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Issue Date: 12 / 2012 |
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Advent in Hiroshima: Japan’s Icon of War & Peace
Dave Bartruff
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Here I was in Hiroshima, Japan in early December about to wind up a tourism monitoring project that I had been invited to join by the city’s tourist board.
Joining me in the project were overseas travel professionals from neighboring Asian countries such as China, Korea and Taiwan as well as the far-flung nations of Australia, England and the USA, which I represented. Each country was an important tourism source for Hiroshima that welcomes more than half a million visitors from abroad each year.
For the international monitoring team, we had spent most of three days and nights inspecting various modes of public transportation, tourist attractions, hotel and dining facilities and shopping centers. We began our inspections at the city’s new state-of-the-art airport with its multi-language signage (English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and its welcoming and accommodating multilingual staff.
The city of Hiroshima, of course, was the target of the world’s first atomic bomb dropped during World War II on August 6, 1945, claiming the lives of 200,000 of the city’s 245,000 wartime population.
Yet today, a new, heroic Hiroshima, dramatically rebuilt and reborn as the "Fountainhead of World Peace," is visited annually by millions of concerned international and Japanese seekers for a planet free of nuclear weaponry and dedicated to world peace.
I must say that I was not a stranger to Japan, having worked in Tokyo for two different media organizations for a total of eight years some time ago. During these stints I acquired a Japanese wife and a Japanese daughter we adopted at birth. So this overseas mission had been a very pleasant task.
Now, with the monitoring project concluded, I had a free day to spend as a tourist myself before flying home to California. The day began early when I was awakened by the sun’s first golden rays crept across my pillow. Japan, “Land of the Rising Sun,” was still living up to its billing! A picture-perfect day lay ahead, and I was determined to make the most of it.
So I bolted out of the hotel with cameras swinging from both shoulders bound for Hiroshima’s renowned Peace Memorial Park.
Despite being a modern Japanese city, Hiroshima is without a subway since it is built on six delta islands whose soil is unstable for tunnel construction. So I boarded a vintage streetcar revered by the locals as their city’s “moving museums.” (Two trolleys - #651 and #652, survivors of the 1945 nuclear disaster - still operate!) It was a nostalgic eight-stop ride down the rails right through the heart of the city’s glitzy downtown.
My stop was Genbaku Domu Mae (Atom Bomb Dome) in front of an inviting riverside park surrounded by a canopy of shade trees. Framed in their branches, I saw a rusty steel skeleton of a dome atop a concrete structure mostly reduced to a pile of rubble. Today it is preserved as the city’s lone standing structure from its 1945 nuclear nightmare. The former industry promotion hall, renamed the “Atom Bomb Dome,” is now recognized around the world as the iconic symbol of the city.
Further on along the riverside, I was drawn to a tall commemorative tower. Beneath it, a winged statue of a woman stood festooned with garlands of colorful origami folded cranes. Behind her on a concave wall were mounted large bronze bas relief of workers laboring away in factories and on farms.
At second glance, I could see they all were all Japanese children. I was told these were youngsters mobilized near war’s end to replace men conscripted into military service to fill its thinning ranks.
Then it hit me! This was a monument to my own dear wife Tsuneko as well. As an adolescent, she was taken out of school to labor in an aircraft factory building kamikaze suicide planes up to the very day it was demolished in an air raid.
The Peace Park is now a beautiful 10-acre sanctuary on a delta island in the city’s Odagawa River containing 66 monuments, memorials, conference halls and museums all dedicated to world peace and located at Ground Zero, target of the world’s first atomic bomb. The first stage in its development was the planting of 120,000 trees on its grounds and approaches.
I entered from Heiwa Dori, or Peace Boulevard. Here first impressions were indelible: the statue of a mother bending low to shelter an infant in her bosom with one arm while reaching behind her to lift her other toddler to her back in a gallant attempt to save them both from the nuclear storm they were caught up in.
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Next I approached the Fountain of Prayer with its rising and descending water projections. The sky was still bright and sunny, but just then a strong breeze arose creating a brilliant rainbow in the fountain mists for a perfect picture op.
It took several hours just to walk the outside grounds and view museum interiors; the saddle-shaped Cenotaph with the names of all the city’s known holocaust victims, the Eternal Flame, Peace Hall, the Childrens’ Peace Monument and more. Renowned Japanese architect Tange Kenzo designed many of the landmarks.
I felt good to learn, too, that both Peace Bridges to the island were designed by fellow American Isamu Noguchi.
Then, it was just a refreshing stroll to two of the city’s most popular reconstructed postwar landmarks: Gokoku Shinto Shrine and the Hiroshima Carp Castle.
The rebuilt shrine in the shadow of the castle is the city’s favorite venue for families to bring in the New Year and to celebrate Japan’s annual Shichi-Go-San (7-5-3) Festival, “a rite of passage” for boys and girls of those ages who are adorned in elaborate kimono for the first time.
Hiroshima’s original castle was built in 1589 as the largest in Western Japan. It became affectionately known as “The Carp Castle” because of the bounty of the fish caught in the inlet below its ramparts. It too was leveled in the nuclear storm but restored to its original splendor.
Hiroshima’s famed classical Shukkeien Garden was just another ten minutes away on foot. Dating to 1620, it is a seven-acre reproduction of a classic Chinese landscape garden. Its pond is dotted with more than ten islets large and small connected by classic rainbow bridges. Totally razed in the nuclear storm of 1945, it is perfectly restored and another example of Hiroshima’s complete rebirth.
By now I was on the last legs of my visit and heading to the hotel to prepare for tomorrow’s return home. But an upward glance at a street corner revealed a tall tower topped with a cross. With Christmas soon approaching, and already in the Advent Season, I felt a church would provide a fond Hiroshima farewell.
A stunning life-sized Nativity scene graced the approach to church’s entrance. And above the front doors, it read in Japanese and English, “Memorial Cathedral for World Peace.” (Earlier I had read the former house of worship here was vaporized in the 1945 nuclear holocaust and rebuilt with world-wide Vatican support and renamed.)
Today was a weekday, yet the massive cathedral doors were open. Inside however, it was pitch black except for the radiant beams of light projected through its magnificent stained glass windows along one wall of the sanctuary.
Gradually accustoming myself to the darkness, I approached the front of the sanctuary. I could now hear young voices singing a familiar Christmas carol in Japanese. Drawing ever closer, I made out a choir of preschoolers costumed as the Holy Family, Wise Men, angels and shepherds along with their teachers.
Eventually reaching the empty front pew, I sat down transfixed as the blessed Advent story unfolded before me. Once the rehearsal concluded, I asked (in Japanese) permission from the teachers to take a photo of the diminutive Pageant group. It surprised and pleased both the youngsters and their teachers.
At last, as we were about to say our farewells, the teachers quickly assembled the youngsters once again to sing a parting carol to honor me and their coming Prince of Peace.
Dave Bartruff is an award-winning photojournalist who has
traveled to more than ninety countries. Based in California, he
has been a contributor to The World & I since 1987.
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