JAPAN

PEACE



This afternoon I took a train to the town of Heiwa (which translates as Peace). It is a town that is not in any conventional guidebook on Japan (I can’t even remember where I heard about it) and there is no reason to go there but for one building.

I had postponed seeking out this place earlier during my visit here, but as I am leaving Sapporo tomorrow morning, I felt it was time I went.

The building – an uninteresting, small, brick structure, is owned by “Hibakusha,” meaning the living victims, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They have converted an upstairs room of the house into a sort of gallery. Graphic photos depicting injuries sustained by the people living within a large radius of the atomic blasts line the walls, and paintings express the horror of those events.

There are some 500 or 600 Hibakusha living in Hokkaido and I met one of them today.

I rang the door bell somewhat apprehensively, thinking that this would be too hard to do, especially without the protective shield of an impersonal museum.

An old man opened the door and he looked surprised to see me. Right away he said “Hiroshima, Nagasaki” as if to explain what was there, thinking that perhaps I had the wrong address. When I reassured him in my nonexistent Japanese that this indeed is where I wanted to be, he took me upstairs and unlocked the door to the room holding the small gallery.

He followed me during the entire half hour I was there. He stood quietly behind me every time I paused in front of a picture and he said nothing as I looked on. But I felt it to be a gentle and kind presence and I welcomed his company. It is not a place where you can stand being alone very easily.

In leaving, I hated myself for not having the language skills to say more than thank you, at the same time that I felt relieved that I lacked the words, because, after all, what can anyone say.

I thought about the two photos I posted earlier today of Japanese children, especially the one from Biai, where the little girl is holding out her fingers in the symbolic gesture that the Japanese use for peace. Peace, from her tiny hand, held to the camera. Peace. It’s only when I recalled her living form that I became uncontrollably sad this afternoon. She made the children of the black and white photos on the wall of the brick house wear faces and have names.

Under the postwar Japanese Constitution, the country has no active military. In the last decade the government here has interpreted the document to permit a military without weapons, to be called forth only for reasons of defense. It was decided that such a unit should be sent to Iraq, though only for ‘humanitarian’ reasons and without weaponry of any sort. Even this was though by many to be excessive.

Travel is such a happy series of events for me, but this afternoon I had to do that other part of it, I had to go back and examine a piece of history – not the political history, but the personal one, experienced by the common, everyday people, just like the ones I am watching now go through their daily tasks of shopping, taking children to school, riding trains to homes in small towns and villages.

An image of a happy little girl in Biei, holding that little fist for peace is the proper ending to this post. Let me reprint the photo, just to remind myself of her smiling face.