I have been to Japan twice. Once in the spring when the cherry blossoms appear, a beautiful transient phenomenon that ripples all too quickly across the length of the country as the “sakura” season progresses.
My favourite visit, though, was in autumn, a longer lasting season of mist, low cloud and melancholy as Japan’s beautiful woods take on a searing russet and crimson colour scheme and the temperature drops.
My son Oisín and I went to our first onsen or hot bath on a rainy night in Kyoto, the old capital of Japan with its 2,000 Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines.
We had had a long day of sightseeing, including a visit to the stunning Shinto shrine of Fushimi Inari and its pathways lined with 10,000 vermilion gate posts, dedicated to Inari, the god of rice. It is set on a sacred hill dotted with statues of foxes, the messengers of the rice god.
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Ahead of us in the rain, there was a phalanx of multicoloured umbrellas moving towards the same downtown onsen, a communal bathing place fed by the geothermal springs that dot Japan’s volcanic islands.
Many Irish rugby fans would have been exposed to the onsen and the Japanese custom of nude bathing during the Rugby World Cup of 2019, in which we were beaten by Japan in the group stage.
It is also likely that the US secretary of war in 1945, Henry Stimson, had shared the onsen cultural experience during several visits to Kyoto before the second World War.
His appreciation of the historical, cultural and religious importance of Kyoto as the ancient capital of Japan led him to persuade US president Harry Truman to reject the view of lieutenant-general Leslie Groves, the leader of the Manhattan Project, that Kyoto’s industrial base justified its destruction.
We arrived by bullet train from charming, old-world Kyoto into the gleaming metropolis of Hiroshima, a city the size of Dublin, rebuilt on the incinerated ashes and rubble of the old city of brick, timber and straw, which was founded in the 16th century.
Once we checked into our tiny but tidy digs, we set out by foot to find evidence of the nuclear holocaust visited on the city 80 years ago.
We made our way to the A-Bomb Dome, the skeletal remains of a popular pre-war municipal building that was once used for exhibitions. It is now fenced off, frozen in time, hosting the ghosts of those who were vaporised inside it at 8.15am on August 6th, 1945.
That was the exact time that the first nuclear bomb was dropped on a civilian population causing unimaginable death, pain and misery.
The lucky ones died in an instant; the rest suffered for years before their burns and cancers overcame their will to live. Many still survive and genetic defects have been transmitted to unlucky members of succeeding generations.
Estimates vary but the final death toll may have been as many as 200,000, the vast majority civilians, including thousands of children. Another 35,000 people died when a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9th.
Across the river from the A-Bomb Dome is the National Peace Memorial Hall, a Unesco world heritage site.
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We shuffled through its exhibition rooms for two hours, almost in a trance at the graphic story which unfolded before us and the rest of the silent, slowly moving crowd of tourists and Japanese schoolchildren.
The minutes, hours, days and years that followed the explosion are evoked with a quiet dignity that does not spare the viewer.
On the day of the bombing a local newspaper photographer, 32-year-old Yoshito Matsushige, walked from his home into the city centre with his camera and took just five photographs. The viewfinder on his camera was clouded over with his tears.
He later recalled: “It was such a cruel sight that I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter. Perhaps I hesitated there for about 20 minutes, but I finally summoned up the courage to take one picture.”
As I thought about the 80th anniversary I asked Oisín what he remembered of our visit six years ago. “The tree that survived and the spot underneath where the bomb was dropped. And how well rebuilt the city is,” he texted me.
On Wednesday, August 6th, as they have done every year since 1946, the people of Hiroshima will gather by the river near the Peace Bell to launch thousands of lanterns inscribed with the names of the dead and messages of peace. The city has become synonymous with advocacy for nuclear disarmament.
At home here in Tramore, I will think of that luminous river in Hiroshima on a visit to the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese gardens to light a candle and curse the darkness that has left the world today with more than 12,000 nuclear weapons.
