oh shit.
i fucking hate hiroshima day.
when the bomb hit, 80.000 civilians died instantly and another 60.000 died lingering, horrible deaths.
i had a professor at harvard who was a buddhist priest. on the last day of our class, he explained that he had been on a troop-carrier train, having been drafted out of graduate studies in a last-ditch attempt by the japanese government to shore up their forces. he said they were ordered to pull down their window shades for a leg of the journey, but being intelligent and curious young men, they waited until the officers left their car and peeked.
what he saw was hiroshima after the bomb. the train ran for what seemed liked forever, and there was nothing living. nothing.
this, he said, openly weeping, was why he became a priest.
personal story: i was in nagasaki city, and we went to this park. my host family said they wanted to take a picture of me - a fairly common occurrence. so my host-father was like, "left more. wait, go back a little more. a little more. almost. now take one more step back."
i took one more step back, and tripped over something.
it was a plaque. it said something to the effect of, "on this spot on 9 august 1945, an atomic bomb exploded over the city of nagasaki."
i was standing where the bomb had hit, killing about 100.000 people.
later that day, we went to the associated museum, against the advice of my host family.
i understood their desire to avoid the museum very quickly. let's just say that i don't think i ate anything for about three days.
people wonder why i get so angry about war. go on, stand on the very spot where a single bomb caused the deaths of 100.000 people and tell me you won't change your mind. no matter it "saved lives" or whatever reason you give. as you walk through the city, you can see where human beings were instantly carbonised and their shadows burnt onto the walls of their homes for all eternity: women hanging the wash, erased from the earth except for where their bodies' shadows kept the walls from being bleached. i can't get it out of my head. i can't stop seeing it - or the dead POWs also killed in the strike, the piles of bodies, the photos of the so-called 'walking dead', who already had died and just didn't know it yet, kept struggling to walk and live for weeks or months as their bodies dissolved around them in a radioactive puddle.
fucking hiroshima day. fucking hiroshima. fucking war.
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