Dr. Richard Boeke

After Unitarian Universalist President Dana Greeley became friends with Rissho Kosei kai. President Nikkyo Niwano, Greeley said, "If we had-known you like this, we could not have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Niwano replied, "If we had known you like this, we could not have bombed Pearl Harbour.'

By the stone lantern

A birch tree stands sentinel over the pond.

The sound of the waterfall washes my soul.

The half-moon is a ying/ yang in the sky.

Two girls sit on rocks in the waterfall for a photograph.

I have come to the Japanese Garden in a London Park

To pay my respects to the dead of the turning point of the 20th Century.

All the science from Newton to Einstein flowed into August 6th, 1945.

Then the World moved from Newtonian Certainty

To Chaos Theory and the Knowledge of MAD:

Mutually Assured Destruction.

 

The Japanese Garden in Holland Park London,

is a gift of the city of Kyoto

Around a central pond with ducks and great square rocks,

Peacocks roam amid the flowers.

The people of Japan have exported their gardens across the world.

Leaders, who survived losing the war in 1945,

determined to win the peace.

New religions like Konkokyo and Rissho Kosai kai

joined with Shinto and Buddhist priests to stand fast

in support of the Peace Article of the Japanese Constitution.

There are Two Japans, like the Ying and Yang of Taoism, to talk even briefly of Japan is to tell two stories. As most Japanese are both Shinto and Buddhist, so there are as least two sides to the Japanese character- one is the warrior, a medieval knight ready to do battle against the barbarians, the other is the contemplator.

Samurai Armour is at the Tower of London beside the armour of Henry VIII) The London newspaper, The Independent featured this Samurai Warrior for a week

After reading the final article on the Kamikaze Nation, I wrote,

To fall like cherry blossoms.

Not only young pilots, all Japan will be, "the Divine Wind."

...to die is destiny.

Tenno heika banzai Long live the Emperor

You and 1, companion cherry blossoms,

just as petals calmly scatter,

We shall fall for our country.

The "warrior half" of the Japanese spirit is glorified in a thousand Samurai movies and in the novel, Musashi', which has sold almost 200 million copies.

This "Samurai" could be brutal to prisoners in Bataan, Burma, China and Indonesia. This spirit could make alliance with the Nazi spirit of Teutonic Knights, the "Ubermensch" who saw other races as inferior and sometimes treated them as animals. As Hitler and his staff preferred suicide to surrender, many Japanese preferred death to dishonour.

The opposite side of the Japanese character I described in this poem:

Gazing at the garden I eat my breakfast.

Amid the flowers there are no strangers.

In the Buddha spirit, I resolve not to be content

until all beings are free from suffering.

This spirit of "Reverence for Nature" is both Buddhist and Shinto. The "Business Warrior" will come home, or to a Shinto Shrine, wash and bathe in one of those wonderful Japanese baths -some as large as the Roman Baths discovered at Bath, England. Shoes and business suits are left outside, and in a Yukata, a simple cloth robe, there is time to meditate, smell the flowers, and enjoy beautiful fresh food.

In four ways, England mirrors Japan: both nations are islands offshore from a great continent, both have a royal family as a symbol of national unity, both nations have a highly developed "tea ceremony," both cultures practice garden care with "religious devotion."

It would be simple to say that the peaceful spirit of meditation and gardening is what Japan has to teach the world. But the greater message is that many Japanese have taken the lesson of Hiroshima to heart and are practicing as witnesses for peace.

They don't just know about the bomb. Its message has become vivid in their lives and this vividness is being passed on to other lives. This is the witness of the Japanese members of the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) encouraged by the friendship of Shinichiro. lmaoka, a Japanese Unitarian minister, President Nikkyo Niwano of Rissho Kosei kai led a religious witness for support of the Peace Article in Japanese Constitution. This article limits the military budget of Japan to 1 % of the Gross National Product.

This witness for peace is supported by leaders of other new religions such as Konkokyo and by Shinto priests such as Yukitaka Yamamoto. Yamamoto was raised by his father, a Shinto priest, who had been jailed for opposition to Japan's actions in China.

In World War 11, Yamamoto, like most young men in Japan, was forced into the service- He was one of a handful of his unit to survive the jungles of Now Guinea. On his return to Japan, he trained with his father. Each night for ten years he stood under a waterfall for purification, preparing his spirit. He led groups to Hiroshima for Dialogues with Survivors. Now, he leads in organizing the 1996 IARF Congress in Korea, facing the difficult issues of reconciliation.

For many, the life transforming experience comes more quickly. In a magazine, Roger Rosenblatt tells this story: "I was being given a tour of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum by its director, who had survived the bombing as a 13-year-old schoolboy. Translating for me was a woman in her mid-20s, who was born in Hiroshima, though long after August 6, 1945.

"As we walked along the exhibits, the museum director was talking about the effects of the bomb that August day: how his schoolroom had been flattened like a cardboard house, how he had trudged through streets in flames, over bodies, past children crying for their mothers. His narrative was intensified by the photograph of shadows on a bridge that remained after the people who made them had been obliterated. Suddenly the translation stopped- I looked from the director to my translator.

The young woman was weeping and gasping so frantically I thought she would faint. 'Oh,' she said as last, 'Oh, I'm so ashamed, referring to her loss of composure, but I never really knew about the war before this week. Of course I knew, but I did not know- The pain, the suffering. This is new to me.'

"Whenever I think of Hiroshima, I do not picture the bomb, but rather that young woman translator, trembling in tears, and I saw war for this first time in my life. The poet Shelley wrote, We must learn to imagine what we know. "

An Ancient Shinto prayer says: "I pray that the wind will soon puff away the clouds which hang like rocks on the mountaintops." Fifty years after the Atornic Bomb fell on Hiroshima, we have many reasons for saying that prayer. Our prayers go to the People of Bosnia and Croatia. We pray that somehow the bloodshed will end and they will move to Peace. We pray for all those who suffer violence and oppression throughout the world: in Africa, in Israel, in Russia, in Burma. And we pray for those who suffer violence here, in our land: for murdered children and their families. We pray for all who live in fear and mistrust William Faulkner spoke for us when he said in his Noble Prize address: "Our tragedy today is a general and universal fear, so long sustained by now that we can even bear it, There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?"

Fifty years after the bomb, we sense in the words of Robert Jay Lifton, that "we are all survivors of Hiroshima." We are all Atomic Bomb Victims: our sense of life transformed by the Bomb. For centuries, humans have dreamed of immortality through monuments, or children, or poetry or music. With the existence of Atomic Bombs, when we symbolically dial the future, sometimes the answer comes back, "Sorry you have been cut off." There may be no future.

Some react by fleeing to dreams of a "rapture" in which the good people will be taken up to heaven. I prefer the motto of Christian Aid, "life before death. Millions have turned to ecology: the awareness of the fragileness of lift makes us appreciate the beauty of nature. In preserving forests or flowers, we are preserving something of ourselves. The planet is our larger self.

The evening of August 6th each year, a million people make a pilgrimage. A million paper lanterns are placed in streams around the world. The stated purpose is to pray for the souls of those who died on August 6th at Hiroshima, or on August 9th at Nagasaki. But for those of us who light the candies and place the lanterns on the water, the prayer is also for ourselves. Like those who survived the bombs, we pray to overcome the psychic numbing" that keeps us from life. We pray to acknowledge the survivor guilt" we feel, that we are alive while our friends and loved ones are dead.

The survivors rebuilt Hiroshima as a "City of Peace", with a "Peace Park" in the center. On the central monument which marks ground zero for the bomb, they wrote, "Rest In Peace. The mistake shall not be repeated." And the rusting atomic dome was left as a symbol, not to be forgotten.

Would the war have ended as quickly if the bomb had not been dropped? This debate will continue- But from the lessons of two bombs we know the risk of Atomic Warfare is a nightmare that can destroy earth and reduce us all to dust and shadows- All the science from Newton to Einstein flowed to produce August 6, 1945. We moved from Newtonian Certainty to "Chaos Theory" and knowledge of "M.A.D. - Mutually Assured Destruction."

We fear we, or our children, may be victims or survivors of some future Holocaust. With candies and paper cranes, we come to renew connection with the music of our hearts. What distant drummer do we hear? Do we hear the drums of hope or of some demonic dream that would lead us to destruction? Are our lives being frustrated by some ancient grief, some ancient unhealed wound?

Ancient unhealed wounds come back in Bosnia and Korea today. "And the sins of the parents are visited upon the children until the utmost generation." Ancient unhealed wounds fragment Christianity. We are isolated from Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Jew.

Recently, I read the report of an Interfaith service at Auschwitz, There were 30 Buddhist monks and nuns from Japan along with Christians and Jews. At the end of the service, one of the Japanese monks gave each of the people there ten beautifully folded origami paper "peace cranes-" Across the world the love of the survivors was reaching out.

The story of the service ended with these words, "The holiest place on earth is where ancient hatred becomes a present love. In every land and in every heart, may ancient hatred become present love.

We give thanks for those who continue to practice the lesson of Hiroshima, such as Japanese Prime Minister Murayama, who on August 15th, 1995, issued a heartfelt apology for Japan's aggression and the suffering which it caused.

In the solemn light of the Mushroom Cloud. May we confess our failures of thought, word, and deed.

May we forgive one another. May we be cleansed of the arrogance of racial superiority. May Hiroshima Inspire us to build communities of peace and kindness.

Sources for this article include:

Ruth Benedict. " The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" a study prepared by the anthropologist to help U.S. Officers to understand the Japanese

Peter Popham, "The Kamikaze Nation," The Independent August 5,1995,

Cavan Dawes, "Prisoners Under the Sun," The Times. London, July 25,1995.

Rev. Yukitaka Yamamoto's, "Kami no Michi - The Way of the Kami "(Tsubaki America, 1987).

Roger Rosenblatt, "Look Elsewhere for Eden," Modern Maturity March-April 1995:

Dr. Richard Boeke Unitarian Church, 5 Westerham Rd, Bessels Green, Sevenoaks, Kent T'N13 2PX