No Plan Japan 19 - Horror in Hiroshima & Horror at Home

I remember deciding to go to this city resurrected from hellfire for multiple reasons, but the most telling I suppose for me was the fact that I needed to feel it. Nothing else would take me to where I needed to be in modern life than going here, to Hiroshima. Where the first atomic bomb was dropped and where the modern age in many respects began, and equally so, when the seeds of its demise were sown. The nuclear age brought with it a slew of nuclear powers, and an Armageddon waiting to happen which no previous age, save those spoken about in the Bhagavat Gita or the Bible, could match it. But if 81 years is enough time for people to forget the horrors of war and of atomic weapons, then surely thousands of years is simply too far in the past to reach the modern mind.

Isn't it strange to be pulled in the direction of ultimate suffering? To have something inside you that actually wants to face the hard and ugly facts of life that most everyone else does their best to avoid? But thats just what Hiroshima was for me, a sore spot in reality that needs to be witnessed, and remembered. To be understood as more than just "The place a battle happened..." or, "Where a weapon was used on people." Out of all the choices there were, all the options to see the vast and beautiful places of Japan stretching thousands of miles and across vastly different climates, I knew which place was the most important to see. Not just because I'm a German/American whose families fought against each other in World War 2, but because I'm Human like everyone else, and life on this planet is nothing if not a test of wills sharpened against the brutal reality of our races ability to hate and fear on another.