Transfiguration Light, II

Three years ago I went to Japan to do a family wedding.  My cousins, Stan and Mary Ann, invited me to officiate at the wedding Mass of their son, John, and his bride, Kyoko.  John had been living in Tokyo for several years, and that's where he met his beloved.   Kyoko had recently converted to Catholicism, and they were going to me married in the chapel of the Jesuit college, Sophia University.  I jumped at the chance.

It was a fantastic week.  I could go on and on about the wedding, my sweet cousins, and our short time in Tokyo.  

But pertinent to the Transfiguration was my side trip to Hiroshima.

You see, ever since I was in grade school, I was intrigued by the two bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, which set the stage for the unconditional surrender by the Emperor, and the end of World War II.  I had read so much about the bombs, the aviators 

who dropped them, the planning, and the deaths (about 145,000 died in Hiroshima, and at least another 90,000 in Nagasaki, plus 

more from radiation poisoning years later).  I also wanted to go to Hiroshima.  I didn't know how, or when, but I wanted to go.

So when I was invited to John and Kyoko's wedding, I planned my side trip.  On the Monday after the wedding, when my cousins flew back to their home outside of Los Angeles, I used my JapanRail pass and boarded the shinkasnen, the so-called bullet train, for a five hour journey from Tokyo to Hiroshima.  What a smooth ride, at speeds over 200 km/hour (125 mph).  I arrived in Hiroshima after dark, about 8:30 p.m., and walked a short distance from the train station to a hotel.  (The concierge in my Tokyo hotel had made a reservation for me days earlier.)  The tiny, but immaculate, hotel room is a story in itself -- but for another time.

In the morning I jumped on a trolley (not very different than the one I remember as a kid travelling on Brownsville Road through Mt. Oliver to Carrick) for the twelve stops to the Peace Park, the site of the bombing.  It was 7:00 a.m.  People were hustling to work, schoolkids in their uniforms giggling on their way to school, the city of two million (and world headquarters for Mazda Motors) was awakening.  At the Ota River, I disembarked, and began my seven hours of viewing the museum, cenotaph, eternal flame, and over 50 memorials around the park and the river.  Language was not a problem, as every sign was in (at least) Japanese characters and English, and I could hear various accents around me in conversations (Australian, British, Indian, second language Japanese, and American/Canadian).  

About 3 p.m. after taking more than 1,000 photos and saying numerous prayers of thanks to God for the trip, I reboarded the trolley for the train station, reboarded the shinkansen for Tokyo, and, the next day, my flight back to the U.S.

I learned a lot on my short but powerful trip to Hiroshima.  I learned that planning by the U.S. Army Air Force had begun in the winter of 1944, for two assaults on Japan.  One, the bombings with these unknown weapons, and the other, a massive ground assault by 750,000 American soldiers and a feared forced march up the Japanese islands to Tokyo. (Up against at least 2 million Japanese soldiers and the rugged mountainsides.)   I learned that the U.S. bombers had not bombed Hiroshima, Nagasaki and ten other cities for more than a month, but rather took high-level photos--the better to contrast with the photos which would be taken by the Enola Gay, which dropped the "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, and the Bockscar, which dropped the "Fat Man" on Nagasaki on August 9.  I learned the post-war history of the Hiroshima people, who after the years of effort to bury the dead, care for the hibakusha, the atomic survivors, and rebuild their destroyed city, dedicated themselves to peace and the eradication of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.

(Hiroshima today, and Mazda Zoom Zoom baseball stadium.)

And I realized that deep deep within my fascination with this bombing was the realization that if the bombings had not taken place, my dad, Marine Sergeant Frank Almade, who served and fought on many islands in the Pacific Theatre in World War II, would have been one of those 750,000 invading Americans.  Would he have survived?  Casualty rates were estimated at 33-50%.  Would he have come home, married mom, and had me and my brothers?   Would I have come to existence, without the bombing?  This was not just a journey of historical study for me, this was a personal facing of my own mortality.  Moralists debate to this day whether President Harry S Truman's decision to drop those two atomic weapons was justified.  I have never been able to decide myself.  The personal gets in the way of the intellectual.

Yet it is in the context of the Transfiguration that I find peace and light.  Jesus is changed, "dazzlingly white," beyond the comprehension of this friends.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were utterly destroyed by those now-famous mushroom clouds of energy, light, dirt and radiation.  But their survivors and future citizens have, in peace times, gone on to rebuild.  And, unlike most every other city destroyed in war, both cities, and their country, have refused to seek revenge.  

If that is not in the spirit of Jesus, nothing is.