Hiroshima Travelogue: Episode 8

In the evening, we are invited to a restaurant. A relatively small part of the restaurant is already prepared for us. The former president of the Hiroshima Peace Museum and members of the MOCT are with us at the restaurant.

A colorful dinner set is prepared for us in one corner; most of the stuff is new to us in the dinner except for the potatoes, fish and pasta. I take some of each. As the dinner is over, and as this is a routine in such gatherings, each of the guests introduces himself. After the introductions, Ms. Soya, head of the MOCT delegation, delivers a speech and repeats some parts.

"How many more years are we going to be able to serve as the link between the Hiroshima incident and the world?" she asks. "Sooner or later, we will all die and our mission should be continued by the younger generation."

Then, she introduces a young colleague of hers and says they have been in close contact for some 7 years in humanity activities.

That evening and the days that followed were enough for me to figure out how the MOCT covers the stories it covers, especially the atomic bombardment of Hiroshima; it does it through face-to-face meetings, anecdotes, visitations and whatever can be achieved through audio or visual senses. This is at the same time interesting and astonishing for me [as a viewer]. The Japanese are in no way alien to the functions of history and literature. They are undoubtedly aware of the greatness of literature.

During the final years of the 80s, while Kaman quarterly was still released, I came across Japanese literature for keeping alive the Hiroshima tragedy.

The first article we published in Kaman about the Hiroshima bombardment was headlined something like "the Magical Hiroshima Park" by Ms. Farshideh Nasrin who had traveled to the city in 1977 and had visited the Peace Park. In the article, Nasrin mentioned two notes by American officers written at the memory book of the museum; "O, Lord! Please, pardon us for repeating the same massacre in Vietnam!" read one of the notes, while the other one read, "Thank us all. Such a great deed. We'll try to keep doing the same."

I learned about a book, 'Towards Peace: the impact of war on the contemporary literature of the world', in the 5th year of Kaman's release. Published by Tehran University Press, the book entails 9 articles about the impact of war on literature in Italy, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, the UK and the US. The book was a great work for those of us who knew little about literature in countries like Italy and Japan; especially three of the articles which focused on Japanese literature were of great significance to us [Kaman magazine staff]. I did the introduction of the three articles for the magazine at that time.

One of the articles was “Getting to know about Kenzaburō Ōe’s thinking and literature”. Kenzaburō was the second Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize. ‘The Hiroshima Notes’, his book, was reviewed in one of the articles. It was said that Ōe finished the 186-page book in five years. To complete the book he visited the city several times to talk to the incident’s survivors and witnesses. His literary thinking was formed during the interviews and visits.

A while later, we reviewed the Persian rendition of “Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima” by Arata Osada in the magazine. The book was translated into Persian by Maryam Saberipour and its original version was released in 1951. The work entails notes by boys and girls who witnessed the atomic bombardment in their city.

There must have already been tens of other such books in the market on the disaster; however, the Japanese staff of the MOCT prefer to adhere to other methods to highlight their history and their identity; they form groups of civilians and tried to link with other nations.

At night, we get out to cruise the streets. We arrive to the Peace Park of Hiroshima; the venue of a great gathering. Everything looks ready for the event. There are chairs as much as the one’s eye can see; placed one beside another in a precisely ordered manner. There are a great number of chairs in the park, unprotected from the sun; and one can imagine what will come to the guests on the day of the event under the sordid sun. However, some of the chairs are in a series of tents. They say the protected chairs are to serve families and survivors of the bombardment and the rest will be the place of others including organizers, officials and other guests.

A beautiful river flows in the middle of the part.

Hedayatollah Behboudi
Translated by Abbas Hajihashemi