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Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2000  Sowing authentic 'seeds of peace'
HIROSHIMA WITNESS FOR PEACE: Testimony of A-Bomb Survivor Suzuko
Numata, by Chikahiro Hiroiwa. Translated by Tadatoshi Saito.
Tokyo: Soeisha Books/Sanseido, 1,000 yen.  Thirty-six years ago,
not two decades after an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
Kenzaburo Oe was already writing about the imperative to
remember that appalling event. It sounds trite -- a hazard that
attends memorials to all great tragedies, from Hiroshima to the
Holocaust -- but Oe was getting at two important things: first,
that people do tend to forget, or repress, traumas of this
magnitude; and second, that the act of remembering doesn't occur
in a void. It is shaped by context: who is doing the remembering
and what they choose to remember.  Oe was aware in 1963, when he
began writing about Hiroshima, that the two atomic bombings of
Japan had been hijacked by t