All We are Saying...Is Give Peace a Chance

(Luana:) Eskimos are mistakenly said to have more words for snow than do Caucasians, though this is apparently another urban myth. But I do wonder if the Japanese rightfully could say they have more words than we do for sadness--two of those words being Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the sites of the two August 1945 atomic bombings that ended World War II. I visited Hiroshima with three busloads of students, faculty and staff from Semester at Sea--Bob had already been and didn’t want to return--and we all agreed that it was an intense, and intensely moving, experience.


It’s hard to process the amount of destruction that the bomb unleashed. The museum exhibit showed photos from the air, and all you really see are street patterns, natural features such as rivers, and some debris. But where the museum really excelled, from my perspective, was in painting a picture of the human cost. It’s very hard to look at the clothing and school uniforms preserved by parents of dead schoolchildren and not feel sadness and discomfort.

The peace park that surrounds ground zero of the bombing does provide a sense of hope and determination that people find a way to work for peace. I’m so glad we spent a leisurely walk and took our time there. It’s a nice counterpoint to the grim reality of the artifacts inside the museum. Our group had brought boxes of paper cranes in honor of the famous book, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, about the little girl who folded 1,000 paper cranes in hopes that she would recover from leukemia induced by the bombing (she didn’t). We hung the cranes in one of the little kiosks set aside for this popular activity. Many of us took a turn at ringing the peace bell that usually is shown on the news each year on the August 6 anniversary of the blast. We also encountered a survivor of the blast who had learned English so he could talk to visitors in the park. He had lost a brother and his father, and was a survivor himself. As he told his story there weren’t many dry eyes in the group.

Later, some students stumbled on the aftermath of a press conference with the 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate, a woman from Kenya named Wangari Maathai, and got to speak with her. (She won the prize for her work with the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya.) One of the students recorded the conversation, so I’m hoping it gets posted on one of the ship’s officials blogs--if so, I’ll update this. Maathai had heard of Semester at Sea and its work with Bishop Desmond Tutu, and the students loved meeting someone so special at a place that is now dedicated to peace.

In talking about the visit, many of us onboard have remarked at how we are puzzled that the Japanese didn’t seem angry at Americans, but they didn’t. Bob and I had fathers serving overseas at the time--Bob’s Dad was in Okinawa and would have probably been in danger if we had invaded Japan, so we are happy the war ended, and sometimes I think it isn‘t fair to second-guess decisions made in a different time, but it is certainly important to think about how we could work for peace so we could avoid these messes. Lots of food for thought.

But where else but Semester at Sea can you go to Hiroshima one day, and then sit down to breakfast the next day with two nuclear physicists who can talk about the scientific, moral, and political decision-making that went into deciding to use nuclear weapons. This has been such a great opportunity to think about things, even if you don't come up with any ideas but one:

Pray for peace.