Tears for Hiroshima

The four-hour “Nozomi” Shinkansen train ride from the Tokyo Station to Hiroshima that my disabled sister Adela, with her husband Yuki Kono, and I took last Friday was an adventure in itself for it gave me an insight on how super courteous the Japanese are when it comes to helping persons with disabilities. It was raining when we got off the taxi at the Tokyo Station and people we didn’t know offered their umbrellas so we wouldn’t get soaked in the rain. The Tokyo Station staffers were also there to show us what platform to use and the nearest door to the bullet train that we should enter.

There must have been hundreds of thousands of commuters inside the Tokyo Station, many of them wearing masks. This is the Japanese way of showing their courtesy to other people when they have colds or cough, even if it is not mandated by any law… they do it so others won’t be disturbed by their illness and yes, it does prevent contamination. I can only dream that someday Filipinos would learn to be as considerate as the Japanese. Incidentally, our Nozomi bullet train left exactly on the dot at 8:56 a.m. and arrived exactly on time because that is the standard for trains that the Japanese have set for themselves. If you’re a minute too late in the platform, you’re simply a minute too late and chances are, your train already left you.

Hiroshima City is literally a new city that sprouted 63 years ago because at exactly 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945 the Atomic Bomb, dubbed the “Little Boy” (last Friday I mistakenly wrote that it was “Fat Boy” that was dropped in Nagasaki… mea culpa) from the US Superfortress “Enola Gay” piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets exploded into world history as the first nuclear bomb ever dropped in anger against a city. This single bomb was detonated 1,900 feet above the Industrial Promotion Hall (now called the Genbaku Dome or A-Bomb Dome), instantly killing some 140,000 people.

Today, the City of Hiroshima has left Genbaku Dome the way it was 63 years ago, although efforts to keep the structure standing through scaffolding can be seen so it can be preserved for history. Across Motoyasu River are the Peace Clock and the Peace Bell, which I rang twice. Then we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Tickets to the museum are probably the cheapest in the world. Since my sister was on a wheelchair, she was free and since I was pushing her, I was also allowed in for free. So my brother-in-law Yuki was the only one who paid the ¥050 (that’s around P25). There you’ll see photographs, artifacts and things that the museum gathered to show the devastation of the A-bomb.

Though it was still a weekday, the museum was full of visitors and what got you immediately was the eerie… very reverent silence. It was as if we were the first people to arrive right after the bomb exploded. My readers know that I’m a World War II history buff and it wasn’t the first time that I saw some of those pictures as a lot of them were also in my books. But the atmosphere was totally different inside the museum as you were able to see for yourself the horror and the devastation of the A-bomb and what the radiation did to the people who were two kilometers away from the hypocenter.

I’m not ashamed to tell you that I cried a tear in Hiroshima last Friday afternoon and I was not alone, many people felt the same way. At exactly three o’clock, I prayed the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy to the souls that perished on Aug. 6, 1945 and all my friends who recently died, including the Martyrs of Japan who were beatified a week ago. Somehow, the Lord gave me a wonderful answer to my chaplet, because when I was done, a beautiful rainbow suddenly appeared where from my viewpoint inside the museum, looked like it emanated from the top of the Genbaku Dome. It was a complete rainbow that even the taxi driver told us he had never seen before.

I have always maintained that often the Holy Spirit guides us where to go. For this trip to Japan, visiting Hiroshima was never on the radar screen. We were supposed to go to Disney Sea, then my sister suggested that we go Hiroshima instead. Good enough that the rains in Tokyo would have cancelled our Disney visit anyway. So we took the four-hour trip to Hiroshima and stayed for only four hours and returned to Tokyo on the same day.

The message I got from Hiroshima is, war is truly hell and that by now, men should learn their bloody lessons from their very long history of war. Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba is seeking the abolition of nuclear weapons through the Mayors for Peace Campaign, which 2,368 mayors from all over the world have signed. It just makes me wonder if any of our Filipino mayors are signatories to this accord. Leaving the museum, I said to myself… “Never again should anyone drop a nuclear device on a city.” That’s what the Nuclear No-Proliferation Treaty hopes to achieve.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.philstar.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, “Straight from the Sky,” shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.