HIROSHIMA PEACE MEMORIAL CEREMONY

On August 6, 2006 in the morning Orlando and I attended the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony. On August 5th the park looked like this:

On August 6th it looked like this:

There where so many people from all over the world that this is the closest I could get to the ceremony. We watched the proceedings in a little screen that was set up by the some trees. The ceremony lasted about an hour. It was filled with speeches form kids, the mayor and the prime minister of Japan. The outstanding moment of the ceremony was at 8:15 am where everyone had a moment of silence (that's the time the A-bomb exploded 61 years ago) and prayed for the souls of the people who died.

At night families and friends gathered along the banks of the river to launch a series of candlelit lanterns. Everyone let the lanterns go into the river with a message of peace in order to remember those who died because of the A-bomb.

Here we are with our lantern which read "Paz en el Mundo" - Peace in the world.

I found this lantern specially cute since it was made my the kids in the school that we went to the Bon Odori festival. The origami doves represent peace. This is due to a little girl that died at the age of 12 from leukemia caused by the radiation. She tried to fold a thousand paper cranes so that her wish for a return to health might be granted. Her school friends completed the folding after her death and the folding of paper cranes has become a symbol of a wish for Peace and a world free of nuclear weapons (http://rosella.apana.org.au/~mlb/cranes/peaceprk.htm).

Here I am next to the river after placing our lantern in the water (after waiting 1 hour under 90 F heat and 100% humidity, just like back home). Everyone placed their lantern on the river and prayed for the people that died during the A-bomb. It was a certainly a beautiful sight to see all the lantern go down the river.