There is a light that never goes out.

"I can't fix something this complex any more than I could build a rose." - Jakob Dylan


As if I wasn't crying enough already, she handed me a paper crane.

Something between a Japanese fairy tale and an idiom, it is said that a person that folds one thousand paper cranes will have their dreams come true. I know of this, like most people that do, because of Sadako Sasaki. Sadako was two years old on August 6, 1945, when at 8:15 in the morning the sky exploded above Hiroshima, Japan. She was in her home, a mile from the hypocenter near the Aioi-bashi Bridge. She did not die right away, was quite healthy for a number of years actually. But at the age of nine, she developed a series of skin conditions, radical ones, that were diagnosed to be leukemia, one of the lingering legacies of the nuclear fallout. Sadako began folding. Knowing this legend, she strove to assemble this grand flock of paper cranes so that her deepest wish could come true: survival. Sadako died before she came close to reaching her goal, but her friends and classmates decided to finish the rest for her after she had already left them. In Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park, there is a statue in Sadako's memory, one with a bell, the clapper (that hanging part that actually strikes the side and makes the noise) is a gold origami-style crane. What makes this monument stand out above the several hundred that I have seen but not written about is not the main part, but the glass sheds that surround the statue. From far away, even from as close as eight or ten feet, the multi-colored interiors look like ribbons, crafted signs urging world peace. You need to get up very close to appreciate the artistry. The meticulous detail of the folds. Because they aren't ribbons or normal signs but rows and rows of tiny origami strung together, pasted to a board. An infinite flock of cranes made by schoolchildren throughout Japan, constantly being donated and rotated as they have been for the past half century, all in honor and memory of Sadako Sasaki.

I was privileged enough to see a few dozen of Sadako's actual cranes. I was struck by how tiny they were, how much attention and love she put in to each one of them. She didn't race through them emptily, rush urgently to reach her target of one thousand. She couldn't. These cranes were not destined to be an empty statistic, each one was not merely a fraction of a goal. Each single crane had to be strong, the wings of each one had to bear the weight of their creator, the weight of a city itself. Each had to support the burden of the past and carry an entire people in to the light of the future.

I saw these cranes inside the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, which held a large number of artifacts from everyday citizens (not soldiers, citizens) killed by the blast. There are photographs all throughout the exhibits of the maimed as they lie in hospital beds. But the worst photographs aren't there. They don't exist. There's no celluloid to capture the immediate aftermath, the atmosphere of the half-dead victims wandering the rubble-strewn ground, so they've turned to other means. You know those really cheesy life-sized dioramas at museums of people frozen forever in some endless task? They're a lot less funny when their skin is dripping off them. The Japanese school girl next to me audibly retched at the sight of them as she and I both rounded the corner. I looked down, shrank still further in to the shell of my embarrassment, my shame at being American in the city of our second worst transgression (more on that below).

Unlike Sadako, I do not know the older woman's name. I don't know her personal history enough to tell if at the very beginning of her sixty-odd years she endured the morning of Hiroshima from a vantage point of safe distance or of frightening proximity. All I know is what she did for ten seconds today. What she said to me as I walked through the exhibits, nearly biting through my bottom lip in an obviously vain attempt to keep the tears from falling openly.

"Thank you for coming here." She handed me a postcard and two tiny cranes, one green, one purple. The postcard I will keep for its sentiment ("Change all bombs on earth in to fireworks"). The cranes I will treasure, like few objects I own in this life. My tears flowed uncontrollably after she gave them to me. Especially at the tender way she emphasized the one word in the sentence that changed its entire complexity. Most people would stress the "thank you," believing it would underscore the gratitude. She emphasized "here." She emphasized that this was a choice that I made, not to just come to this museum but to this city. By saying that in the way she did, she did more than emphasize, she conveyed her recognition that for me this was much less of a visitation than a confrontation. Hiroshima is not Omaha Beach, not Auschwitz, not S-21. On these grounds, I was not an heir, not a victim, not a bystander. In Hiroshima I, an American, was something I haven't had to be before in any of my travels. A culprit. A perpetrator. You can make your own decision on whether or not the ends justified the means, but whatever you think in your head, in your conscience, understand that it does not change the fact that we did this. In the photographs all throughout the museum, it is we that turned caramel skin in to white wastelands of cells, or worse yet, a liquid. We that made dying little boys so thirsty they tried to suck the puss from their own open boils.

You can think what you want. But understand, about not merely Hirsohima but all events in our nations past, present, and (sadly) future, that the question was not "Do we drop the bomb or not..." It is "Even if we do take this step, is there a way to go about it somewhat humanely...." (In the case of Hiroshima that is. To repeat the same display, the same atrocity three days later in Nagasaki is flat out reprehensible. We as a nation gained unequivocally nothing by it.) To flesh this argument out fully would take too much time, space, deviate from the core of this writing, the central themes of what I felt today and last night as well. Its something that, if you want, we can discuss in person....

After being sequestered and thoroughly searched for half an hour in customs at the Hiroshima airport, I didn't arrive to my hostel until nearly 11pm. But neither my exhaustion of traveling for more than 24 hours straight, nor the freezing weather could keep me away from visiting Hiroshima's Atomic Bomb Dome right away. A building some two hundred meters from the hypocenter of the blast, the Atomic Bomb Dome (formerly the Industrial Promotion Hall since being built in 1915) was not leveled like almost everything else that morning; it was damaged pretty severely, but it still stands, part shell, part concrete tatters. Last night I took photos of it from across the Motoyasu-gawa River. But I never crossed to the other bank to get close to it. I wasn't ready yet. Tonight, after visiting the museums and various related sights in the morning, and heading out to the famous floating O-Torii at Miyajima in the afternoon, I had an overwhelming impulse to return. To complete my confrontation. Tonight I looked at the ruins up close. Tonight I crossed the river.

I saw the building from close up this morning as well, but to see the frame floodlit at night is the true way to experience it. It is in this stark illumination that it looks most like a skeleton. It is in this light that the emotions it evoked from me were strongest. It's silly to cry over twisted metal, steel girders contorted off their axes. That's not what I cried over, and that's not why the decision was made sixty years ago to keep this ruined building standing. The generations of visitors who have looked at the ruins of the Atomic Bomb Dome are looking at the embodiment of that morning, at the corpses of the dead and the shells of the living. The bent off-shoots I saw tonight were not steel girders. They were the black fingernails that grew perpendicular to the hands of survivors. The grid structure of the dome was the checkered pattern of the kimono that had been branded in to the skin of a female blast victim.

The ruins of the dome embody Hiroshima the event. Not Hiroshima the city. For that you cross back to the island of the Peace Memorial Park, to its very center. There burns the Flame of Peace. It burns day and night, sun, rain, or snow, and will burn in this place, ceaselessly until the last nuclear bomb on earth is destroyed.

I write these words on the day of my visit. Twenty-three thousand, five hundred days exactly after the era of nuclear aggression began. Twenty-three thousand, five hundred days exactly after Hiroshima. And I know that I will never live to see that flame extinguished, nor will anyone else in any generation to come. Since 1960, after every single test of a nuclear bomb anywhere in the world, the mayor of Hiroshima has written a letter of objection to the appropriate test-conducting country's ambassador, or even head of state. Each one has known that these petitions will not be acted upon. But that does not stop them, as it should not stop any one of us. Even in the face of the insurmountable, one must continue to do that which is just. Because it is also that which is necessary. In matters of such importance, fatalism is not just suicide. It is genocide.

Through it all, the flame burns in protest. But it also burns as a starter, something which we can each visit, physically or metaphysically, and use to ignite the fight for what is just that we intend to wage ourselves. Even if it is in simple, everyday ways. It's not that your actions need to accomplish something in themselves. If they can inspire others to join you in this fight, that is enough. That is something that can build, grow stronger, swell in to something so bright that it cannot be ignored.

I think before, back in Liverpool, I compared myself to fire. I think that's necessary now. I think that's what we all need to be.

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