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We would do better to welcome this death and dying, so Jesus and Christian teachers from St. Much dying, and death as a whole, is unavoidable-both the physical dying of the body and the spiritual dying of the ego. If there are such things as ghosts, they were out that evening-perhaps every evening-in Hiroshima, that city of our collective consciousness. The dome stood softly lit, while I sat quietly, and the city was still. In the evening, I sat on a bench and held an impromptu Easter vigil of sorts, facing what was left of the Industrial Promotion Hall, now known as the “A-Bomb Dome.” Although the hall was almost directly at the epicenter of the blast, its shell somehow survived complete destruction, and it now stands as a famous monument to that infamous day. Outside, I walked along the Ota River and by the park’s fountains. Holocaust Memorial Museum or the victims’ voicemails at the 9/11 Museum still do. That image of the watch still grips me, the way the pile of shoes at the U.S. I still recall, for instance, the analog watch eerily frozen at 8:16-the exact time its owner’s world and the world as a whole changed forever. Victims’ belongings, survivors’ testimonies, and other a-bombed artifacts mesmerized me and other visitors from around the world for hours. I visited the Peace Memorial Museum on what was Holy Saturday. With the hope that folding a thousand origami paper cranes would help her recover-a belief from Japanese legend-she made 644 of them in the eight months before she died. Even though she had no apparent initial injuries, nine years later she suddenly developed signs of leukemia, which had been caused by radiation exposure from the bomb. She was 2 years old the day of the bombing. One person who died of such effects later was Sadako Sasaki. Tens of thousands more people died later, and many more-the hibakusha, the survivors-lived with radiation sickness and other terrible wounds. dropped “Fat Boy” on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 instantly. On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 bomber “Enola Gay,” named after the pilot’s mother, dropped the first atomic bomb “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, killing an estimated 80,000 instantly.
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The city represents what we human beings are capable of. I had wanted to see Hiroshima since arriving in Japan for its unique place in our history, in our imagination, and in our psyche. While in the Navy and stationed in Japan, I took the shinkansen from Yokohama to Hiroshima one weekend.