The watch, which stopped 63 years ago today, reads 8:15 am.
The faint shadow of a sitting woman burned into the stone of the steps was made at the same moment.
The violence of that instant in time still resonates outwards from ground zero. A profound silence, 270,000 souls strong, follows. The dropping of the A-bomb over Hiroshima marks a watershed in human history.
Years ago, in 1985, I made a short experimental film about the A-bomb protests then occurring in Toronto, where I lived. Protestors were painting shadow outlines of themselves on the roads and sidewalks to mark the anniversary of this catastrophe. I went out one night with a super-8 camera and a flashlight, and filmed some of them.
At one point while doing this, I had a very strange experience. I felt a savage, indescribably loud and violent wind like a cyclone or hurricane blow through my mind. This became the central metaphor of the piece; I felt this wind as as a manifestation of the historical aftermath, an echo 40 years later, of the original explosion and it’s shock wave. It was coming from a place I had never been, half a world away, 13 years before I was born.
I made a 16mm. short, showed it once or twice and then put it away.
Reviewing it in 2005, back in art school to obtain a degree, I found it embarrassingly badly made, but still containing some good ideas. I tried to remake it as a video installation, without quite succeeding. I came up against a stone wall and could go no further. But the metaphor remained: of temporal mutation, time sped up, and the vortex of the shock wave generated.
What goes around comes around. On August 6th, I found myself for the first time at ground zero, Hiroshima Peace Park. I wasn’t alone, of course; there were probably 100,000 others there with me.
I went there at the invitation of my Japanese teacher, Yanagihara-san. We joined a troupe of girl scouts, and had lunch with them at a tabehodai Italian restaurant (!).
The gruesome displays of the blast’s aftermath in the main hall left me somewhat unmoved; they looked too carnival-esque, too grand guignol to me. I found myself distanced from them. Most of those around me seemed quite affected by them.
I was, however, moved to learn of the role of the river in helping those who could to survive. Images of water are very important in the Peace Park. There are a number of fountains and pools.
And I found the sculptures and installations in the Peace Hall itself very beautiful. This building is remarkable, essentially a cave with a long spiral hallway leading down and into a primary chamber, and a hallway off of it. This architecture echoes the role of caves in Japan, often as holy places for meditation (Kukai’s cave in Muroto Misaki), and refuges (the caves of Hineyuri no to in Okinawa).
There is an extraordinary piece of art: A database driving a wall of screens, containing all the known photographs of the victims of the blast. Visitors to the site can enter a name into one of the terminal keyboards at the side of the room, and some of the fields on screen rearrange themselves to display that photo and those around it. The photos fade to white when changing.
The effect, for me, was of a slowly evolving field of white energy, where photos emerge, float for a time, unmoving, then fade in a burst of light to white, to be replaced by another.
The piece is simultaneously a search engine, a display mechanism and a beautiful metaphor for death, loss, memory, meditation.
Sadako Sasaki was a 2 year old girl who survived the blast, only to succumb to radiation induced cancer ten years later. She is famous for having made 1000 origami cranes, a symbol of longevity, as a gesture to defy the cancer. She died, but some of her cranes are on display here. There is also a very popular sculpture of her at the park.
And I am reminded of an article I read in the Japan Times around this time, of a young man, not in Hiroshima when the blast occurred, who returned immediately to the city to search for his uncle. His uncle had disappeared, but in the smoking ruins of his store, the young man found a flame burning. He took the flame back to where he was living, and kept it lit. His son, a middle aged monk, tends it sixty three years later. This flame has been the single source of the numerous peace torches in Japan.
