I didn’t realize I was going to be in Hiroshima in the week of the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb. And I suppose it doesn’t make any difference to my thinking that I was. Yet birthdays are always a ripe time for reflection. And 65 years is both a long time and a mere heartbeat. To my mind, the event for which Hiroshima is renowned feels like it took place in another world, and I find the fact that there are still survivors left to tell the tale of what happened to them when the bomb landed somehow astonishing. The hibakusha, as they are known, are a dying breed, of course, as are the veterans of every nation involved in that particular world war, but it’s so old school. We’ve come so far since then, right? Oh. Right.

What struck me as I toured the permanent exhibit at the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima and the various installations that make up the city’s Peace Memorial Park was a theme I’ve touched on before and one I’ve thought about in this context ever since Ian McEwan published his devastating op ed in the Guardian just after the awful event of September 11, 2001. As McEwan put so beautifully, what makes any of us matter in this world is our relationships with other people. As he wrote about the people on those planes on 9/11, their desire to reach out to those who meant the most to them is essentially what elevates the human being. “Those snatched and anguished assertions of love were their defiance,” he writes of those last, anguished phone calls.

Yet the decision-making process leading up to dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima effectively stripped the city’s people of their humanity. Take this excerpt from the June 6th 1945 entry of the diary of Ally Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, highlighted at the Peace Memorial Museum exhibition: “I was a little fearful that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength.”

Through propaganda, a fervent belief in the Allied cause, or whatever it was, Stimson had dehumanized the Japanese nation to the extent that bombing them didn’t mean the obliteration of hundreds of thousands of people, it meant a delightful emphasis of firepower. It’s a common strategy in war. By all accounts, the Japanese had so dehumanized the Chinese that an event such as the Nanking Massacre in 1937 saw its soldiers sink to depths of terrible savagery (Chinese estimates put the death toll there at 300,000). The 9/11 terrorists surely weren’t thinking of individuals or families as they flew planes into buildings. Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, sadly the list goes on and on. One effective way to motivate an army is to turn the enemy into caricature subhumans.

These days, though of course soldiers are still only too present in many a warzone around the world, the disconnect from the battlefield is only growing. When the plane doesn’t need a pilot, it’s even easier for war to be both entirely abstract to the perpetrator and utterly devastating to those on the ground. After all, there’s no need to rally robots. Just set them to “destroy”.

Anyway, back in 1945, Stimson got his wish. The new weapon showed its strength and the era of disconnected warfare went up a gear. 140,000 people are estimated to have died in Hiroshima by the end of 1945.

I thought I was coping pretty well with the exhibit, which is filled with the bloody rags of the clothing people had been wearing when the bomb went off, along with their battered possessions. And then I watched the video testimony of one survivor. I’m not sure when it was filmed, though clearly fairly recently. She described how her son had died in his bed, the buttons of his pajamas burned into his skin. A few days later, her daughter died and last, a few weeks after that, her husband. Her lip trembled as she spoke to the interviewer. “We used to be such a happy family,” she said quietly. “The A-bomb destroyed my life.” And that did it. Her simple, quiet recognition of what had happened to her was a gut-wrenching reminder of the human devastation wrought by an event that the records of the industrial military complex have sought to classify as just an interesting landmark on the path to progress.

And so, on the anniversary of Enola Gay flying to drop her deadly cargo, I have the awful sense that even as we’ve come so far, we haven’t really come anywhere at all. But in an effort to use the sadness of this depressing anniversary as the catalyst for something positive,  a word for all my own extensive support network of amazing people: thanks and love; you rock.

Pictures: the 08:15 time of the bomb blast is used as a motif throughout many of the installations in the Peace park, including graphics in the Peace Memorial Museum and a fountain in the Peace Memorial Hall for Atomic Bomb Victims. My hotel was right beside the A-Bomb Dome, which pretty much took a direct hit from the bomb. Everyone inside was killed, while the walls and roof were blown out. The structure stands, and has now been shored up as a physical symbol of the day’s events. The skeletal dome itself is lit at night. I didn’t take pictures of much of the exhibit; it felt wrong, somehow. The glass bottles were fused together in the blast.

I loved the Random Hacks of Kindness event that happened last year, sponsored by tech heavyweights including Microsoft and Google, to bring together a community of developers and geeks to work on the Big Problems of our time.

I’m not actually sure where the concept of “random acts of kindness” first came from (anyone?), but I just got recruited to the cause, after an elderly angel came to my rescue in Kyoto.

The thing about tropical weather, see, is that it can pelt it down without so much as a by your leave. You might think I’d be somewhat prepared for this, what with living in increasingly inhospitable New York. And as it happens, I was very proud of myself for traveling with an umbrella. Only I didn’t actually have said umbrella with me on the morning in question. In fact, I was a number of miles away from it when the heavens opened and I found myself doing an extremely convincing impression of a drowning rat. (The picture above is not blurry because I’m a bad photographer, but because it was pouring with rain.)

Anyway, skip over the part where I attempted to find out where the nearest train station was, only I’d overlooked the fact that I don’t know the Japanese words for either “train” or “station,” which led to a supremely awkward encounter with a man who’d clearly have loved to help if only I could tell him what in god’s name I needed. And skip to the bit where I’m squelching down the street in a state that’s by now bordering on hysterical laughter at how ridiculous this is/I am.

Suddenly, a woman passing by grabs me by the arm, yelling at me in Japanese. Then she points at her umbrella, at which I nod and agree that it’s a lovely umbrella and she’s very lucky. Then she drags me about 100 yards up the road, yelling all the way, which if universal body language/tone are anything to go by includes telling me I’m a very silly girl to get caught in this storm and what the hell do I think I’m playing at, which isn’t really a sentiment I feel I can argue with, to be honest, so I agree busily. And then we get to this hole in the wall alcove, which has a glass counter but not much else, and she drags me under the awning and promptly reaches underneath the counter to pull out a bucket of umbrellas, the big show off. And then she hands me one. At which point I do have a phrase that works: “How much is it?” at which she shrieks again and shakes her head and near enough shoos me out of her shop and back into the rain. At which point the language breakdown happens all over again, with me repeating incessantly, I think, “I’m very well, thank you very much” and heading on my way, squelching off down the street, warm in heart that people really are, in essence, pretty great. I was too bedraggled, befuddled and other words beginning with “be-” to get a photo of my rescuer, but instead, above, a shot of my very beloved, very most favorite souvenir, very pistachio-colored umbrella.

All a long way of saying that I clearly have some karma to repay. So watch out random tourist in distress in NYC. I surely won’t have a bucket of umbrellas on me, but I’ve totally got your cab fare.