Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

From Salzburg to Window Rock, WE ARE ALL HIBAKUSHA – Steven Leeper: 1st "foreign" head of Hiroshima Memorial Foundation

“From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers had planned for them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away.”
– Leslie Marmon Silko, meditating on a nuclear test blast at Alamogordo, New Mexico, only few hundred miles from her reservation – from Ceremony (1978)

"We, who were not killed at that unforgettable moment…have kept our silence, hid our faces, scattered ourselves and led our lives that were left to us." But later decided, "to save humanity from its crisis through the lessons learned from our experiences, while at the same time saving ourselves."
-–"Message to the World" – Hidankyo, 1956

Longtime Japan resident, American Steven Leeper, has returned from a sojourn in the U.S. to Japan, to head the Hiroshima Memorial Foundation. A contributer to the Atomic Bomb Museum, a web-museum, Leeper was hired by Hiroshima mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, whom Leeper met when he and his wife ran a translating business in Hiroshima.

Some American commentators have questioned whether Leeper's American nationality might be problematic for Japanese atomic bomb survivors. This notion springs out of two mistaken assumptions: that the message of Hibakusha is only about their victimization, and that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of 1945 have been the only victims of nuclear weapons proliferation.

Nuclear weapons backers have long discounted Hibakusha activists, arguing that their global anti-nuclear weapons message amounts to a preoccupation with their own suffering. Instead the Hibakusha "Never Again" message has always been directed outward, intended to remember and commemorate those killed by working to spare other people from this horrific experience.

Hibakusha and peace educators in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki stress a broad vision – that we are ALL victims of the nuclear weapon nation states' obsession with weapons of mass destruction. Atomic bomb museums in both cities include the faces and voices of millions of people who have suffered from the consequences of around 2,000 atomic bombings around the world.

American Dr. Strangelove-style (Stanley Kubrick modeled the character on several real people) WMD proponents, made their livelihoods "thinking the unthinkable" -- forecasting how to control the aftermath of global nuclear devastation. Fallout would be considered another everyday nuisance. Heavily contaminated food would be given to the elderly, who would die before cancerous tumors developed. These nuclear bomb backers were so enthralled with weapons of mass destruction that they practiced bombing their own citizens.

According to Howard Rosenberg, author of Atomic Soldiers: American Victims of Nuclear Experiments, the military conducted nuclear bomb experiments on terrified pigs and hundreds of thousands of unprotected American "atomic soldiers," while Johns Hopkins psychologists recorded their reactions, for decades. Ultimately, radioactive fallout from U.S. bombings covered the entire American continent. The U.S. government nuclear bombed Nevada, Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico, as well as the Marshall Islands, over a thousand times. With military strategists and psychologists like this at work, who needs enemies?

In second place, the former USSR nuclear bombed Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, the Ukraine, Russia and the Arctic over 700 times. The Kazakhstan government estimates 1.6 million people, including Soviet atomic soldiers, were injured.

France, third runner-up, nuclear bombed Algeria and French Polynesia over 200 times, and as recently as 1996. After the last extremely controversial bombing, former Prime Minister Chirac blathered "the safety of our country and of our children is assured." Aside from not making any sense, did Chirac give any thoughts about the safety of the people in the South Pacific (where the rate of thyroid cancer has increased)?

The UK nuclear bombed Australia (where radiation has shown up in the teeth of those affected ) 45 times. China atom-bombed itself 45 times. India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all nuclear bombed themselves. India named its first nuclear bombing tests after divinity (the "Smiling Buddha") (India's tests took place in a region largely populated by the absolute nonviolent Jainist sect) after developing its nuclear weapons from nuclear power technology imported from Canada and the United States.

It's no accident that the U.S. military keep naming their bombs after divinity, from the first atomic bombing, "Trinity," to the proposed "Divine Strake," the non-nuclear 700-ton bomb designed to simulate a low-level nuclear weapon, that the Shosone Indians and supporting activists were able to stop last year. The primary Euro-American religious narrative envisions an apocalyptic end to history.

Psychologist Erich Fromm, commenting on the prevalence of compulsive destructiveness and the deathwish in modernity, wrote in Escape From Freedom that this reflects the mindset of powerlessness. "The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it."

Therefore, when commentators question the choice of an American as an anti-nuclear spokesman for the Hiroshima Memorial Foundation, they're using a framework that's way too small. They have forgotten that birthplace of the atomic bomb was the United States and that the ground zero for the weapons of mass destruction mindset has always been the American military-industrial culture.

The atomic attacks on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are part of a global atomic history that includes thousands of other atomic bombings affecting us all. Beyond the hundreds of thousands of victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, commentators need to remember the children and grandchildren of these Hibakusha – the American sailors who went into Nagasaki to search for POWs in the radioactive rubble – the millions of other innocent victims of fallout, including American downwinders plagued by cancer and birth defects, as the 1992 documentary "Downwind" lends voice to – hundreds of thousands atomic soldiers – uranium miners – nuclear-weapons industrial workers – millions of anti-nuclear activists who have sacrificed to challenge the apocalyptic insanity of nuclear weapons, and those threatened with nuclear waste in their backyards, including residents near Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Because their lands have been repeatedly atom-bombed and are now being used for nuclear garbage dumps, Indigenous people, who have organized transnationally, are at the forefront of the anti-nuclear movement, as Brenda Norrell outlines in her Counterpunch article "Leave It in the Ground! Indigeneous Peoples Call for Global Ban on Uranium Mining" that covered the 2006 Indigenous World Uranium Summit.

Mayor Akiba's move in appointing an American to represent Hiroshima's anti-nuclear weapons movement reflects Hiroshima's universal breadth, whose messages and warnings belongs to us all. As Mayor Akiba and others have said, "WE ARE ALL HIBAKUSHA."

June 11, 2007:
American to Recast Hiroshima’s Message: Peace activist Steven Leeper, the first foreigner to head the memorial foundation, wants to add substance to the emotional plea
The Los Angeles Times

HIROSHIMA, JAPAN - Dig down below the 3 feet of topsoil that was dumped atop the ruins of central Hiroshima to make a memorial Peace Park and you’ll still turn up bones, remains of Japanese civilians incinerated when an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic fireball over this spot one August morning in 1945.

The Peace Park is a graveyard, the most visible scar of Japan’s disastrous imperial war and ground zero of its postwar, anti-nuclear conscience.

Remarkably, Hiroshima is now entrusting stewardship of this symbol of its annihilation to a citizen from the country that dropped the bomb: Steven Leeper, an American peace activist recruited to reinvigorate a local peace movement that critics say has failed to sufficiently push the power of Hiroshima’s anti-nuclear message to a global audience.

“Hiroshima feels an urgent need to have more connection to the world,” says Leeper, 59, who spent long stretches in Japan as a child and an adult. He says his mandate from Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba is to find a way to turn Hiroshima’s misfortune as the original victim of nuclear war into more than just a sentimental force for peace.

“There is a view among some that Hiroshima’s message is all emotion and lacks substance,” says Leeper, who in April became the first foreigner to run the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, which oversees the museums and memorials. “Right now, Hiroshima tells you the obvious: that the atomic bomb was a terrible thing, that nuclear war should never happen again, that we should live in a peaceful world.

“But it doesn’t tell you how to accumulate the political power to vote the warmongers out of office, or how we can stop ourselves from killing each other. If we are going to graduate from a war culture to a peace culture, we’re going to have to be a little more hardheaded on how we go about it.”

Leeper’s appointment comes as the generational clock is already forcing Hiroshima’s peace foundation to question standing assumptions. The museum has relied upon hibakusha - those who survived the bombing or who came into contact with its radiation afterward - to act as guides to the daily stream of visiting school groups. But any hibakusha who were old enough to have more than childhood memories of the bombing are now in their late 70s or 80s; only two dozen or so are still healthy enough to tell stories that bring that terrible day alive. Their witness may be digitally preserved in the museum’s archives, but the human connection to the bombing is about to disappear.

There is also awareness that Hiroshima’s peace memorials face competition to attract field-tripping students, who make up a quarter of the 1.2 million annual visitors. A few years ago, an advisory committee charged with suggesting ways to stop the slide in school excursions noted that the major complaint of visiting schools was the lack of any nearby amusement park for fun once the A-bomb tour was done.

Though school visits remain down, Leeper says overall attendance has recovered in the last two years, and he is hardly about to cater to amusing diversions. “You will not see a waterslide,” he says, grimacing.

But he still has an a mbitious agenda of reform. The museum will try to raise its voice in the nuclear proliferation debate by sending an exhibit of the Hiroshima story to two locations in each of the 50 U.S. states ahead of next year’s presidential election. And in Hiroshima, Leeper wants a complete overhaul of the park museum’s displays.

The substantive challenge, he says, is to address whether Hiroshima can get beyond its current focus on eulogizing Japan’s suffering in a war it bears responsibility for starting.

Only about a tenth of the museum’s visitors come from outside Japan; Leeper says he has met Koreans in Hiroshima who “resent that this place does not talk about how bad the Japanese occupiers were in Korea and China.” Those who suffered at Japan’s hands can become furious, Leeper says, “at what they see as the Japanese getting away with looking like they were the only victims.”

Leeper wants to create a committee ranging from defenders of Japan’s pacifist Constitution to Japanese nationalists, as well as Chinese, Korean and American voices, aimed at arriving at a common narrative of the world’s first atomic bombing. If such widely disparate views can come together, he says, Hiroshima will have showcased the peaceful conflict resolution it has always advocated.

The desire to spearhead a more forceful peace crusade is something Leeper shares with his friend Akiba, a three-term mayor and energetic peace campaigner who is well aware that the anti-nuclear movement’s good intentions are not matched by influence in the corridors of power.

The two men met when Leeper and his wife, Elizabeth Baldwin, were running a translation business in Hiroshima in the 1980s, and grew closer as Leeper became drawn into the city’s peace movement.

When the American couple moved to Atlanta in 2001, Akiba hired Leeper to lobby at the United Nations on behalf of Mayors for Peace, a group of city leaders from around the world that the Hiroshima mayor wanted to become a lobby with political teeth.

Then in April, with the Hiroshima foundation casting for a new chief executive, Akiba did the backroom schmoozing to pave the way to bring in his American friend. The argument was that Hiroshima needed someone who spoke English, who would be as comfortable espousing a nonproliferation message in New York, Tel Aviv or Tehran as in Tokyo...

"'It is highly symbolic that the mayor of Hiroshima has chosen an American,” Leeper says. “It proves that what Mayor Akiba has been saying all along is true: that Hiroshima does not seek revenge, that it does not hold a grudge.'”

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