
The day Hiroshima burned, August 6, 1945
B-San and Hiroshima
Life and History on Earth
Rewind, for a brief moment time, and dial it back all the way to August 6, 1945. Slow your time travel down and set the clock at exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, Japanese time. And what you will now get to experience if you look up at the sky is the moment when an entire world shivered in pain, fear, guilt, relief, anxiety, doubts, death and disgust. It is the moment when an atomic bomb lit up the sky above Hiroshima. The moment when Miss Toshiko Sasaki sat down at her place in the Hiroshima plant office turning her head to speak to the girl sitting right next to her.
It is today, a little more than 70 years since this day.
music of the day while you are reading our article
Throne of crows by Bornholm
The memory of B-san.
A day still worth remembering for what happened, and as a warning for what could once again happen.
Some have claimed it ended the war sooner, others that all the hundreds of thousands in total of innocent civilians sacrificed in that bright wave of light and radiation and it´s horrifying aftermath, some how was less than the amount of people that would otherwise have died and suffered before Japan finally gave up. Truth is no one will ever know if that is correct, or if it was nothing more than a nation already mere moments away from winning deciding to take all its anger and hate and pour it down from the heavens in an act of two step revenge like the world has never before or ever again seen.
Either way, it was for the world, a collective moment and lasting devastation of horror, pain and misery that followed, it was on a scale entirely unthinkable. So many lives lost and destroyed in the blink of an eye that the global and national trauma somehow lingered on for decades and generations afterwards, so much so that after the second bomb fell, the world despite its many following wars and raging hate, ongoing conflicts and shortcomings have chosen to never again repeat what happened August 6, 1945.
John Hersey - Hiroshima
6 survivors
[ "Mrs. Nakamura
took a single step
when the
explosion,
tossed her
through the house" ]
It was perhaps best described by John Hersey's Hiroshima essay, a lengthy read which took up almost the entire August 31st, 1946 issue of The New Yorker.
An Essay that takes you through that exact moment that you have now travelled back to, showing the world what happened through the eyes of six actually surviving Japanese civilians instead of the usual and carefully polished victory propaganda the world most often gets to see in the aftermath of any conflict.
It will forever stand as a moment in time and history worth revisiting and experience now that his 70-year-old essay has been republished online by the New Yorker.
'As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen.
'She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.'
A short passage from John Hersey´s excellent essay.
To the six survivors that John talked to and later wrote about, that moment of the explosion was as if the sun had descended down upon Earth, but afterward. After the shellshock that tore down trees and houses.
After the burning heat had passed, far beyond the soundless explosion, the fire, and the light.
Afterward, when the radiation slowly spread, and day was turned into night.
The sun was gone and winter and night was all that remained.
And as such, before I send you off to read the entire 70-year-old essay, I will leave you with the question one of the children that survived the initial explosion said.
The five-year-old, Myeko, asked:
“Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down? What happened?”.
And with that I urge you to read the entire essay in the safety and comfort of your home. To never forget it, and perhaps even consider as you go about with your own life just why the world still spend thousands of times more per year on building more and better weapons than we do on healthcare, sustainable energy, clean air & water, healthy food production, well fare, parental care, elderly care, education and equality all combined.
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