21日 もみじ灯路 準備委員会
71 years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind
possessed the means to destroy itself.
Why do we
come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in the not so distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children,
thousands of Koreans and a dozen Americans held prisoner.
Their
souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward to take stock of who we are and what we might become.
It is not
the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first men. Our early ancestors, having learned to make blades from flint and spears from
wood, used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind.
On every
continent the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen,
peoples have been subjugated and liberated, and at each juncture innocents have suffered -- a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.
The World
War that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities and magnificent art.
Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice and harmony and truth, and yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest
tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints.
In the
span of a few years some 60 million people would die; men, women, children -- no different than us, shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed starved, gassed to death.
There are
many sites around the world that chronicle this war -- memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism, graves and empty camps, the echo of unspeakable depravity.
東京都新宿区