Posted by I should actually be on my way north but I decided to go to the park this morning instead. I want to go and hear the clock sound its bell this morning. It is 8.10 it is raining. A few people are walking by or cycling by on their way to work or school.
I search for a place to get out of the rain – there is the big bell in the park – it is under a roof. I go in under the roof – there are another man standing there as well hiding for the rain – he looks European – he is just reading his book – he might be another tourist just here on an ordinary morning. A little Japanese family arrives looking out over the river towards the old building on the other side of the river.
The European man is leaving maybe he needs to go to work or something. The Japanese family comes up and has a look at the bell for a minute or so and then they move away again. I am standing alone under the roof of the bell tower – the birds are hopping around looking for something to eat. It is just an ordinary morning.
It was also an ordinary morning 23.364 days ago – when people were going around doing their daily business. Back then it was a clear sky and sunny – it looked like it would be a nice hot summer day in the city. Of course it was in extraordinary times – there were a war going on in the Pacific. Earlier in the morning the air raid alarm had been sounded – but the all clear had been sounded at 7.31 in the morning so people went to work and to school. But school were not quite as usual – the big kids were not going to school in the morning but instead they were working in demolition to create fire lanes to reduce the damage of fires from the air raids which were hitting all over Japan. Many of the big school kids were working just a few hundred meters from where I am right now. But until this point the city had been spared from the multiple air raids hitting all the big cities all around the country.
At 8.15 the clock sounds. It does that every day as a remembrance of that day now 23.364 days ago – 8.15 August 6th 1945. It was the moment when time froze and life change forever in the city of Hiroshima. A few hundred meters south east of where I am standing 600 meters up in the air were the biggest explosion ever in the history of mankind. The bomb known by the innocent name little boy had just exploded creating a giant fireball spanning 280 meters just a second after the blast creating incredible heat and a shock way that hit the area in a second after the blast.
Today it is really just an ordinary day not much is happening except the clock which is heard for less than a minute – but it is a memorable place to be – a place to remember what happened at that specific time in history. I guess it would be a place to come back to once more on a more specific day a possibility would be 36 years and 12 days from now – if I am still alive and at a reasonable health this far out in the future.
I wrote this entry when I visited Hiroshima in 2009 – it made a huge impression back then and I put it on a different website which has since then been shot down. I decided to repost this entry August 6 2020 at 8.15 AM Tokyo time in remembrance of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs on the 75 years anniversary of the bomb in Hiroshima.
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