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On Aug. 6 people at Eden Park marked the 58th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Remembrance ceremonies were held in cities all over the world in solidarity with Hiroshima. Local participants heard speeches, listened to music and then carried paper lanterns from Seasongood Pavilion to Mirror Lake.
About 75 people participated, according to Carol Rainey, a member of the August 6 Planning Committee. Paper lanterns, some decorated with names of victims from Hiroshima or Nagasaki and many containing wishes for peace, were launched into the lake, usually accompanied by prayers for peace.
“Salam, Paix, Shalom, Peace, Paz, Pace: Open us to your gift,” said one of the lanterns.
Another lantern glowed with the colors of a rainbow, drawn in the tight, intense hand of a determined child.
The lantern floating in Mirror Lake recalled similar ceremonies in Japan. Every year since 1945 candle lanterns have been floated on the Ota River in Hiroshima in memory of those who died in the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the same day as Cincinnati’s ceremony, Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba reminded the world of “mushroom clouds spilling black rain” in 1945.
Officials there added 5,050 more names to the register of victims who died immediately in the blast or from the after-effects of radiation exposure in Hiroshima. In all, the Hiroshima death toll now stands at 231,920 from the American bomb.
A similar ceremony was to occur in Baghdad, according to Peggy Gish, a member of a Christian Peacemaker Team who visited Cincinnati in May and has now returned there. People in Iraq today suffer and many have died from the slow radiation poisoning of America’s “depleted uranium” weapons.
The highest levels of childhood leukemia in the world occur in southern Iraq, where 300 tons of radioactive litter from American “depleted uranium” weapons lies on the ground. Some experts have predicted that by 2007 40-48 percent of the population in southern Iraq will have cancer, mostly due to refuse from radioactive American bombs and bullets.
Rainey, professor of English at Xavier University, warned of new victims of atomic weapons.
“Pictures are now coming back of deformed babies in Afghanistan, hospitals full of cancer and leukemia victims in southern Iraq,” she said. “Mr. Bush responded to the events of Sept. 11 with the biggest military buildup in world history and has requested money from Congress to develop new nuclear weapons.”
Hiroshima Remembrance ceremonies at Mirror Lake, held yearly during the eighties, may become annual events again in Cincinnati. ©
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2003.