Hiroshima Mon Amour Elin O'hara Slavick Excerpts from a Blog Written in the Third Clocks Stopped

Volume 13 | Issue 32 | Number 1 | Article ID 4357 | Aug 10, 2015 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Hiroshima Mon Amour elin o'Hara slavick excerpts from a blog written in the third Clocks stopped. Even in grayscale, the person, destruction wasn't made while in residence in Hiroshima, summer, lost. A child's lunchbox tied to ash and bone. 2008 and then again in 2011. What were You can see the entire blog here. we - seven or eight years old when Mrs. Risko exposed us It is reprinted here with generous permission of The Volta online journal, where it was recently to the photographs of Hiroshima I had published in the issueEvening Will Come, nightmares; my dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the mother called the principal to complain. time of this reprinting, slavick has been awarded a Japan Society for the Promotion of ••••• Science Fellowship to return to Japan for a few MAY 22—MAGPIES, BUTTERLY WINGS, months. She plans to continue her research in BAMBOO Hiroshima and to begin work in Nagasaki and Fukushima with plans to make a lead box in When you level a city—literally destroying which she will place x-ray film and exposed everything except for a few buildingsand 60 objects to see if the lingering radiation makes trees in a city of over a million—killing 100,000 exposures. Her solo show Seventy Year Old people instantly, you leave a population Shadows of Hiroshima, closes at Cohen Gallery wanting things—beds, clothes, their children, in Los Angeles on August 29, 2015. This project toys, technology, anything to hold onto. She felt is also currently on view in Brazil, Canada and guilty and just wanted to go take pictures even Detroit, and will be included in the Kohler Art though everyone knows that pictures do not Center October exhibition Photography and the alleviate guilt or fix things. Photographs only Scientific Spirit. show the same thing again and again, proliferating the problem or making the On August 6 - Hiroshima Day - an opening problem pretty. reception was held at Cohen Gallery and poet Lorene Delany-Ullman read prose poems from her book Camouflage for the Neighborhood,the winner of the 2011 Sentence Award. Delany- Ullman recently published her poetry and creative nonfiction Santain Monica Review,Prime Number,Stymie,Sports Literate,Lunch ,AGNITicket 74andWarscapes.She teaches composition at the University of California, Irvine. Here is an excerpt from her book: 1 13 | 32 | 1 APJ | JF Hiroshima Storefront near the Train Station, 2008 She had never expected to live in a building built by the US military right after the atomic bomb was dropped—built for soldiers and American scientists to study—not help—the victims of her country’s crime. The ABCC (Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission that became a joint operation with the Japanese in ABCC (Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission) being the 1970s, renamedRERF, Radiation Effects built on Hijiyama Hill, Hiroshima Research Foundation) is perched on a hill Archival photograph from the Hiroshima Peace overlooking Hiroshima, next to the Museum of Memorial Museum, 2008 Contemporary Art. It is an old compound—a little rusty and abandoned even though plenty RERF (Radiation Effects Research Foundation, of people still work there. The people of previously the ABCC), from the dormitory, 2008 Hiroshima do not like that the compound is up The birds, with their deep caws, woke her there—so out of the way and difficult for the family up at sunrise and they ventured out onto survivors to get to and on such precious land. the roof to watch the day begin. The kids love As far as she could tell, the American watching out for the wild cats—strays with government had no plans to move it. She feels bloody wounds on their necks, limps, various guilty for even being here. disfigurations or odd features—crazy fur, wild eyes, plump paws, skinny backs. MAY 23—ANTICIPATION She wants to walk along the river, roads, buildings, neighborhoods, and see it all, rub it all, photograph it all. She wants to get inside, to find the spoiled objects that will leak onto x- ray film—leaving ghostly explosions of light in 2 13 | 32 | 1 APJ | JF the darkness, to place flowers on the little Schoolchildren singing at the Children's Peace cyanotype paper she brought with her that will Monument of Sasaki Sadako holding a bronze crane, leave white shadows. Peace Park, Hiroshima, 2008 Howard Zinn’s wife died last week. She emails the famous and kindest historian she will ever She cries several times while in the Peace meet to send her sympathies and love and is Park—once while listening to the English audio astonished that he emails back with love and at the Tower for Mobilized Students, and joy that she is in Japan—a place that every time throughout the two devastating documentary he was here he found it extraordinary. films she watches in the museum: A Mother’s Prayer from 1990 and Hiroshima and Nagasaki: MAY 24—BEING AMERICAN The Harvest of Nuclear War from 1982. Both films have footage of a two year old girl She is struck by the monolithic concrete heaving and crying out for her dead mother buildings everywhere. She understands that and roving shots of the dead, skulls, burned this was all built after the bomb that destroyed bodies, keloids, deformities, destroyed cities, everything and that was what the time everything completely obliterated and yet, the dictated—1950s modernism, a concrete jungle, miracle of a kind of survival for some. A young brutalism, bunker mentality. She notices that girl fans the ashes of her father in an urn, when she makes statements to other Americans wishing to cool him. He was a fisherman and about the atomic bomb or her protests at Fort died three days after being exposed to the Benning Military Base against The School of atomic tests on the Bikini Atoll. In Hiroshima, the Americas, they do not respond. An all things atomic are connected. Sadako, the American in Japan, she does not feel like an girl who died of leukemia while folding American. thousands of her medicine wrappers into paper cranes; another girl who was damaged by While taking pictures of groups of schoolgirls radiation at the moment of conception would singing at the monuments in the Peace never understand the damage. “There is no Memorial Park, she hears the voice-over from a cure for the atom bomb." film in the Peace Museum, “In the searing flash, I became a picture. Blasted by the heat, I She is stunned by the footage of grasses, melted into the wall. Blasted by the wind, you flowers and ladders, and yes, even people, disappeared into the earth.” burned white onto the surface of wood and stone, negative shadows like Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes. Can't believe that she feels even more than she already felt about these absences, these atomic ghosts. She not only wants to make cyanotypes, but also do rubbings of flowers, grasses and ladders. 3 13 | 32 | 1 APJ | JF Film still from the Hiroshima Peace We Are Our Own Enemy, Alamogordo, New Memorial Museum, 2008 Mexico, USA 1945 from Bomb After Bomb: A Violent MAY 26—WE KNOW FULL WELL … Cartography, elin o'Hara slavick It was only 21 days after the first atomic bomb test in Alamogordo, New Mexico that the U.S. This drawing takes as its reference an aerial dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima and then just photograph from the Los Alamos National a few more days after that when they dropped Laboratory Archive of the crater formed by the Fat Man on Nagasaki. They wanted to see and first atomic explosion. On July 16, the Trinity study what the atomic bomb would do to people test was the first test of a nuclear weapon on the other side of the world. It was a criminal conducted by the U.S. on what is now White experiment. She wanted to listen to JoySands Missile Range. The detonation is Division’s “Atrocity Exhibition” and when she credited as the beginning of the Atomic Age. saw footage of the countless charred bodies Shortly after this test, The U.S. dropped Little and the emaciated survivors, she hadBoy on Hiroshima and Fat Man on Nagasaki. flashbacks to other footage—footage of the concentration camps—another war, another war the U.S. was involved in. 4 13 | 32 | 1 APJ | JF Hypocenter in Hiroshima, Japan 1945, know full well … from Bomb After Bomb: A Violent MAY 28—NO GOOD WAR, NO BAD PEACE Cartography, elin o'Hara slavick She decides to go into the Peace Museum this time with hundreds of school kids. She can The atomic bomb called Little Boy “dropped on barely see the soft and thin clothing on display, Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 turned into the black rain on a white wall, the utensils and powder and ash, in a few moments, the flesh melted bottles. The schoolchildren take notes. and bones of 140,000 men, women, and The U.S. dropped the A-bomb to “justify children. Three days later, a second atomic expenditures.” Dummy A-bombs were called bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed perhaps pumpkins. There were children called bomb 70,000 instantly. In the next five years, another orphans (who shined the shoes of westerners). 130,000 inhabitants of those two cities died of The ABCC (Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission) radiation poisoning. Those figures do not was formed in 1947 and the Japanese people include countless other people who were left had this to say about it, “They examine us but alive, but maimed, poisoned, disfigured,they do not treat us.” Hibakusha (A-bomb blinded.

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