Nagasaki Peace Memorial Ceremony (8/10/2007)

At 11:02 am on August 9th, 1945 the "Fat Man" atomic bomb exploded in the sky above Nagasaki City. Every year since then people all across Nagasaki Prefecture have remembered the event with the Nagasaki Peace Memorial Ceremony. The event is dedicated not to blaming and reinforcing hate but instead to remembering the horror and atrocity of what happened that morning and reminding everyone why peace is so important.

August 9th also happened to be my first day of work. The kids normally have vacation during August but they would all be in school for the Memorial Ceremony and so Kawaguchi-sensei, one of the two English teachers, invited me to attend.

The ceremony itself was a pretty interesting experience, but it was also interesting to see the differences even in just the way that assemblies are handled. All of the students sat in vertical lines according to which grade they were in. In Japan junior high is three years and the US equivalents would be 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. For the most part all of the kids were very well-behaved for the hour+ assembly. About half of the students made big newspaper-style posters for the ceremony that were displayed in the halls but the other half had put together presentations and one group actually did a short dramatic bit. They clearly had put a decent amount of work into their presentations.

A little before 11am the presentations were interrupted and all of the students spread out within their lines. At 11:02 a bell began to sound throughout the town (like a recording, I mean), and everyone lay down and pretended to die. And I mean everyone: teachers, students, the principal... everyone. And yeah, you bet I did too. I thought it was actually a really interesting ceremony and idea but even if I didn't, I suuure wasn't going to have the only person standing up in a room full of "dead" Japanese on Nagasaki Peace Memorial Day be an American!

After the kids had finished their presentations three banners were unrolled in the back of the room so that they hung vertically. Kawaguchi-sensei translated them for me and they said something like "We must pay attention to small things", "We must understand each other and work together", and "We must attain enduring peace". I'm not exaaactly sure of the last two, but you get the general idea.

Overall it was a really good experience and I'm glad I had the opportunity to attend. Dino, Rachel's successor, told me that in the high school they watched a video and nobody pretended to die, so I guess it's not a universal thing. Maybe just in the younger grades? I don't know. "This world was made for love and peace!!" (they didn't say that at the ceremony, it's from somewhere else... don't worry about it).

-greg.