Word: hiroshimas
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Streetcars stopped in silence. A bell rang mournfully seven times. It was 8:15 a.m. in Hiroshima last Tuesday, 40 years after an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy burst 1,850 ft. over the city with a searing, blinding flash, killing 118,000 people within days and dooming nearly as many to slower deaths in later years. In a speech to 55,000 onlookers at Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, Mayor Takeshi Araki urged the superpowers to abolish nuclear weapons. The goal, said Araki, was "no more Hiroshimas." Afterward, 1,500 doves, symbols of peace, were released into cloudy skies...
Throughout the U.S., hundreds of groups held their own memorials last week for the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki. While speakers at many of the rallies echoed Araki's agenda, for the most part they avoided both partisan rhetoric and talk of disarmament. Like the Hiroshima service, which used doves to make its point, many of the American commemoratives made use of simple symbols to underscore mankind's vulnerability to nuclear weapons. The displays were frail and mute, but they managed to express deep fears for the survival of the race, which the language of policy...
...they made their way to work on the morning of Aug. 6, residents of New York, Boston, Minneapolis and 370 other cities in the U.S. and abroad discovered that artists had been at work overnight, painting silhouettes of people on streets. The silhouettes were intended as reminders of the Hiroshima victims who, caught outdoors by the blast, were vaporized, leaving no trace except for profiles etched on Hiroshima sidewalks. The arresting images, usually created with plastic stencils and rollers dipped in whitewash, were the work of the International Shadow Project, a network of 10,000 volunteer painters in cities ranging...
...Hiroshima, many residents avoided last week's ceremonies. A few blocks from the blast's hypocenter, Takeshi Ito, an economics professor who chairs the national organization of 370,000 Bomb victims, visited the graves of two nieces. "I was face to face with the dead," said Ito, "and that was a lot more meaningful to me than listening to empty speeches...
...American casualties in the Pacific fighting that began with Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, felt the domestic memorials were misplaced. Others, including President Reagan, emphasized that peace and the elimination of weapons were not necessarily synonymous. "We must never forget what nuclear weapons brought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki," said Reagan, "yet we must remain mindful that our maintenance of a strong nuclear deterrent has for four decades ensured the security of the U.S. and the freedom of our allies in Asia and Europe." For most, however, it was simply a time to consider events that all fervently hope...