by Sean Arent, Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program Manager, WPSR
By a little luck and a lot of good international organizing, the opportunity arose for four people to travel to Japan through the World Friendship Center in Hiroshima. I’m lucky to be counted among them. These blog posts will share my honest impressions of what I’m experiencing on my journey with the Peace Exchange program (PAX).
There are six Americans in our group including myself: Roger and Kathy Edmark, the trip organizers and former directors of the World Friendship Center, Ben and Charles, two students from Wilmington College, and Horacio Perez Moralez, a healthcare worker and indigenous/food sovreignty activist. Four of us come from Washington state, while Ben and Charles come from Wilmington, Ohio, the home city of Barbara Reynolds, founder of the World Friendship Center.
After a rigorous first day of travel, our second day featured a visit to the Kyoto Peace Museum, organized by the intrepid Kazuyo Yamane. Kazuyo is the former director of the museum and a second generation Hibakusha (atomic-bomb affected person). We were greeted by her as well as the rest of the peace museum staff, a group of university students, and Joyremba Haobam director of the Imphal Peace Museum in India, who happened to be visiting at the same time.
The museum is adjoined to the local university, and the group of students acted as our guides for the main exhibit. Pictures were not allowed inside.
Upon entering a projector lit up, posing questions for visitors to ponder. To my surprise, these questions weren’t just about why we don’t always get along - they struck at the conditions that create militarism and warfare, massive social and wealth inequality. I considered these questions throughout my time in Kyoto, which is itself a living museum.
As beautiful a city as Kyoto is, that gulf between rich and poor, the theft of resources from the working class of Japan (and during the imperial era, the rest of Asia) to their God-Emperor built the beautiful palaces and pavilions that dot the city. These conditions are derived from class conflict, and time and time again it is the master class that would set to war-making beyond borders to turn that conflict elsewhere.
The Kyoto Museum wall featured a timeline of Japan’s conflicts- the Russo-Japanese War (a defeat that laid the groundwork for the end of Tsarist rule in Russia), conquests of Southeast Asia, the occupation of Korea, and of course the dropping of the atomic bomb. The timeline continues to cover the post-war peace movement to the modern day.
I found talking to the students to be a very enjoyable part of the tour. These were young people from Japan and Indonesia interested in peace, and their perspectives were a fresh look into the current moment. We shared equal complaints about our government’s inability to teach about war and peace, the sanitization of history. They expressed their admiration for the US Peace Movement, the marches for Gaza, and talked about the smaller demonstrations in Japan. We answered each other’s questions and spent longer in the main exhibit than we all thought we would.
The Kyoto Museum doesn’t hide the harsh truths of Japan’s past, featuring testimony from Japanese soldiers who participated in the infamous Rape of Nanjing, nor does it excuse the use of atomic weapons. It is a description of consequences juxtaposed over an idea: that to end this chain reaction will take more than an absence of open conflict. It will require a Just Peace.