As the Rush concert came to a close at the Forum in Inglewood Ca., my life just turned another page. More than just a talented rock band, 30 years ago, my life changed in a direction I never thought would happen. Manhattan Project by Rush got me to think. Again, more than just a song with complex time signature, it was the path to me being an atheist, a peace activist and finally, a Unitarian Universalist.
When I bought the Power Windows C.D., I heard:
1. "The Big Money" 2. "Grand Designs" 3. "Manhattan Project"
I thought these songs rocked. Big Money had a great beat and I banged my head to the beat, while Grand Design had a lively beat which I truly enjoyed. It was a happy tune, which evoked feelings inside of me now that I became a Rush fan. Being a former pianist, I loved the intro and I played it on the piano. Then I heard Manhattan Project. The intro was Neil's drumming and it had a military beat. I was thinking, was this about war? I then read the lyrics: Imagine a man when it all began/The pilot of 'Enola Gay'/Flying out of the shockwave on that August day/All the powers that be, and the course of history/Would be changed forevermore...
I wondered what Enola Gay was? Was Enola an anagram for Alone? Alone Gay? Was this an LGBT with an identity problem? I really didn't know. So I asked a friend in my journalism class and he said to ask my Asian American Studies professor.
So I did.
I asked: Sensei, what is the Manhattan Project? She told me and the song started to make sense. My aunt was a victim of the Manhattan Project. Well, I was told that from my mother. Over the years when I asked, my mother would say her city was bombed by an atomic bomb. It really didn't phase me, because, I was kept in the dark...on purpose. In Japan, my aunt would be called a hibakusha (被爆者) or bomb survivors. Because of this, she would be discriminated against. Hibakushas are genetically defective and if you were a hibakusha, you probably deserved this...karma?
This got me mad. So at 19 years old, I was trying to find everything I could about what my aunt experienced. As I got older and found out more information, I was getting mad. I wondered why would a loving God allow his flock to kill innocent lives? I then became an angry atheist. As I got much older and the dawn of the Internet became more open...without dial-up, I searched everything. I gathered information, seen videos on Hiroshima and even saw an anime on the bombing by the U.S. As I gathered more information on Hiroshima, I was even more disgusted when I read:
A visitor looks at 'Death of
American Prisoners of War,' one of 15 large folding-screen panels on the
U.S. atomic bombings drawn by Iri and Toshi Maruki, at the Maruki
Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels in Higashimatsuyama, Saitama
Prefecture, on May 31. | KYODO
The U.S. killed American POWs. Why? To show Stalin that we were a force not to reckon with...so eventually, Russia created the most powerful hydrogen bomb called Tsar Bomba 16 years later. This made me even more mad. I received the facts but I never knew what my aunt experienced. So I sat down with my mother and asked what did our aunt experience? She sat me down and told me what happened. She prefaced what happened by saying: [our aunt] said if there was a Hell, she saw it in Hiroshima. So what did she see? When the bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945 at 8:15 a.m., my aunt, a high school student was in class, when all of a sudden, the wall of the classroom fell and acted like a lean-to.
Not knowing how long she was out, my aunt and a classmate crawled out of the classroom, after being buried under 48 dead students and one teacher on top of her and a classmate. The corpse of the students, teacher and the wall shielded her from the blast. Not knowing how long she was out, she and her classmate extracted themselves out of the dead bodies, and out to the city. As the two girls went to their separate ways, my aunt described to my parents what she saw. My aunt saw a woman dragging a charred fetus attached to her umbilical cord, people walking in a daze with their skin peeling off, she heard people screaming help who were trapped and then she approached them to help pull the man, woman and or child, their charred skin came off and their skeleton was exposed. People asked my aunt for water, she gave them water, they thanked her and died. Luckily none of her relatives died as she got home but six months after 9/11 happened, she died from cancer after being in a coma for several months.
Many people like Colonel Paul Tibbets justified both bombing as justifiable because Japan would not surrender. Then there are others who said that the destruction in Dresden was comparable in destruction, yet what both fail to mention was: would the killing of your buddies be justifiable as you dropped the atomic bomb over them, when you were trained to leave no one behind? Also, how many people, 70 years later, who survived the bombing in Dresden have cancer today? In Los Angeles, there is a program for the hibakusha who are still alive today. HICARE (Hiroshima International Council for Health Care of the Radiation-exposed) examines the survivors and possibly treat them too. My aunt was a part of the program. I saw her at the clinic and I have a feeling that when we said hello, she left the facility out of shame.
On August 2, I spoke about the experience my mother told me to my church members and I nearly cried in church. The church Throop Unitarian Universalist in Pasadena Ca., allowed me to share what I experienced. My influence from Rush to my goal to end nukes, from bombs to nuclear power. My inspiration came from Rush and 30 years of inspiration made me what I am today...sadly, one more of my family are in a nuclear mess...they live in Fukushima...life sucks.
