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I have been putting off writing this entry for a while; mainly because I didn’t know where to begin.

Between August 10th and August 19th, I participated in the “Peace Child: Say You Love This World! 2007” program. In this program, we (the participants and staff) stayed in Enokisawa Farm in Chiba Prefecture (about 2 hours of out Tokyo) for 10 days, to discuss war and peace, pollution and the environment, and poverty and wealth. Participants came from both inside and outside of Japan, and the circumstances given to us were ideal to accomplish the goals of the camp - and I really thank the organizing staff for this.

Every morning, we woke up before 6.00am, did some chores around the farm and then got started with our day. During the daytime, we had plenty of activities, workshops and discussions. The evenings left us feeling pleasant with a sense of accomplishment and looking forward to the next day’s activities. We mostly ate vegetarian food, with the bulk of the ingredients being fresh produce from the farm itself. We did not need to use any air-conditioning, television or the internet for ten days; it was a refreshing experience.

We spoke about many different topics, but the one that left the deepest impact on me was the workshop about the Atomic Bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 62 years ago. One of the most vocal survivors of this terrible crime against humanity, Michiko Yamaoka, visits the “Peace Child Tokyo” program every year to talk about her memories as a 15-year old girl from Hiroshima who had been been wounded almost mortally - both in the physical and psychological sense - had it not been for her mother’s love and support. She has always emphasized that it is important to remember the tragic bombings as a lesson to humanity and to pass on the message of peace to younger generations; especially now that there are less and less survivors living to tell their story.

This year, Michiko Yamaoka could not visit us in the camp because she has been bedridden for a few months, and all of us found this painful and disappointing, even without having met her. However, a DVD of one of her speeches in a high school in Washington in 2003 was shown to us. That very evening after watching the DVD, I pulled out a small notebook and wrote down the details of her speech so that I would share her story with you, the reader, as a way of carrying forward her wish of her story not fading away after she leaves this world.

Just as the organizers of the program asked us to do before watching the DVD, I ask you to take a moment to think about what did you in the Summer of your 15th year.

(Silence.)

Time: 8:15am on August 6th, 1945.
Place: Hiroshima, Japan

Just ten minutes earlier, a 15-year old girl named Michiko bid her mother goodbye as she went to work in the local telephone company. Michiko had lost her father at the age of three, and so as a means of supporting herself, her mother, her uncle and her two cousins from the countryside who were living with them - she went to work daily, barely giving her any time to go to school and enjoy the pleasures of youth. Michiko, however, was not the only 15 year old living such a hard life; for her country - Japan - had been at war and life was not very easy for anyone at that particular frame in time.

That moment, the first of the only two atomic bombs dropped in history (both in Japan) landed 800 meters from where she - the 15 year old girl - was while she was on her way to work.

Michiko remembered suddenly seeing the world covered in a beautiful colour between blue and yellow, and she looked on in awe. In that split second, she had not realized that she was experiencing the burning heat of 1,000 infernos; its crippling pains lasting an entire lifetime. Naturally, no 15 year old (or any rational being) would expect something so painful, and on such a clear-blue-skied, beautiful sunny day, to fall out of nowhere and turn their lives inside out (or for those who were lucky, bring their lives to an end).

The child’s hands were melted into claws, her skin a loosely hanging sheet of cloth, and her face was left unrecognisably bloated. Despite this, her mother - ailing from the shards of broken glass lodged into her own body as a result of the explosion - pulled the child out of the debris, just when Michiko was ready to give up on life before even experiencing it.

When Michiko took her first look at what has become of the people of Hiroshima, the first thing she noticed was their wounds and how everyone’s faces turned into those of ghosts running towards the mountains. Michiko’s mother asked her daughter to run with the ghosts of Hiroshima to the mountains to get medical aid and water, and that she would meet her up in the mountains later on.

There was no medicine on the mountain top. There was no water, either.

When Michiko was finally reunited with her mother in the mountains, they decided to go to their family in the countryside - as they had no home of their own to return to. When they arrived at their family’s home, they were quickly turned away because they blamed the girl and her mother for the death of the uncle and cousins who were living with them in Hiroshima, and that they were afraid that Michiko’s wounds from the Atomic Bomb would somehow infect them.

And so, Michiko and her mother returned to Hiroshima to build a new house and start life over. Michiko lived the next ten years of her life, until she was 25 (my age now!) ashamed of her wounds, not leaving home. Ten years after the tragedy, she was invited to go to New York for surgery in order to return back to a semi-normal life. Many people opposed the idea of her going to the United States for surgery because they told her, “They tried to kill you once and failed. This time, they will kill you for sure!”. She ignored their words and went for the surgery. She stayed in the United States for nearly 2 years, and was much better after the treatment she received.

After her treatment, she was able to use her hands again and was able to get a job in a clothing factory and managed to slowly rebuild her life. Twelve years after she returned from America, her mother died.

The doctors extracted a piece of glass lodged in her mother’s arm after she passed away. It was this piece of glass and knowledge of the suffering her mother must have secretly felt that drove Michiko to ultimately become an outspoken activist against Atomic Weapons and War.

It is a broken piece of glass that flew into Michiko’s mother’s arm at 8:15am on August 6th, 1945 in the sleepy town of Hiroshima that drew me to write this entry and I hope the same piece of glass leaves an impact in you, the reader, as well. It all started with one mother’s love symbolized in a piece of broken glass.

After watching the DVD, silence fell over us all. Some of the participants wept for the pains of Michiko. The day we were watching the DVD, August 12th, was actually the day Japan surrendered to the United States in 1945, marking the end of the war there. August 12th also happens to be the day Korea gained its independence from the Japanese; the Korean participant, however, was not celebrating that day after hearing of the suffering of Michiko Yamaoka. Looking back at it all, my first actual interaction with Japan was when I was in the 2nd grade - I had participated in a penpal program with students my age in Hiroshima; all the postcards and pictures they sent me were of the peace memorial in Hiroshima - which became the first concrete image I ever had of Japan. How tragic. How cyclical.

The main thing I remember about Michiko Yamaoka, as I saw her on the DVD, was that she had a spirit of iron. As she spoke of her pains, it is easy to see how hard she tried to hold back her tears and rage, but it was her drive to tell her story that kept her going. I also told my friends at the camp that I felt that even her tone and the way she spoke sounded like bombs continuously dropping. She’d start a sentence softly, and then, it would be punctuated with a raise of the tone of her voice and a violently painful image. After I returned to Tokyo, I’ve been looking up information on Michiko Yamaoka and here are some of the things I found (Click here, here, here or here).

Incidentally, and speaking of motherly love, the name of the B-29 bomber that dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima was named “Enola Gay”, after the name of the mother of Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. - the man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima; who in March of 2005 said (about dropping the bomb on Hiroshima), “If you give me the same circumstances, hell yeah, I’d do it again.”