Hiroshima mon amour
This posting is not about the 1959 French New Wave film. It’s about the second time we visited the city of Hiroshima. The first time was a carefully guided tour with a baker’s dozen of high school students. It was instructive but constrictive. The second time we were on our own, just three of us, fresh off the boat from Miyajima Island, with no tour schedule tying us down. And sometimes it’s the personal connections that lead to larger understandings.
We made the obligatory stop at Ground Zero, took photographs of the Atomic Bomb Dome, visited the Peace Memorial Museum—and contemplated the enormity of what happened. We then moved on to the memorial park across the river, where we met an elderly local man feeding birds. He spoke no English, and we knew maybe ten Japanese words between us, but we communicated with him just fine. He offered some bird seed to us and showed with gestures how to hold out an arm, palm up, for the birds to land on and proceed to feast. And feast they did. In his own solitary way, he was an ambassador for the city of Hiroshima, and an exemplar for how to get along with others.
We met more ambassadors when we walked north on foot and stumbled upon the annual Hiroshima Food Festival, which celebrates local food delicacies from the surrounding prefectures. It is hard to exaggerate the size of the festival—it surrounds Hiroshima Castle and fills Chuo-koen Park with hundreds of food vendors and untold thousands of diners—and nothing in English. Nada. One woman saw us looking at the food-ticket booth and asked if we needed help. Oh, yes we did. She phoned a friend who spoke a bit more English and who offered to leave work to guide us around the food stalls. We declined her kindness, thanked her profusely, and managed to eat con gusto. We were the only Caucasians in sight in the entire park, and we were treated graciously by everyone we saw.
It was only after we got home and I started going through the photos that I realized how much the iron tower at Tokyo’s Ghibli Museum reminded me of Hiroshima’s A-Dome (note also the iron dome in the background of the bird-feeding photo!). But then, Hayao Miyazaki, a founder of Studio Ghibli and creator of several war-themed films, including The Wind Rises and Porco Rosso, is well aware of the symbols he uses. And as a pacificist, he treats his characters, even the villains, with dignity. He makes me wonder if he, and all the inhabitants of Hiroshima, have read Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Eh, sorry, that’s not very fashionable now; anger is the flavor of the day. Today we channel the Servingman in Coriolanus (Let me have war, say I. . . . Peace is . . . a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men). We tried peace-and-love in the Sixties, got bored, and moved on. Strife sells. But then a new baby is born, and we begin to see the possibilities that go with teaching kindness. And maybe even living it.
