Archive for August, 2010

Literary Mileage
Remembering Hiroshima

Monday, August 9th, 2010

August 6 was the 65th anniversary of the United States’ bombing of Hiroshima, an event that killed over 100,000 people. In November of 1946, Rev. A. Powell Davies, the Senior Minister at All Souls Church, Unitarian, in Washington DC, delivered a widely-circulated sermon denouncing a newspaper photo of U.S. military officers celebrating around a cake shaped like the atomic cloud seen over Hiroshima. An aide to Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan learned of the sermon and suggested that American children might share school supplies with Japanese students as a way to respond to the devastation.

The children at All Souls collected over half a ton of school supplies and shipped them to Japan, where they were distributed to children at two schools and an orphanage. In appreciation, the Japanese schoolchildren sent gifts of their own artwork back to the church–a small but significant exchange of gifts of peace between the children of All Souls Church and Hiroshima’s Honkawa Elementary School within the context of World War II. All these years, the drawings–many on Big Chief tablet paper–have been at All Souls. They are full of beautiful colors and depict joyful scenes, children at play, sunny days, Buddhist temples. There are no dark mushroom clouds, fighter jets, or tears.

Last week a delegation from the church traveled to Hiroshima to reunite the recently restored drawings with their creators who are now in their 70s and 80s. The drawings are now on exhibit at the Honkawa School Peace Museum and, in the last week alone, have garnered thousands of visitors and significant attention from the Japanese press. On the evening of August 5, the All Souls emissaries attended a memorial service for the Honkawa children who died in the bombing, and were honored to be the only non-Japanese invited to lay flowers at the shrine to the dead. Filmmaker Bryan Reichhardt accompanied the church delegation. He is completing a documentary about the drawings and the relationship between All Souls Church and Honkawa School.

Full disclosure—I’m a member of All Souls and this story is one of many reasons I love the church. I write this post with thanks to Rob Hardies, Senior Minister of All Souls, for his August 6 pastoral letter to members describing his experience in Hiroshima.

(these pictures are examples of the drawings made by the Japanese children)

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