“After the bombing of Nagasaki, the survivors began to pray, not for vengeance on America, but that Nagasaki would be the last city to know the horrors of the atomic bomb.” -Full Circle: The Epic Return to Trinity
A few years ago, I visited Hiroshima for the first time. I took a tour around the city with a few friends of mine, in which our tour guide spared no details of the death, devastation, and tragedy that resulted from the US’s dropping of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what really struck me, even more than the shocking details of the bombs’ aftermath, was how the survivors reacted. Understandably, the bombs trumped any offensive strategy that the Japanese would or could have had. Instead, the prevailing sentiment resulting from the bombs was the hope that no one else would ever have to go through what had just occurred, rather than the hope for revenge on the United States. Hiroshima has since dedicated itself to encouraging and spreading peace, despite the atrocities its people witnessed, and the city represents a part of human nature that I don’t think people see enough of. There is so much ugliness in the world, and so many people who want to get back at those who have wronged them, but every once in a while, we come across someone who can take that ugliness and turn it around. Coming full circle doesn’t necessarily mean ending up where you started–rather, it can mean finishing a cycle and starting with a fresh, clean slate.
Matt Taylor’s “Full Circle: The Epic Return to Trinity” is a movie that explores this, following the pilgrimage of three monks from Nagasaki to San Francisco, and then ultimately to New Mexico’s Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated as a test. They take with them a flame kindled from the embers of a temple that had been ruined after the bomb in Nagasaki, that had been burning for 60 years. The purpose of their journey was to carry the flame from the site of the last bomb’s detonation back to the testing site or birthplace of the first, closing the circle that had opened as a result of the 3 bombs.
I am going to try to get the version of the trailer in English up of the movie so you can watch it. (Below is the movie’s trailer in Japanese.) In the meantime, I would love to read (and possibly post) anyone’s stories similar to that of Hiroshima’s reactions to the devastation its people suffered.
Full Circle: The Epic Return to Trinity
-Fernanda
