August 6, 2020 - A Day of Peace and Reflection

About 2 and a half years ago I visited Hiroshima for the first time. It makes me think about my family in Japan and how I had just met them also for the first time, and that spending a day with them at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, eating okonomiyaki, and watching the sunset over Miyajima was one of the most memorable moments of my life.

75 years ago today the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, instantly killing 80,000 people and later tens of thousands more due to radiation exposure. The devastation wasn’t enough, though, and a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki killing an estimated 40,000 people on August 9th, 1945.

These atrocities make me think about the way lots of people abuse their positions of power and still exact violence on others, justifying more death and destruction, warranting its usage because it’s spread over a longer period of time but still killing thousands (maybe millions), excused by insert-any-colonial-system-here. Or maybe it's because we just don’t know any other way so we blame a lack of compassion and empathy on something more insidious, embedded deep within our genetic memory. 

It makes me think of the hibakusha -- the atomic bomb survivors -- everything they had lost and had to rebuild and try to regain.

It makes me think of the countless persons who have fought with weapons or with words for their freedom, for their families, for food and shelter, for what they believed in was right.

It makes me think of the countless persons who have fought to ban nuclear warheads, assault weapons, the 2nd amendment, to abolish, demilitarize, and defund the police.

It makes me think about my father and his family. He would have been less than 6 months old when the atomic bomb was dropped, a shockwave hitting every Japanese person’s heart and guts as the news would travel across the islands.

It makes me think that I might not even be alive today if Niigata (the city my father was born and raised in) made it to the top of the shortlist for the A-bomb attack. He didn’t go unscathed, though. Even before he could walk, he and his family still had to fight for their lives because of multiple air raids of pumpkin bombs that were dropped on a city only 50 km away and countless others across the country to prepare for the atomic attack. 

It makes me think how easy it is to hurt someone: how pressing a button, pulling a trigger, following an order, or choosing a fist leaves no chance for listening, for connecting, for understanding. 

It makes me think that there is great power, too, in my thoughts, in my words and actions.

It makes me think that it’s never too late to change them, to listen and understand what I fear, what I don’t know, and to take action for what I believe is right, and that that is a true expression of love and community. 

It makes me think of my family all the way in Japan, and that maybe they wouldn’t have ever existed, or me, too.