= Excerpted from this last year's post at LetsJapan.Worpress.Com =
. . . The next morning another introductory whirlwind. I was brought to the Principal’s office where I would be officially received. The Vice Mayor and Superintendent of the Board of Education were there, too. In the corner of the Principal’s office a television was on, showing the morning news. Just as the initial introductions were made everything stopped. It was as though the wind suddenly went out of the sails of a previously fast-moving ship. It took me a couple of beats and a quick glance over at the television: it was 8:15 in the morning of August 6, 1990, 45 years to the minute that an atomic bomb had detonated over Hiroshima. The television was showing the live service — then with everyone’s heads bowed for 1 minute — from Hiroshima Peace Park. After that moment of reverent silence, we all went on . . .
Photo taken 18 years later, from my room at ANA Crowne Plaza, Hiroshima. 2008.
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I'm posting this, from here in the U.S. Central Time Zone, on the early evening of August 5, because at 6:15 p.m. here it will be 8:15 a.m. tomorrow, August 6, in Hiroshima. So I'd like this diary to actually coincide with the proper date and time in Japan.
This post, also one of mine from LetsJapan.Wordpress.com goes into a little more history. Excerpt:
"On seeing the fireball and mushroom cloud [when the atom bomb was first tested in New Mexico on July 16, 1945], J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death the destroyer of worlds." Trinity Test Director, Harvard Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, had a less ethereal reaction, saying, 'Now we are all sons of bitches.'" Larger quote and source citation
Middle School Student at Hiroshima Peace Park Museum, May 2008.
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Also from the above-referenced post:
I was glad to see that the Museum had been updated dramatically since I first went there in the spring of 1991: it included extensive information about Japan’s road to war and imperial dreams, which were all but missing in the earlier incarnation of the Museum that I had seen. Nevertheless, to see all the children there and to know . . .
As any American who’s visited Hiroshima will tell you, there is simply no city with kinder, more gentle-souled people than Hiroshima. The warmth (or even nonchalance) with which they treat Americans is beyond humbling.
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Teacher & students at Hiroshima Peace Park, May 2008.