Missed last week's opportunity to blog due to travel. I will try for two this week.

Last weekend, I visited Hiroshima and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum with CIEE. As part of our program, we were given the opportunity to hear a firsthand account from Ms. Miyoko Matsubara, a hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivor.

Lunch was wrapping up after our previous lecture with Prof. Robert Jacobs. Ms. Matsubara was led in to the front of the small conference room while we students finished eating our provided bento lunches. After graciously greeting staff on her way in, she started setting up her materials at a table. Prof. Jacobs rose to exit, and thanked Ms. Matsubara for being there. I watched her give a deep, almost 90 degree bow in return.

Lunch ended, Ms. Matsubara was introduced to us, and she began speaking. She spoke slowly and deliberately in English, and the pitch and emotion behind her voice made me tense up and listen with my full attention.

She told us how she was working outside of her school nearby her teacher and her best friend. When they saw the plane, they didn't believe it was American. The air raid sirens had finished going off all night, and the sky that day had been completely clear. She described seeing a giant fire in the sky before hitting the ground and losing consciousness. She thought that the plane had been aiming for her.

She brought her hands against her forehead to show us the way she had been squinting into the sky before bringing attention to the scars on her forearms from the intense burns and the deformed shape of her hands from the blast.

When she gained consciousness, she couldn't move. She called to her friends, but nobody answered. Her dark clothes had mostly burned off from absorbing so much heat. She described skin peeling and hanging off of her body and her hands having swollen to twice their normal size.

She described the horrors she saw as she wandered the city. The river full of dead bodies, people begging for cold water, the terrible smell. She recalled vomiting and losing her hair in the days that followed. Ms. Matsubara had been about 1.5 km away from the hypocenter when the bomb was dropped.

One thing she said that stuck with me the most, was that if Japan had possessed the atomic bomb, she was sure they too would have used it. She was not angry at nations or people. She spoke with a deep regret for war. Her message was a plea for peace, an appeal for nuclear abolition, and a world without any more hibakusha.

It was an extremely sobering account, and for me, put more than a few things in perspective.

A gallery of Miyoko Matsubara's artwork and drawings of the bombing can be found here: http://www.hiroshima-spirit.jp/en/draw/index.html

I've also found a more detailed account written by Ms. Matsubara: http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/1999/00/00_matsubara_spirit-hiroshima.php