I was in Hiroshima and Miyajima a few days ago. It’s all been marinating in my head – so many things coming up. I can experience everything all at once, in non-verbal brain language. Writing it in a way that adequately captures my experiences and thoughts is going to be harder. I can’t possibly do it justice. So I’ve been doing what we all do in moments like this and just avoiding it. Rumpling it up and putting it into the top shelf of my brain where it keeps falling over into my consciousness. Procrastinating.

First of all, I had no intention of going to Hiroshima when I woke up that morning, but some combination of FOMO and shame at the idea that I’ve been chowing down on okonomiyakis like it’s nobody’s business, but I can’t get off my lazy ass to see something pretty damn important propelled me to go. OK, and honestly, I had an unlimited Japanese Rail Pass that I hadn’t used enough to have it be worth it. So there were multiple things going on there, as there often are.

I got on the shinkasen (Japanese bullet train) from Osaka and followed Google Maps instructions to navigate the whole Japanese trail system craziness, which is actually (somehow miraculously) quite well-orchestrated.

My initial impression upon arriving is that it looked like a pretty standard Japanese city, but with more greenery. All the large buildings and concrete around the train station made me slightly ill. It was hot. I purchased a modest onigiri (seaweed-wrapped rice triangle snack thingy) and a treasure trove of mixed nuts from 7/11, and I was on my way.

I got on the tourist tram, and we started chugging along. I had originally planned to go to the end of the line and start at the island of Miyajima and come back towards the Hiroshima sites, but something pushed me to get off at the Atomic Bomb Dome site. I believe it was laziness (I mean, we’re already here) and remembering one of those “must-do” stars next to its description in the Lonely Planet. It was hot. I had dragged myself through 3 hours of transit and transfers. I felt like I was on my 8th grade Washington, DC school trip. I was initially interested and yet underwhelmed. The bomb had gone off 600 meters (I’m assuming not feet, can’t remember) above this dome, and it is the only building that survived anywhere near the hypocenter of the bomb. Hm, actually, that’s kind of remarkable…in an almost divine kind of way. It’s lookin’ pretty good!

Then I continued to walk through Hiroshima Peace Park, which does actually have a slight Washington Mall kind of feel to it, but with more heart. The abundance of trees and walkways on either side of Ota River. The memorial spots, each unique. It was beautiful and super peaceful. At the Children’s Memorial, there were a bunch of glass-encased paper cranes and letters and some tokens from Obama’s visit there a few years ago.

I walked by a bunch of interesting monuments, one of my favorites being the Peace Flame. I guess it’s a big flame that just never stops burning, which I thought was super cool. We see stone monuments all the time, but the fire burning is alive and has a real temporal element that appealed to me.

As I approached the cenotaph, there was a small group of Japanese women singing. On the cenotaph is inscribed 安らかに眠って下さい 過ちは 繰返しませぬから. In English this translates to, “Please rest in peace, for [we/they] shall not repeat the error.” It isn’t about blame, what the count of wrongs are on one side vs. another, but a recognition that the world needs to move forward in peace. This could be applied in many situations today, both in our private lives and in world affairs.

Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo. I’m chugging along. Hot. Grumpy. The usual cocktail.

And then I went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Everything changed. I was gripped by the stories and remaining artifacts. Horrified. A large part of the museum is dedicated to stories and remaining identifiers/possessions of those who perished either when the bomb hit, immediately thereafter from the wounds or radiation after-effects, or longer-term from other complications like cancer. Many were schoolchildren. There are heart-wrenching stories. For example, remnants of a tiny school girl’s uniform that she had stitched herself, melted lunchboxes, a watch that stopped exactly at 8:15am on August 6, 1945. One exhibit showed fragments of skin and fingernails from a boy who had been badly burned and felt so thirsty that he bit off his fingernails and tried to suck his own blood. The mother saved these pieces of skin and fingernails to show her husband/his father when he returned from the war. There were stone steps with a shadow, a suggestive impression of where a body had been at the time of the bomb. Vanished. Heartbreaking stories of family members searching for days and finding remnants of their relatives, identifiable through minuscule details like a barely noticeable hole in a shoe that the child had patched up. All pieced together with small clues.

The museum also outlined the science and scale behind the atomic bomb, and the specifics of how it was deployed in Hiroshima. Many perished and were injured. There are some contradictory statistics, but it seems that about 200,000 people were killed. 10% of them were Korean workers. Many were children, including 7th and 8th graders who had been deployed as demolition workers to help the war efforts.

At this point, I started becoming flooded with emotions, and many things came up beyond empathy and grief. I thought a lot about our race and how we have been destroying other human groups for so long through war, genocide, and other atrocities. I thought about how my reaction to the lives and stories of a few were so deep and potent while the larger reality evoked horror and yet not the small kind of emotionality. “A single death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic.” Sadly, there is some element of truth to that.

We see it on the news everyday. The body counts keep creeping up in war-torn areas. Explosions in Iraq. Air strikes in Syria. I feel almost numb to it and expect it. And that’s not right. And yet, death on a smaller scale and closer to home can unfortunately carry more significance for most people living away from these war-torn areas. This is what is capturing the mindshare of our entire society. A single individual lost, killed, brutalized. That becomes more meaningful. Why? Because it’s closer to home. It brings the war to our backyard. That could be us. We could be that one person or group of people at a restaurant or club that gets blown up or shot.

In a world with a-bombs, hydrogen bombs, and sophisticated military technology, we can operate at such scales of potential loss of life. Against conventional warfare of machines, asymmetric and more personal tactics are employed. It’s arguably just as harmful in impact, if not more. The loss of life may be lower by comparison to the bombing of Hiroshima, but the act of engendering a culture of mass fear and psychological hurt across entire world populations is powerful in affecting the entire trajectory of the human race. How we define what matters or is possible. The decisions we make. Where we direct our energies and resources. I was in NYC on 9/11. For me, it was significant but not life-defining. For many I know, some of whom weren’t even in NYC that day, it was life-defining. It fundamentally changed their view of the world, their core sense of safety and security, and whether there was a point to living for the future when we could surely live for today. The proliferation of ISIS attacks is alarming. I haven’t wrapped my brain around it yet.

Let’s not forget Hiroshima. It is a place, but let it also be a conversation. It made me remember a lot of literature, philosophy, and art that was influenced by Hiroshima and the Holocaust. They were just spinning around in my brain while I was walking around the museum like a big web of intertextuality, the idea in literary theory that basically that everything is related to everything else. A sort of network graph of literary influence and texts. Marguerite Duras, Victor Frankl, Elie Wiesel, Murakami (both Takashi and Haruki), Primo Levi. I guess I was wondering how we make meaning out of all of the craziness of this world, and I think art and writing tries to do that. Yes, intelligence agencies, historians, and many others are also immersed in the work of analyzing the past to understand the future. Actually, isn’t that just part of what all humans do, period?

One phrase in particular that kept coming up for me was something Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher, wrote, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” I don’t really know what he means or if he even knew what he meant, but it sort of boils down to the “barbarism” of writing poetry after Auschwitz. I feel like the idea is that after such atrocities, we as a human species are inescapably trapped in a sort of damned condition. There is no redemption. How dare we be us anymore? We have transgressed.

I think the spirit of Hiroshima today shows there can be poetry. We move on. We grow. It evokes a message of telling and moving forward without resentment or finger-pointing. Hiroshima today is a platform for advocating for future peace. There is still a lot of work to be done. Let’s remember but not dwell.