Hiroshima Marks Day 50 Years Ago When Bomb Hit Crowd Of 50,000 Hears Mayor Appeal For Abolition Of Nuclear Arms

With the deep, clear tolling of a bronze bell, a flight of doves into the blue-gray sky and a moment of tearful silence, tens of thousands of people marked the moment 50 years ago that the atomic bomb exploded above Hiroshima.

“Memory is where the past and future meet,” Hiroshima Mayor Takahashi Hiraoka said in a declaration appealing for peace and the abolition of nuclear arms. “So long as such weapons exist, it is inevitable that the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be repeated.”

On a morning whose steamy heat recalled the day the bomb fell, an estimated 50,000 solemn mourners milled through the sprawling park built near ground zero - the center of the blast - making offerings of chrysanthemums and incense. Shinto priests in white silk robes and saffron-clothed Buddhist monks intoned chants and beat prayer drums.

Standing rank upon rank, schoolchildren in uniform and women in subdued kimonos bowed deeply before the arch-shaped monument enshrining the dead, with the eternal flame to the victims flickering in the background.

The crowd fell silent at 8:15 a.m., the moment of the explosion. Only the cooing of doves and the bell’s tolling broke the hush.

Nearly half of Hiroshima’s wartime population - 140,000 people, plus or minus 10,000, according to the city’s own estimate - died immediately or of bomb-related causes in the six months after the bomb was dropped.

In the few fatal seconds following the explosion, human beings were vaporized where they stood or suffered agonizing flash burns that ripped skin from bone. Buildings were blasted from their foundations and streetcars blown off their tracks.

In what had been a thriving business district, a huge firestorm erupted. The rivers were clogged with corpses. The horribly injured died crying for water.

“Where the city of Hiroshima had once been there was only a great emptiness,” wrote local historian Yoshiteru Kosakai.

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama laid a wreath of yellow chrysanthemums and pressed his government’s opposition to nuclear testing.

“As the only country in the history of humankind to experience the devastation of atomic bombing, Japan has held a firm determination that the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must never happen again,” he said.

Murayama’s government has spent much of the year arguing over whether Japan was an aggressor in World War II or fought in selfdefense, and over the years, many Japanese have tried to forget or justify the war of aggression that preceded the bombing and led to the deaths of millions across Asia.

This year, however, Mayor Hiraoka - a native of Hiroshima who was working in a military chemical factory in North Korea when the bomb fell - has emphasized the importance of putting Hiroshima in historical context.

He has apologized to the Asian countries that Japan overran during the war, and urged his countrymen to face up to the realities of the past. But the mayor, like most Japanese, strongly contends that the United States’ use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unjustified.

Japan surrendered unconditionally nine days after the bombing of Hiroshima and six days after the bombing of Nagasaki.

Possibly to avoid an embarrassing rejection, no official representative of the United States was invited to today’s ceremony. A delegate from Honolulu, however, was attending because of the Hawaiian capital’s sister-city ties with Hiroshima.

In front of the “A-Bomb Dome,” the remains of an industrial hall whose skeletal roof was preserved as a monument, former government employees who had worked there set up a white Buddhist funeral canopy. Clad in black, they sat solemn and stiff-backed for a prayer service.