It's more then a moral or foreign policy debate. The word Hiroshima is different things to different people. Successive mayors of Hiroshima write to world leaders, pleading with them to cease nuclear testing. But you know, even though Hiroshima students make countless school-sponsored outings to the memorial museum, the connection between Hiroshima and Bomb is an American's first impulse. And its obvious if you think about it. All of the buildings downtown, everything, is less than fifty years old, and an entire generation was wiped out of existence. All the same, Japanese hear "Hiroshima" and think, "shellfish," "okonomiyaki[a pancake-like dish]," "people who end their sentances with jyan instead of da, or "the island shrine at Miyajima!" Hiroshima has a global reputation: The International City of Peace. That's more intimidating than the reality was for me.

Hiroshima is a place; it's a big small town. It's too small to be an inhuman, unfeeling mecca that one can never really get to know. Like, forgive me for typifying, Tokyo, a city I have visited but wouldn't really want to live in. Hiroshima seemed to me to be quite personable. You can get to know the backstreets and gain haunts with only a bit of effort.
And yet, Hiroshima, like any place, has as many faces as it has people!