Dispatches from Japan - Part 2

This is the second part of the article written and posted by Anu Garg, the founder of the online community, Wordsmith.org . He is an Indian American.

His schooling took place under a mango tree, his classroom consisting of a few broken sticks of chalk and a blackboard made by painting a flat piece of wood with soot. The only language he knew was Hindi, and he did not see a library until college.

Garg graduated from Harcourt Butler Technological Institute in Computer Science in 1988. He lives in the Seattle area with his wife, Stuti and daughter, Ananya. Garg became a naturalized US citizen in 2008.

Dispatches from Japan - Part 2

Hiroshima, Courtesy: Wordsmith.org

Last month, on Aug 6, as I sat under a pavilion that protected people from oppressive heat, it was hard to imagine that that place was much much hotter exactly 68 years ago. I was in Hiroshima, the place that has the dubious distinction of being the first city to experience an atomic bomb.

Every year, the day is observed with a Peace Memorial Ceremony. At 8:15 am, the time when the bomb was dropped, a peace bell is rung. There's a large gathering and addresses by the Prime Minister of Japan, the Mayor of Hiroshima, and atomic bomb survivors among others. The theme remains the same: peace.

Every time a country conducts an atomic weapon test, the mayor of Hiroshima sends a letter of protest.

After the ceremony I walked around the park. There are many memorials, but the most touching is of a 12-year-old girl named Sadako Sasaki. She was about a mile from the hypocenter when the bomb dropped and her exposure to the radiation resulted in leukemia. While in hospital, she heard the Japanese legend that anyone who folds a thousand paper cranes gets a wish. She started folding cranes, she folded more than a thousand cranes, but she still died. In her memory, schoolchildren around the world still send countless strings of paper cranes to Hiroshima. (There's a statue of Sadako in Seattle as well.)

I went inside the Peace Museum and attended a presentation by a hibakusha (survivor of an atomic blast) relate her experience. During the hour-long talk, I tried to detect any trace of bitterness without success.

Later in the day, I visited Hiroshima Castle. On the castle grounds I met a man, now retired, who volunteered as a guide. He showed me a eucalyptus tree that was scorched by the nuclear blast but is now thriving. Before taking leave, I asked the man what he thought of Americans considering the US turned their city into a cemetery. He told me, "Hate war, not hate people."

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