Ringing the Peace Bell

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It was a day that promised rain and the onset of autumn, but the rural train station was filled with people en route to weekend destinations. Still exorcising remnants of sleep from my body, I dropped a hundred yen coin into a vending machine and watched the slim, shiny can of sweet coffee fall from the depths of the machine. The signature Shikoku train song blared out of the loudspeakers signaling the arrival of the early-morning train bound for Takamatsu. I was headed to the city of Hiroshima for the weekend from the island of Shikoku where I had been teaching English for the past few months.

After three hours of slicing through the verdant Japanese countryside, the train pulled into the bustling Japan Rail Station in Hiroshima. In Japan, the city of Hiroshima has two meanings, one couched in the other. The Hiroshima we see today is a city of islands, a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis. The other "hiroshima" is the legacy of atomic destruction. As I stepped off the train, I already could feel the heavy ghosts of the old bomb-struck hiroshima slipping up through the glittering skyscrapers and modern, Western coffee houses of the new Hiroshima. The city seemed too new, devoid of the timeworn temples and shrines that usually co-exist with the convenience stores, glittering neon signs, and high-rise office buildings.

I did not know how to prepare myself for Hiroshima, because I knew that I would see everything around me through the lens of that cataclysm. Not only would the twisted branches of the phoenix trees -- the vegetation that emerged out of the radioactive ash of the blast -- be reminders of war, but the whole city would seem a phoenix city ever marred by its own ashes. Later that weekend, I would worry that the city's call for peace is languishing in the Peace Park in the city's center while the world's most powerful entities play at war. But when I first arrived, my mind was focused on remembering the past, making sense out of a war that has not yet strayed far from history's conscience.

I considered my visit to Hiroshima to be a sort of pilgrimage, one belonging to the secular religion of history rather than to the metaphysical world of spirituality. It would help to define my relationship with Japan, and with that of my own country. It was also a pilgrimage of remembrance. Bernie Glassman Roshi of the Zen Peacemaker Family speaks of remembering as an act, not only of recalling, but also of piecing together the fragments of history, as if it was a living entity, the parts of which are in need of reconciliation with one another -- re-membering history. This re-membering is especially salient when recalling the post-war history of Hiroshima because the city was literally dismembered by the atomic bomb. Remembering, as Glassman Roshi explains, is a powerful act, an act that can call to mind the piecing together of bodies -- bodies of those in danger of being lost to history, bodies of knowledge, and in this case, re-envisioning as whole the bodies of those lost in the blast.

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