Mr. Japan

Ken Domon, Hiroshima, 1957.

The skin all over the body, which already had looked like that of a person in the last stages of tuberculosis, began to change to an even more hopeless, opaque colour, like that of a roasted eggplant.
Ōta Yōko, 1983.

Outside the summit hall, the flags perform
their ancient office, fluttering above mistakes.
The delegates adjust their borrowed smiles
while satellites rehearse the evening’s takes.

A bomber lifts because a signature
travels quicker now than any prayer.
Another city learns the grammar taught,
whenever empires conjugate the air.

Then comes the verdict:
‘The Islamic Republic of Japan’.
As though geography were merely noise.
Tokyo replies with cartoons, cats, and memes,
a people rescuing themselves with poise.

Yet laughter knows the map beneath the joke.
Phone screens glow beside the guarded fence.
Seventy-six enclaves where another flag
commands occupied ground.
The bomb remembers
its white handwriting on the stone.

The mushrooms rose, the runways lengthened,
children wave where bloom outlives the wire.
History laughs because it cannot weep enough,
while memes bloom beneath the bomb’s long weather.

Vahid Salemi, Tehran, 2026