From Ground Zero to the Streets of New York City

lt was water that they poured upon the cenotaph, a shrine-like memorial erected at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, housing the ashes ot thousands of people whose bodies were incinerated by the fiery blast, heat rays and radiation of the A-Bomb that exploded above this very place fifty years ago.

The water was a beautiful offering, though we couldn’t see the ceremony very well through the estimated sixty thousand people who came August 6th to remember Hiroshima and her people on the anniversary of the atomic bombing.

Interestingly, the commemoration was simultaneous with the traditional Japanese Obon Festival, a time of remembrance in Japan when the souls of the dead are said to return and visit the living. Thus. the act of pouring water was one of reverence for the dead. Moreover, it was poured to soothe the souls and quench the thirst of those who died and those who suffered in burning agony as they searched for water after the atomic bombing.

For those of us who came as pilgrims, the water brought with it a flood of images we had absorbed from hearing and reading the stories of the hibakusha, viewing photographs and documentary films of the devastation and rebuilding of the city itself, visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, wandering the city streets.

Such words came back to us in our dreadful imaginings: “tiny fingers seemed to melt,” “rivers were choked with bodies,” “keloid scars,” “hair loss, bleeding gums, vomiting, diarrhea,” “red blood cells destroyed and white cells strangely enlarged.”

We were told by Maryknoll Sister Jean Fallon, who has been in Japan since 1951, that it is said, “to understand Hiroshima one must come to Hiroshima.”

Perhaps that is the fuel of any pilgrim who feels drawn to journey to places of suffering, hope and resistance to make real what had once been abstract, to see, in the indigenous landscape and the human face, what had only been known at a distance, filtered through television, or never even reported.

Places like Northern Ireland, Iraq, Tibet, El Salvador, and East Timor come to mind. It was our experience this summer in Japan (thanks to the generosity of friends and family, especially that of Sabra’s sister Erin who has been teaching English in Japan for the last two years). And it was a kind of journey through time, history and memory, since our lives began twenty-three years after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For this reason, it was of special significance to us that during our first moments in Hiroshima we met up with participants of the Interfaith Pilgrimage for Peace and Life 1995.

Initiated and organized by the Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist Religious Order, the purpose of the pilgrimage was four-fold: to offer prayers for victims of all wars; to acknowledge and reflect deeply on the military invasions and human tragedies of World War II; to advocate for nonviolent resolution in all international and domestic conflicts, and for the renunciation of all war and the means of war; and to learn from history and to abide by the principle of nonviolence through self-discipline and purification.

The group began their journey in Auschwitz on December 4, 1994 with a ten-day fast, and then traveled through Austria, the former Yugoslavia, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. On August 1, 1995, they arrived in Japan, reaching Hiroshima the next day.

We met up with them on Thursday, August 3 at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, while they were praying and chanting before a monument in memory of the Korean victims of the A-Bomb. In Japan, it is only recently being acknowledged that 10,000 forced laborers from Korea were killed by the blast.

An eclectic and international group, the peace pilgrims and their stories became an integral part of our experience of Hiroshima. They had traveled a long distance, as we had, to witness a land transfigured by death in a way no other had ever been. And they came via lands currently embroiled in the fires of hatred and war, starvation and ethnic cleansing. They were witnesses to the war that continues, with after effects lingering like deadly radiation, and bearing the face of a Cambodian child disabled by an exploded anti-personnel land mine or that of the Iraqi child dying for the lack of proper medical supplies.

What land had we come from? What were we witnesses to? New York City, USA. The Lower East Side, to be exact. And eerily, particular faces of people we know came to us as we heard the stories of the pilgrims or crossed the targeted Aioi Bridge, prayed and fasted before the ruins of the A-Bomb Dome or looked over the gleaming, rebuilt metropolis that, fifty years ago, was nothing but embers and ash.

We began to see the faces of the young people we work with at our parish, the faces of those who come to the soupline or for clothes in the afternoon, the faces that are considered an ugly nuisance by those working to develop the aesthetics of our rapidly and threateningly gentrified neighborhood. It was as if our concerns about the present were reflected back to us in the memory of a past we never ourselves experienced.

And so, thoughts of the estimated 200 million guns in our nation of 260 million people broke through our consciousness as we traversed the streets where an estimated 140,000 people died instantaneously when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

As we walked behind chanting monks up to the Peace Pagoda, built in 1966 as a prayer for everlasting world peace, we thought of the Justice Department statistic that 25,000 people were killed in the U.S. in 1994, 70 percent of them by handguns.

We thought about our local parish, and how young people we know or see at church have been shot, even killed. The youth we teach catechism to talk about their experience of gangs, and the topic of violence can dominate their conversation. We thought of the powerful and terrible influence guns and hi-tech weapons have in our own society, how they are glorified on graffiti murals, in television and movies, at museums.

Perhaps the most jarring juxtaposition for us was viewing the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in light of our knowledge of the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum located in the Hudson River on the West Side of Manhattan. The Intrepid, known as “The Museum of Patriotism” and “The largest Naval Museum in the World,” houses highly sanitized exhibits, and, much like the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute, tells a glorified story of war, its heroes, and its weaponry. Rarely, if ever, is there mention of the victims of this represented valor, of those on the receiving end of such gleaming technological sophistication.

In Hiroshima, the Peace Memorial Museum tells a very different story. It is a story told from the bottom up, from ground zero to the Enola Gay. There, children were not pointing to the world’s fastest airplane, the Lockheed A-12 Blackbird, or sitting atop the M-60 Patton main battle tank.

Rather, they were standing silent before the remnants of disintegrated uniforms which many schoolchildren were wearing the morning “Fat Man” was dropped on their city. Others were giggling and sickened, not quite sure how to react, as they viewed an exhibit of fingernails, disfigured and fallen out, the effects of radiation sickness that so many survivors, including the curator of the museum, experienced after the bombing. What a study it would be to examine how children are affected by the message of two such contrasting museums.

A statue of Pope John Paul II stands boldly inside the entrance of the Hiroshima Museum. Quite a surprise, really, when less than one percent of the population of Japan is Catholic. Inscribed below his bronzed breast, however, are these words he spoke at the Peace Memorial Park on February 25, 1981: “War is the work of man/War is the destruction of human life/War is death/To remember the past is to commit oneself to the future/To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war/To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace.”

To remember Hiroshima is to remember all victims of war past and present, the nameless battlefields, the bombed-out cities, the ravaged villages, the countless dead men, women and children, the refugees and orphans, the disabled, the young soldiers, barely out of adolescence, forced into battle.

To remember Hiroshima is also to remember those who have given witness against war, conscientious objectors like Franz Jaeggerstatter who was executed by the Nazis exactly two years to the day before the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, or the Mothers of the Disappeared in countries like Argentina and El Salvador, whose persistent demand for a just peace and an end to injustice in the face of brutal terror have risen up in defiant resistance to the works of war.

One way the city of Hiroshima remembers the past is by preserving what is now known as the A-Bomb Dome, a reinforced steel skeleton that was once the Industrial Promotions Hall, and now stands in jarring contrast to the skyline of modern Hiroshima.

Clearly the message cries out; “Never Again!” And yet, clearly, the world continues to have a different voice, desperately clinging to the development, testing and maintenance of murderous weaponry.

Our fear and our greed have isolated us, causing us to hide behind elaborate mental, spiritual, and technological fortresses. With this in mind, it is, sadly, unsurprising that, the word “intrepid” means “to be characterized by resolute fearlessness.” Confronting these complex internal and external human and social structures, which foster and maintain the violent divisions between human beings along class, race and gender lines, is an ongoing daily effort, perhaps a pilgrimage of sorts. The conversion of the heart is a constant and difficult task, full of starts, and stutters.

We are so deeply grateful for the emphasis Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin placed on the daily practice of the works of mercy, voluntary poverty and inclusive nonviolent love, for these elements simultaneously confront ourselves and our society. It has been said that our vocation ought to be a process of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” and it is noteworthy to say that doing the afflicting is often a little less than comfortable.

We realize how easily we fall into blind comfortability and are in constant need of awakening. (We have yet to see what will happen on our court date after a group of us from the Catholic Worker and other local peace communities were arrested during a prayerful vigil at the Intrepid War Museum on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, or especially for those friends waiting sentencing for their Plowshares actions and other acts of witness in the face of our country’s continuing addiction to militarism and consumerism.)

In going to Hiroshima, we experienced a kind of marriage of history, suffering and memory in the faces of those human beings who bore and bear witness to violent suffering.

The faces of the A-bomb victims, those encountered by the peace pilgrims on their nine-month trek, and those we know in our life on the Lower East Side, in our parish, and at the Catholic Worker came together within our hearts as a kind of communion of saints. We felt a profound interconnectedness within the Mystical Body of Christ, all members knowing one another in their brokenness.

And we felt a surge of hope to see, that, from earth upon which it was said another tree would not grow for seventy-five years, a beautiful phoenix of a city has arisen, flying high above the ruins like the hundreds of doves that were released at 8:15 am the morning of August 6, 1995. “ Nu-mu-myo-ho-ren-ge-kyo ’’ is what the Nipponzan Myohoji monks chant as they walk, fast, and beat their prayer-drum as the foundation of the order’s spiritual work for world peace, “All Life is Sacred.”

We tried to learn the chant, sometimes able to catch the rhythm of the drums as we walked, or as we sat and fasted. At other times, we attempted to pray in ways familiar to our hearts, chanting the Jesus Prayer instead, the Serenity Prayer, even the Rosary.

It was the Fatima Prayer that kept coming back to us, however, its cadence resonating with our steps and the beat of the Buddhist drums: “Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell and lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy.”

Oh my Jesus, forgive us our sins, bring us water to quench our thirst for violence and calm the fear that causes us to destroy our earth, store up weapons of death, and teach works of war to our children. Save us from the fires of hell, bring water to soothe those souls who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from bombing raids, from land mines, from smart-bombs, from handguns.

Bring water, Lord, to cleanse us from our love of war, to free us to be pilgrims of peace in all aspects of our lives and work, and grace us with hearts that are open to the fearless and weaponless practice of nonviolent love. "Especially those most in need of Thy mercy…

Joe (d.2020) and Sabra McKenzie-Hamilton lived and worked at St. Joseph’s House, where they were married in May 1993. They served on the editorial board of the Catholic Worker newspaper for nearly a decade and had three children. Sabra still lives in New York City.

This essay originally appeared in the October 1995 issue of The Catholic Worker.