leaving only the spindly framework underneath.

It was eerie to look at the Dome, frozen in a time of pain and fear. We walked next to it and down a set of stairs to a small courtyard with a beautiful fountain and the same angel statue that I had glimpsed through the Dome. Our guide told us it was commemorating the day they were bombed, and those that had worked to restore Hiroshima after it was destroyed.

Above another set of stairs was an expansive stone bridge that we used to again cross the gleaming river. That very same bridge turned out to be the one that American pilots carrying "Little Boy" had been told to find before dropping the nuclear bomb over Hiroshima. I allowed my mind to wander for only a second then, and I wondered about the people that had been walking across this bridge as they had done every day when suddenly their life was ended. Which of them had children or lovers…? Which of them were smiling before they burned? Which were crying?

The bridge opened up to a series of courtyards with various statues built in reverence for all those whose lives ended with the dropping of the bomb. The sheer number of markers was shocking. There was even a monument dedicated to the American soldiers and citizens who had died in the attack. Even though it was America that had set the bomb loose on the city, and even though the number of American deaths paled in comparison to those we caused, they honored our dead without reserve.

Beyond these monuments stood one awe-inspiring statue that commanded a courtyard of its own. The statue rose above the leafy trees surrounding it and was flanked by glass cases as tall as a person that were filled with colors which, on closer inspection, held billions of folded paper cranes. The statue’s base lifted an image of a beaming little girl holding a huge origami crane high above her head. She was beautiful and positively overjoyed.

This little girl was quite real and her story illustrated the horrible effects of radiation. Ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped a mile from her home, twelve year old Sadako Sasaki was diagnosed with severe leukemia and given less than a year to live. It was said that Sadako’s best friend from elementary school inspired her to attempt folding one thousand paper cranes, as it is a common Japanese legend that one who folds a string of one thousand origami cranes will have an earnest wish of theirs granted.

A few short months later, Sadako’s left leg had swollen dangerously and her entire body was covered in lumps and bruises, she was too tired to eat or drink. Her mother set closest to her, encouraging her to eat some tea on rice and, for once, she ate it. Smiling, Sadako remarked, "It’s good," closed her eyes and drew her last breath. At the age of twelve, Sadako Sasaki died surrounded by her entire family. She had folded six hundred and forty four cranes.

Sadako’s story touched millions all across the globe. The monument in Hiroshima became a necessary stop for thousands of people every year and each donated at least one paper crane to the growing collection surrounding Sadako’s Statue. Just as I was spurred to do.

A large stone pathway lined with trees led from Sadako’s courtyard to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in the distance. Two separate memorials were placed at the middle of this spacious path. The first one we came across rose out of a shallow pool of glistening water and featured a large fire at the center that seemed to dance in the unassuming breeze. The statue was of two hands joined at the wrist, palms open and splayed to either side. The flame sat at the center of the palms as if it was an offering, or perhaps it was being presented as more of a plea. Our guide explained that the fire would burn until the day that all nuclear weapons in the world were destroyed.

"This is an eternal flame," she remarked as she turned to continue down the path.

The next statue came at the end of the shallow pool that the other had been in. It was a simple arch. The arch stood at about twelve feet tall at its highest point and was about half as wide. As the majority of us secretly deemed the sight as uninteresting, we began to chat quietly about decidedly superfluous things, but our guide’s voice silenced us almost immediately.

Sixty years before our time it was common for children to use whatever they could find to build arches like this statue to hide in and play in. This statue was meant as a safe haven for the lost souls of the children killed by the bomb to go to so they would not be alone.

This narration ruined us.

The last stop on our brief but emotionally charged visit was Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum, a huge complex of two buildings connected by a walkway made entirely of glass. The sun was still blinding and the heat of the day was still just as unbearable as we followed our little guide towards the first of the buildings. But our world changed once we passed through the museum’s hefty doors.

Sun streamed through the high windows of the main room in ribbons. They all seemed to illuminate a massive mural on the far wall. The painting was a smoky red and black canvas that featured a city that had gone up in flames, which stretched upwards towards the black clouds above it. A vicious looking demon perched among the clouds, grinning down at the burning city. This, if nothing else, clearly stated the Japanese view of the attack on their homes, and this became increasingly more justified as my day wore on. Somehow, this was all just so sad.

But the mural was only the beginning and the next room was filled with paintings by survivors of the bombing. Each one was accompanied by a short caption to explain the pictures and each picture told largely the same story. One drawing was of a room filled with bleeding and bandaged people lying on the ground. Another was of a little girl trying desperately to pull her dying grandmother from underneath the ruins of their home. A third showed a burned husband and wife tangled in their last embrace. These drawings were in no way biased opinions, they were facts about common sights on August 6^th, 1945.

Our group again crossed into the main room of the museum and through a door, which led to an open room filled with people milling about the floor and looking at the exhibits. Directly in front of us were two very large circular models. The first one, on the right, was a bird’s eye view of Hiroshima the week before the attack. The second, on the left, featured the same model and view except it was of Hiroshima after the bomb had been dropped. The amount of destruction was staggering when seen in that format. Everything was gone. Important places were clearly marked, such as the A-Bomb Dome and the future site of the Museum itself. But the city was generally desolate, and even though I had only just entered the museum a feeling of emptiness and pain grew in my stomach then and stayed with me from then on.

Something I had never fathomed until then was exactly where "Little Boy" exploded. That room of the museum was entirely open and about three stories tall save for a crescent of floor that formed the second story of exhibits. A comparatively small orange ball was suspended from the ceiling above and hung, unmoving, over the model of a destroyed Hiroshima. The distance from the ball to the model represented how high above Hiroshima the bomb had actually exploded. A sign labeled the actual high as 580 miles or 1980 feet above ground zero. From almost 600 miles above the city, America had destroyed an entire city and murdered 140,000 people.

The walls of that room were plastered with banners and posters with various facts about the destruction. This room and the floor above presented more of a broadened view of the attack. It, like our guide’s introduction, was laden down with numbers and facts that, honestly, did little to prepare us for the exhibits that followed.

This room was safe.

Our group broke off into smaller factions that somberly darted from poster to poster and model to model, obligingly scanning the words and pictures. Up the spiral staircase positioned to the left in the first floor room was a comparatively narrow floor of mounted glass cases filled with facts. The flow of people was steady and controlled here until the stream slowed to a stop at a screen showing movies of important ambassadors expressing sympathy for the people of Japan. I watched for a few minutes wondering how many of their words held truth beyond the formalities.

This room opened up into a small better-lit one with a souvenir stand inside of it. Many of the museum goers loitered around the stand and chatted lightly about the price of various objects. Surprisingly, none of them seemed to speak Japanese.

Their conversations hung in the air as I broke from my group and walked down the glass chamber connecting the two buildings I had seen from outside. Slowly the light from the chamber grew thin and nearly disappeared as I started to walk through a red and black painted corridor that began to resemble bricks. The walls increasingly deteriorated until the walkway was cut short by a burned and broken brick wall. This wall blocked my view of the next room of exhibits in the museum as I walked along the alley, but now I could see that the dimly lit room was lined by glass cases and featured a few that were freestanding.

My eyes were still trying to adjust to the lack of light in the room as I almost walked into the first case in the middle of it. Inside of the case was a cut of the yellow-orange bricks of a wall and four or so broken steps leading up to it. A sign attached to the top of the glass stated that this stone had been lifted from the earth of ground zero right after Hiroshima was bombed. On the last couple steps and the wall itself, the clear form of a running man had been burned into the stone.

To the right stood an alcove with plastic models of burning people wearing real clothes from those who died. Their skin was melting.

The walls behind the glass cases were covered with a panoramic view of the destroyed city, while the glass cases themselves were filled with the few items that had not been completely destroyed by the blast. Each item was attached to a sign that told the story of its owner, if they had been able to be identified. One item was a tattered, burned, and cracked pocket watch. The hands were frozen at 8:15am. The paper said it had belonged to sixty year old Kengo Nikawa who had been biking home when the bomb was dropped. He never went anywhere without the watch, which was a gift from his only son.

The cases were also filled with tattered school uniforms. One had belonged to thirteen year old Nobuka Oshita, who had been sent to Hiroshima to work and did not live there. She lived to see her parents one last time, but she died soon after as she was too burned to even pull this uniform off, which she had sewn herself.

Every object represented a person with equally horrifying stories. One after the other I read stories of children that had been injured and had run to a hospital, only to die painfully within the next week. I read stories of mothers and fathers who had searched amongst the ruined city looking for their children for so long that they died from the radiation soon thereafter, never having seen their children again. There were stories of fathers who carried their sons or daughters on their back in order to get them medical help, who then died once their children were safe.

The silence in this room was deafening and the pain in my gut increased.

In the next room people were just as silent; everyone concentrated on their footsteps to ensure that they would not make a sound. This room was Sasako’s room. The setup was basically the same as the last, but a small movie screen in the corner looped interviews with Sasako’s mother and the doctor that had been in charge of her treatments.

High above my head, a line of pictures of the same smiling little girl from the statue bordered the edges of the glass display cases and the ceiling. These pictures and the various items that had previously belonged to her were a powerful testament to the spirit of Sasako. She had been very alive, and every day she celebrated her life as only a child could.

A very small glass dome at the center of the room held three tiny origami cranes. Each was only about half an inch long, which, as a sign inside of the dome explained, had been so because Sasako used the wrappings that her medicine came in to fold the cranes. She hadn’t had access to enough paper in the hospital to achieve her goal of folding one thousand of these tiny cranes.

My eyes brimmed with tears as I thought of this little girl, thrust into a war zone of radiation that ultimately caused her death, and she knew that this was going to happen. Yet she continued to smile and laugh with her friends when they came to visit, while all the time she was foraging for paper in a race to save her life.

It was in these rooms that the human element was finally introduced into the story of the end of World War II. Those one hundred forty thousand people killed in the bombing of Hiroshima no longer were data. The number was no abstract attempt at describing the destruction nuclear bombs caused.

Everyone was real. Everyone had a family of children, a wife, a husband, a mother and father, grandparents. Everyone had a story that was just as important as each and every person on this earth views his or her own life to be. That there were still people that did not recognize every individual life affected from the attack on Japan and others like it devastated me emotionally.

I realized then, as I left the maze of horrifying exhibits, that this was not how the world was meant to be. People were not meant to be slaughtered and filed away as a number. Everyone has a story as beautiful and meaningful as the next and not one person in the world has the right to take that story away.

I cried then. I cried for every person left by the wayside and forgotten by the world. I grieved for the people of Hiroshima, who had experienced the worst that people have to offer and whose voices that spoke of peace were all but completely overshadowed by the human greed that ran the world they lived in.

It seemed that all the others around me shared my thoughts. As we passed one another we looked into each other’s eyes with new understanding. When I saw a stranger in the sunny sitting room past the exhibits I thought, "This stranger, that may mean nothing to me, has a life just as important as mine. They are seeing me exactly as I am seeing them."

I had never really thought like that before.

I was still reeling from my emotional revelation and was sitting down on a burgundy colored cushion when I was reunited with some of my group. I’m not sure if they felt the same as I, but I know for a fact that each of us was profoundly affected by what we had seen in the exhibit rooms. We were still generally silent.

It was then, before we were about to leave, when our little tour guide pointed us towards two huge elegantly bound books. She told us that we were welcome to write a parting message in the right book, and our names in the left one.

I don’t remember what I wrote even in the slightest, as my mind was bombarded anew with the immensity of the impact the museum was having on me.

The books listed names in every language in the world. Between the few of us crowded around the book we could roughly translate messages written in English, Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Russian. But so many more messages were in unrecognizable languages. Even though we could not read it all, the messages were all the same. Every person that had passed through the museum spoke of the need for peace and the horror they felt while viewing what had happened to the people of Hiroshima.

I was no longer alone in my grief and my need for worldwide peace. I was no longer a hopelessly idealistic girl caught in a world of pure greed and hate. These messages helped me realize that millions of people in every corner of the world were dedicated to peace and believed fully in our power to change the world, ending needless suffering like this. This final chapter of my trip to Hiroshima spoke of hope for the future and the need to spread that message of peace.

More so than ever, that message was very real to me. I realized at that moment that we were not meant to struggle against one another, that now was the time to fight for the preservation our world, and that no one would be alone in that fight.

 

 

 

I see now that I was forever changed by my trip to Hiroshima and that my choice to dedicate my life to peace and understanding came about because a spark was ignited within me while travelling in that beautiful city. I continue to recognize that spark by speaking and writing about my experiences and the human element of history, instead of only the data. My story will not end war or cause countries to befriend one another, this I know, but I still want to spread my story and the stories of others in the hopes that even one person that hears them will be affected by it. I do not do this so that everyone will become activists for peace, but I believe that the only way to really achieve peace is by altering the mindset of people around the world, one by one.

 

I live my life by the creed that there is no such thing as small change, and the people who had visited Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum before me made the truth of this even more apparent to me.

 

They, like me, had been changed

 

Comments

[ramblinsuze.livejournal.com]

Oh my. This is an incredible piece of writing. Such feeling and description...it's like I'm right there with her. Wow. She should look into trying to get this published somewhere.

[pamwax.livejournal.com]

I am glad your Charlotte had a chance to visit and learn from Hiroshima. Wouldn't it be nice if leaders around the globe could embrace what she learned on this trip.

Charlotte is a truly gifted writer. It is obvious the apple didn't fall far from the tree. Tell her I said she needs to blog more.

[moko-moko.livejournal.com]

This is incredible and so, so moving. Beautiful and human, reading this is making me tear up (and being at work is a little awkward when people come in) but I'm glad it is.

Surprisingly, none of them seemed to speak Japanese.

Ruining people, indeed T_T

[empath-eia.livejournal.com]

I wish the world could hear her speak like this. I'll hold out hope that someday it will be so.

[kls-eloise.livejournal.com]

Beautifully written from the heart. I hope that someday she has the opportunity to visit the Arizona also. I would love to hear her impressions of that.

She's going to take some courses to polish that talent, right?

[chibi-kaz.livejournal.com]

Remarkable.

You know, Newsweek prints essays by people who send them in, in the "My Turn" feature. Just a suggestion.....

[zannachan.livejournal.com]

What the others said--a beautiful and powerful piece.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. What a completely honest, personal and important story. Wow. She's an incredible writer, incredible human being. Carol

[angeljapan.livejournal.com]

It's too bad she missed the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims.

When you walk down the circular path into the main chamber you read the facts about the bombing. And then you reach the main chamber and it hits you like a ton of bricks.

It is large and round and with a 360 degree panorama photograph of the devastation on the upper half of the wall that was taken from that point. The lower half is separated into the districts and lists names of the victims if they were known. The farther from the bottom of the wall the farther away from the epicenter. In the middle of the room, where the epicenter was judged to be is a fountain made to look like a clock with the hands at 8:15am. It was quiet, somber, and I had to sit for a while. I had seen the A-Bomb Dome, Sadako-chan's memorial (and nearly cried there as well), I had rung the Buddhist bell for peace, prayed at the burial mound, and at the arch, but that, that quietness, that sight of the devastation, it all hit home then, what happened. Here's a picture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hall_of_Remembrance.jpg Wiki said the panorama was built with 140,000 tiles, about the number of people estimated to have died by 1945.

When you pass through the room into the next chamber, the human element is brought down upon you, like a ton of bricks.

In the chamber is a wall of TV screens. And on each screen is a photo. Next to the photos are names, ages, and other information about the victims. Just as Charlotte saw the human element through the belongings of victims, I saw the human element in the actual photos of victims. I saw the faces. The photos also included the American and other foreign POWs who died, the indentured Koreans, everyone. Any family who had a member die in the bombing and who had a picture and wanted to, could donate that photo for this database. It was... huge. They had collected about 1000 names and pictures. There were terminals on the other side of the room where you could look up individual names and pictures.

Then I took the escalator up and ended at a round room where the special exhibits were viewed. It was filled with artifacts as well as testimonials hand written by survivors and rescuers and witnesses and translated into numerous languages. The theme for that exhibit was 'Water'. I sat at a terminal and looked through the selection of testimonials available and listened as a young actress read about how the witness was told by soldiers not to give water to the victims and how hard it was to listen to her younger brother begging for water until he died and how guilty she felt after wards. The others were much the same.

One I remember was a girl who gave water to a stranger and how he smiled and sighed as his horrible thirst was parched a little, and then died. She felt guilty that she had maybe caused his death by defying orders and giving him the water. But then she as she grew older, she rationalized that he was too hurt to survive and by giving him water she had provided him a little comfort before he succumbed to his wounds.

Or the soldier who watched as a woman, holding her badly burned baby begged him and his superior officer for water for the baby and how they refused coldly. The solider saw the woman and the baby later, but the baby was dead and the mother most likely died soon after as well. They were told that giving water would kill the victims. Most of them died anyway.

I left then, leaving a hefty donation and headed for the museum where I had much the same experience as Charlotte had.

She should try and get the paper published. It's amazing. And congrats to her for getting a 105% on it!

[tricia612.livejournal.com]

Wow....what insight from someone so young. She has an amazing future ahead of her. Please tell her to keep up the good work - she's so talented.

[marinda-4.livejournal.com]

I was directed here by a friend. This piece is absolutely beautiful, and I agree that she should get it published. Please pass along that she is a gifted writer, and we are all in a better place since she has shared this with us.

[khatife.livejournal.com]

I was directed here by another blog. Your Daughter had a profound experiance and through your posting of these words is affecting others- her dream of Peace is reaching out to others with her words. I will echo other readers by suggesting Newsweek. I am very moved.

[wildwose.livejournal.com]

Excellent, honest and touching work. I have forwarded this to my son to read for school credit. I thought Charlotte might find that amusing. I am deeply touched by this. As a Buddhist, as Peace Activist, as a Human. Tell her thank you.

(I want to add one correction. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the events of WWII is one of my passion for research, so when I saw this it stood out and Charlotte will want to correct it if she seeks to publish it. She seems to have read the labels wrong about the height of the bomb over the city. It was 580 meters above the city, not miles. 580 miles would put you into space. Not trying to be critical, just my inherit nature as a proofreader and fact checker.)

[ramblingrican.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

So rare you find kids these days that a) put the effort to learn from history) and b) be MOVED by history. Wishing the next generation learns from the past mistakes of both countries and from war so we don't continue to make the same mistakes. Awesome piece of writing.. completely astonishing coming from a 15 year old!