Hiroshima

Today is August 6, the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  On August 9, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

I’ve been to Hiroshima and left a single paper crane in remembrance there.  May no more atomic bombs be used ever again.

Hiroshima by John Hersey
NY:  Bantam Book, 1946
ISBN 0-553-13078-1

(31)  Dr Machii said, “It must have been a Molotoffano hanakago - a Molotov flower basket, the delicate Japanese name for the “bread basket,” or self-scattering cluster of bombs.

(39)  The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr Tanimoto ran past them.  As a Christian he was filled with compassion for those who were trapped, and as a Japanese he was overwhelmed by the shame of being unhurt, and he prayed as he ran, “God help them and take them out of the fire.”

(47)  To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience.  The hurt ones were quiet;  no one wept, much less screamed in pain;  no one complained;  none of the many who died did so noisily;  not even the children cried;  very few people even spoke.

(77)  Father Cieslik was bursting with some inside dope he had, but he waited until the conversation turned naturally to the mystery of the bomb.  Then he said he knew what kind of bomb it was;  he had the secret on the best authority - that of a Japanese newspaperman who had dropped in at the Novitiate.  The bomb was not a bomb at all;  it was a kind of fine magnesium powder sprayed over the whole city by a single plane, and it exploded when it came into contact with the live wires of the city power system.

(89)  Even though the wreckage had been described to her, and though she was still in pain, the sight horrified and amazed her, and there was something she noticed about it that particularly gave her the creeps.  Over everything - up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks - was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green;  the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses.  Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city’s bones.  The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact;  it had stimulated them.  Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonets, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hair-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew.  Especially in a circle at the center, sickle senna grew in extraordinary regeneration, not only standing among the charred remnants of the same plant but pushing up in new places, among bricks and through cracks in the asphalt.  It actually seemed as if a load of sickle-senna seed had been dropped along with the bomb.