Human Shadows in Stone Reflect Violent...

It is a drab, misty morning in Peace Park.

At this early hour, the park belongs to the doves--pigeons, actually--which sit cooing in the dampened trees or peck contentedly at scraps of food in the grass.

Throngs of tourists and children on school outings can be expected even on the slowest of days, but for now there are no distractions along the broad paths to the Peace Bell, the Children’s Peace Monument and the concrete-and-granite Memorial Cenotaph.

Here, under a dull gray arch near what was once ground zero--today, “city center” is the preferred term--are enshrined the names of 186,940 people who lost their lives because of the world’s first atomic bomb attack.

The names are encased in a stone coffin, hidden from public view, but a weather-beaten inscription in its glistening face of stone offers this vow:

Let All the Souls Here Rest in Peace for We Shall Not Repeat the Evil.

The promise has been upheld since the monument was unveiled in 1952. But because of bomb-related cancers and other diseases, the number of souls memorialized here grows with each passing year.

*

Hiroshi Harada has forgotten many of the details.

He remembers being on the platform at Hiroshima Station waiting for a train that was to evacuate him to the countryside. It was morning. His parents were with him. He was 6 years old.

Then came a flash.

He remembers being buried alive. And he remembers fighting his way out.

“I was saved by a series of coincidences,” Harada says, pausing for a moment beside a particularly grisly painting in a gallery depicting what other survivors went through that day.

“Had the station building not been between me and the bomb, had I not been able to get out from under the rubble, had any of those things been different, I could have died,” he says, turning back to the painting.

“It is still hard for me to look at these pictures. Every time I come here--it never gets easier.”

Avoiding the gallery isn’t an option. As director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, he runs it. Showing people the horrors of Hiroshima’s past is part of his job.

Something like 40 million people have visited the museum since it opened in Peace Park in 1955. Its blocks of stone are indelibly marked by the shadows of people long dead, and flesh drips from the outstretched arms of its victims, depicted by wax statues. But last year, the museum made a major addition. Context.

In its new wing, exhibits delve into the reasons why Hiroshima was bombed, including the politically sensitive topic of Japan’s military escapades in Asia and Hiroshima’s often forgotten importance as a military port and garrison city.

Unlike the uproar in America over the Smithsonian’s attempt to create a similar exhibition around the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb, the change here has been widely acclaimed.

“It is very important to look history straight in the eye,” Harada says. “We must reflect on what we did that was wrong. The people of Hiroshima realize that because what happened here was so awful.”

*

The sun is coming out, and the air is fresh and sweet.

It’s the lunch hour, and joggers are out en masse atop Hijiyama, a quiet, tree-covered hill with a breathtaking view of the department stores and high-rise apartments in the crowded downtown area, about 1 1/2 miles away.

Inside Hijiyama’s most famous building, the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, geneticist Akio Awa begins his tour in the cryogenics lab, where a technician carefully loads a tray of blood samples for freezing in shiny metal vats of liquid nitrogen.

Awa, affable and articulate, next leads the way to the tissue culture lab, where blood from the spleens of mice is being prepared for testing.

From there, it’s down the hall to the cytoscan lab and a roomful of researchers peering at “painted” chromosomes through powerful microscopes in search of mutants.

Since 1947, medical researchers here have studied the effects of the bomb on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was attacked three days later, and scrutinized the lives of the survivors.

They have mapped out the pathology of radiation sickness, calculated cancer risks, helped set international standards on acceptable radiation levels and collected a mountain of data.

But one big question remains:

“In more than 40 years of investigation with different kinds of approaches, we have failed to demonstrate any increase in genetic damage passed down to the children of survivors,” Awa says. “Theoretically speaking, there should be some. We have found it in experiments with mice, fruit flies, certain kinds of plants. But we have yet to find it in our experiments with humans.”

Does this mean the second generation, and the generations to follow, are safe?

Maybe, Awa says. And maybe not.

*

A tape-recorded bell rings through the muggy, late-afternoon air. School is out at Honkawa Elementary.

As his students flit out of their classrooms, laughing and sprinting for the gate, Principal Naoshi Sasamura points across a sandy playground to a tall “niwa urushi,” or tree of heaven.

“It began growing just after the bomb,” he explains. “It’s another reminder for us of how precious life is.”

Honkawa Elementary School was only 400 yards from ground zero. Miraculously, the building, though burned and severely damaged, remained standing.

The people weren’t so lucky.

“The explosion came just 15 minutes before school was to start,” Sasamura says. “Of about 400 children and 15 teachers here that morning, only two survived.”

Sasamura, a third-grader back in 1945, already had been evacuated to the countryside by the time the bomb fell.

“When I came back for the first time months later, there was nothing,” he recalls. “I had to collect scrap metal, anything that could be resold, to help our family survive.”

Sasamura and his family managed to rebuild. He went on to college, became a teacher, then a principal.

Honkawa Elementary, meanwhile, became a symbol.

Immediately after the bombing, it was used as a hospital. Part of the original schoolhouse has been preserved, and now serves as a museum.

But after decades of peace and prosperity, Sasamura fears that, even here, the lessons of the past are beginning to fade.

“Children today don’t feel the importance of things, of life, of helping each other,” he says. “We learned these things through the hardships we endured. It is our duty to pass them on.”

*

Night is beginning to fall.

Downtown, thousands of workers, well-groomed and neatly dressed, crowd the sidewalks and streetcars. A few stop in at Shanghai Renaissance, a popular watering hole with jazz on the stereo and a poster of Humphrey Bogart out front. Others head for Hiroshima Stadium--just across the tracks from Peace Park--to cheer on the local pro baseball team, the Carp.

As the darkness deepens, crowds converge on oases of neon, where the smells of grilling chicken, cigarette smoke, rice wine and beer fill the muggy air. Along the rivers, pleasure boats set off for a long and rambunctious summer night.

But in Peace Park, all is quiet. Floodlights illuminate the eerie skeleton of the A-Bomb Dome, left standing as a symbol.

A few yards away is the Motoyasu River. In the bomb’s aftermath, it was a floating mortuary, clogged with the bodies of dead and dying.

Tonight, reflections of young lovers holding hands waver silently on the inky water, then disappear along a breaking wave.