This one hour conversation, on the Acupuncture Power Hour with Tim Chambers, aired on March 28th, but I am just getting the link now. On the page, the show, What’s Going on in Japan, appears in the list second to the bottom.
A bit of wise advice:
“The point is not to fix anything. The point is to create anew.”
I think of this when I watch the radiation leaking into vast swathes of Japan and listen to the excuses, as if to say that, if we can blame this tragedy on incompetence or a freak occurrence or strange foreign ways we do not have to worry about the caged tiger in our own livingroom.
I think of this when I see the pictures of the dead baby dolphins washing upon our Gulf beaches and read that we “may never know why so many animals are dying.” No, in our oil-infused, dispersant-saturated waters, we may never know.
It is up to us to imagine a new relationship with our planet if we want to have a future on it. Not in fear, but with care and clear vision.
For anyone who missed the Heart of a Woman radio show and couldn’t get it through the link I posted before, here is a better link.
It’s an hour long discussion of everything which some people have been wishing for with the narrow focus on motherhood issues in some of the recent press.
Today, I am sending love and prayers to the people of Japan. They suffered the only atomic bombs ever used in war, and are now facing the biggest nuclear disaster in peace. Please join me.
From an interview with Justin Tedaldi:
“The most unbearable stories were often about children. Children who died; children who tried to save their brothers or parents; children who cremated their parents, at age six, because that was what their parents would have wanted. In the months after 9/11, though, something happened which was very moving and powerful. A number of people came to me to tell their stories. Before then, I had been finding my own interviewees with the help of my translators, but after September 11th, I found out that many people actually knew I was there, listening, and they sought me out because they needed a witness. They needed a safe place to relive, and purge, their memories. And then, it wasn’t just the sad moments. It was also the happy memories of life before, and their family members before. They needed to share those, too, and they gave them to me so their loved ones would not fade away.”
Read the whole conversation here.
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On the 65th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we risk losing the memories of the survivors.
I went to Hiroshima in 2001 to interview the hibakusha — literally, the “bomb-affected people.” I made this journey as a Japanese-American woman who had no knowledge of the atomic bombings — no experience of war at all.
When I got to Hiroshima in June 2001 and began my interviews, good-hearted people shared their testimonies with me, all beginning with where they were the moment they saw the plane, where they fled to, and who among their family and friends survived. Even those stories with some gore in them — descriptions of how the six rivers of the Hiroshima delta were so swollen with bodies that you couldn’t see the water — were curiously detached. It was not that they were afraid to offend the American interviewer. It was that they had forgotten precisely what it felt like.
The survivors recited the facts I had found in books: 100,000 dead within days, 100,000 more dying; everything within two kilometers irradiated; thirteen square kilometers burned to the ground. Drinking the water was deadly. Small fleshy body parts, like ears and noses, melted long before the people themselves died.
Often, the hibakusha ended our conversations with a speech about the need for peace and nuclear disarmament. There were even people who expressed their belief that the world was already at peace, and that, by dying spectacularly, the victims of Hiroshima had made it impossible for any sane leader to use nuclear weapons again.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that their sacrifice was almost invisible where I came from. Photos, film, documentation of the city had been confiscated and censored almost immediately after Japan surrendered, and the only indelible image of the bombing was the power of the bomb itself: the “shock and awe” version of the mushroom cloud. John Hersey’s Hiroshima, first published in 1946, remained the only “oral history” account released by a major, commercial American press. As a result, most Americans know almost nothing about nuclear fallout beyond the 1950’s advice to stock your bomb shelter with canned food.
But after September 11, 2001, when terrorism exploded on television, the interviews began to change.
Witnesses recalled being trapped under beams, screaming to be saved from the tornadoes of fire that were whipped up as the shock wave advanced. One woman I spoke with, who was about eight at the time, told me about trying to fit her mother’s eye back into its socket. Another remembered giving her child water and watching his lips attach and pull off onto the spout of the kettle. One man said:
They brought my sister home, lying on a door. She died the next night, calling, ‘Mother, help me, please.’ My sister’s agony, her terrible burns, her skin slithering off… it was common at the time.
The global instability — the terrorist attacks, the anthrax, the war in Afghanistan — had seeped into the past and made the kind of unconscious link between inhumanities that only trauma can. The hibakusha had been stripped of their trust in the future, and they passed that insecurity to me.
In 2001, living at the world’s first “ground zero” and watching on TV as my New York City home adopted that label, war seemed to be an act that could only be possible if we could fool ourselves into believing that other people’s children were not as precious, or human, as our own.
Hiroshima should have taught us not to be such fools.
This article was first published by the Progressive Media Project. When I sat down to write something for this anniversary, I realized that nothing has changed, except the date. So I changed the date. It is now also available on The Huffington Post and Discover Nikkei.