OUT OF EDEN WALK

The trees are old.

They stand like weary sentinels in downtown city parks, their limbs bent by age, some with huge steel beams crutching their sagging branches. Thick woody calluses warp their trunks, particularly on the sides facing the Aioi Bridge, the original target of the American B-29 that dropped the first nuclear weapon deployed in war 80 years ago on Hiroshima. The bombardier, a farm boy from North Carolina, missed the bridge by 260 meters, and the uranium went critical 600 meters above the Shima Hospital, a spot today occupied by a clinic parking lot. Little was expected to survive the 4,000-degree Celsius flash near the bomb’s hypocenter. Ultimately, between 70,000 and 140,000 people didn’t. But a few trees within the blast radius miraculously lived. Splintered and scorched, reduced to charred stumps, they sprouted shoots after “black rains” fell from the mushroom cloud. Japanese call these botanical miracles hibakujumoku, or “A-bombed trees.” Exactly 159 remain in the city.

“They are camphor trees, black locusts, Chinaberries,” said Chikara Horiguchi, 80, an arborist who has catalogued and cared for the survivor trees of Hiroshima for more than three decades. Hiroguchi stood under a gnarled eucalyptus next to the Hiroshima Castle, just 750 meters from ground zero. “This one’s seeds give no seedlings. It seems it may have been sterilized by radiation.”

A bespectacled man who shaded his weathered face beneath a dapper palm hat, Horiguchi referred to the survivor trees with the fond intimacy of a longtime family doctor. Underground, he noted, the trees’ roots even today grew directionally, away from the bomb’s detonation site. He treated one ailing war-veteran willow by stuffing its hollow trunk with wet moss. He worried about tourists stomping on the A-bombed trees’ knobbly exposed roots. He wasn’t altogether happy about people touching their bark. Yet he understood the necessity.

“They are witnesses,” he said of his silent charges. “They carry a message we need to hear today.”

Horiguchi smiled and nodded when I placed my palm on one scarred and crooked eucalyptus. I tried to feel something.

Days before, my walking partner, the photographer Tomonori “Rip” Tanaka, and I had walked into Hiroshima from the south, through villages where loudspeakers played the Westminster Chime at 5 p.m. We had passed a golden rice paddy being hand-harvested by young women raising organic grains for their boutique food cart. We entered the city on a bustling car bridge over one of six urban rivers, and booked ourselves into a capsule hotel where men slept like larvae tucked into a honeycomb. I ate my breakfast in a chic-funky downtown café where the cook was a pony-tailed Australian.

It was hard to see Hiroshima squarely.

The port city of 1.2 million is one of those places flattened in the imagination by a single overwhelming event in the way some people are forever stamped by a singular trauma in their biography.

Like many Americans, I mostly grasp Hiroshima through John Hersey’s famous book about the atomic bombing. Europeans might know it through a French New Wave film scripted by Marguerite Duras. Japanese are obliged to study the cataclysm of Hiroshima in the pages of schoolbooks, and those of a certain age recall it through an old manga comic called “Barefoot Gen.” And of course, about 100,000 very aged and rapidly dwindling Japanese survivors called hibakusha know it through the hole it blew in their lives.

“I picked up small talk in my family about the bombing, but like it was an abstract news event,” said Kazuhiko Futagawa, 79, a hibakusha who experienced the shock waves of August 6, 1945, as an eight-month-old fetus inside his mother’s womb. Futagawa’s father and 13-year-old sister were vaporized in the radioactive firestorm that leveled two-thirds of Hiroshima. “I wasn’t told any of my own story until I was about eighteen.”

For decades, he said, survivors like himself kept their stories private to avoid the ignorant stigmas of being damaged goods, mutants. “People didn’t dwell on it,” Futagawa said, shrugging. “They wanted to live happier. Look ahead.”

When we met at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, Fukagawa was celebrating the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to grassroots Japanese atomic bombing survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were lobbying for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Earlier, I’d tried interviewing one of the movement’s leaders, Toshiyuki Mimaki, but he seemed overwhelmed. He spoke in fits and starts of years of thankless activism while tourists swirled in guided groups around the ruins of the Genbaku Dome, the only building left standing in the bomb’s drop zone. Few if any passersby recognized Japan’s newest laureate. I finally closed my notebook.

Before leaving the city, I took a stroll alone among the gnarled green survivors of Hiroshima’s apocalypse.

Each tree had a small plaque denoting its status as a national monument. Peace groups were distributing seeds and saplings from still fertile hibakujumoku to foreign countries as reminders of both catastrophe and renewal. But what would the trees actually convey, I wondered, if as the botanist Horiguchi hoped, they could talk? Indifference? After all, we were still engaged in murdering civilians in Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, Israel, Congo, Myanmar, and other bloody elsewheres. We were still bombing hospitals. Nuclear weapons were, if anything, more at risk of proliferation than ever. And what would my dead father think, if he were walking Hiroshima at my side? He’d been floating offshore in the U.S. Navy, nurturing his own psychic holes, when the columns of pulverized lives rose twice as high as Mt. Everest above Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Walking partner Tanaka and I left behind the malls, mass graves, and pachinko parlors of the city.

Mostly in silence, we trekked the grassy banks of the Hiroshima river upstream, making for the remote coast of western Japan. One lifetime before, thousands of fatally burned people had staggered out of Hiroshima on foot along precisely the same roads. For us, the surrounding autumn hillsides of Mongolian oak and Japanese bird cherry held nothing back. They blazed the color of the sun.