The cities today


I had the opportunity to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki recently.

I knew that it was going to be somber, but I was surprised at how emotional it was. The memorial mosaic in Hiroshima certainly hit me hard. The walls of a memorial rotunda are covered in a huge mosaic mural showing a 360 view of the ruins of the city after the bomb...each square in the mosaic represents someone who died when the bomb was detonated or shortly after. The number is staggering...about 135 thousand...so many that the mosaic is almost photographic. The hardest part for me waited outside the rotunda...on several monitors were displayed the pictures of families that were wiped out. I stood there in shock....families wiped out to the last child...no one to remember them or carry on...only these photographs.

In Nagasaki, it was the photograph of a young boy who had carried his dead brother on his back to be cremated. The boy is stoic, but you can imagine what he is going through.

It struck me that the two cities represent our species at our worst and at our best. Imperial Japan should have surrendered long before these cities were destroyed. That it took a second atomic bombing to finally force the issue is even more tragic. On the other hand, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are both entirely rebuilt, beautiful, thriving cities in a nation that was reborn as a leading member of the democratic West.

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The Japanese were not sufficiently punished in my opinion.

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