Arriving on the railway platform into Hiroshima, it's hard not to be sharply conscious of the self being at that spot, writes Evelyn Conlon.
All the stories and the half-learned facts and the truths turned away from in terror beg to be polished. Unless you take the train back out to Osaka this minute you are going to have to learn.
Yesterday we were watching the carp in a Kyoto Temple lake when Akiko Manabe said that they are the symbol of the Hiroshima baseball team and that I will see lots of them on flags when I get there. I was shocked into silence by the dizziness of such normality. But here I've forgotten. The taxi driver - and yes, he must have seen it, he's over 70 - helps me to find the hotel, his patience astonishing in the face of my return to pre-literacy. If you've not studied Japanese my advice is to put your hands up and keep them there.
In 1931 Hiroshima was one of the first cities to install Lily of the Valley lanterns for the purpose of admiration by its students and theatre-goers and everyday citizens. Today it is of course a totally new city, every single thing 60 years old or younger. With more grace, found everywhere on my travels, and not a little laughter, I got booked into my room. Out on the street I ordered dinner by pointing at pictures. Low Infants again. It's comforting to distract oneself momentarily with these observations.
Morning brings me walking to the Memorial Park, down Peace Boulevard, a median strip of park between the street lanes. The boulevard boasts trees, and how they boast of trees and flowers and adults and babies in this city. Nothing can quite prepare one for the effect of standing in Memorial Park. I know this can be said for many memorials that stand where ghastly deeds were done, but there is an extra gloom here, at Ground Zero, one of only two such places in the world, the other being Nagasaki. Ah, poor Nagasaki. Had they heard the news and were they afraid?
Perhaps I feel this gloom because I have just seen in the museum the minutes of the committee meeting which decided that an atomic bomb should be used "on a war plant surrounded by workers' houses, and that it should be used without prior warning". I notice that even the commas are in the correct place. There was a blue, blue sky on that day, over Hiroshima, perfect for flying, and so, from among the list of possible targets, it was chosen. An earlier "ordinary" bomb warning had been cleared and people were going to work and school - life does go on during war - and the plane came over at 8.15.
The pilot is reported to have said later that Dante would have been terrified. The aerial photograph of afterwards, with its three bits of buildings standing in a two-kilometre radius of melted wasteland, where minutes ago there had been a city of people, is the perfect monument to the devastating, merciless cynicism of that particular act of war.
Memorials are built to remind us, because it is said that we cannot forgive without remembering. Forgetfulness as alibi has inherent dangers. There is a children's picture story, Pika-Don, translated into English by Ken'ichi Matsumura, unbearable to read, but an essential part of that remembering. And there are children everywhere. I wonder what the school tour will make of the Hair monument, where a brief poem declares, "We enshrine here hair,/ Cut and gathered in the morn of life". I wonder what I think of it. And I salute the people who reinhabited here and who use the entire city as a midwife to sanity. Walking back, I notice every leaf and hear every bird singing. Because I have to.
In Tokyo's Waseda University, where the Greek-Irish Lafcadio Hearn once taught, it is appreciated that I know that his Japanese wife, Setsuko Koizumi, helped him to gather, and translated for him, old Japanese stories and folktales. She told him the ghost stories in a dim light and when both she and he were sufficiently frightened he was ready to transcribe.
Back in Yokohama, waking from my rest, where I am staying with two women I met at the christening of a field in Brittany last summer, I hear that the pilot whose plane dropped the bomb has died. The Japan Timesis suitably cryptic. I intend to think about the temples, and Kobe, and the flashing lights of Tokyo, so soon roosted at the back of the over-exposed eye.
If travellers are magpies, what treasure have I got. Our Shared Japan, a Dedalus Press Irish poetry book, just out, a riveting collection that celebrates 50 years of Irish-Japanese diplomatic relations, a warning from Joe O'Leary not to be writing only lovely things, a poem by Masazumi Toraiwa, for which I have the perfect home, a Welshman's address, and a memory of the aesthetic enthusiasm of the members of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature, Japan branch, a visit to whose conference was the original purpose of my journey.
My fully formed but waning jet-lag collided with the maturing return one somewhere over the Urals and I dreamt of straightening pictures at home.