ATOMIC AGE: In a Hollow Tree

Two years after the victory that was to have brought freedom from fear and want, men were as afraid of each other as ever, and most were in want. Endlessly branching plans for the world’s regeneration were stiff with bureaucratic blight. To find postwar hopes alive with real sap, the world had to look in odd places—for instance, Hiroshima.

The Doves. Last week, on the second anniversary of The Bomb, the people of Hiroshima stood with bared heads bowed around a 43-ft. peace tower to hear a specially cast bell toll for Hiroshima’s dead. Muffled sobs stopped when giant firecrackers began to slam like .50-caliber machine guns. Tiny parachutes bore peace festival streamers above the crowd. Thereafter, Hiroshima observed its day of disaster with singing, dancing and boating. Boys & girls pulled peace floats through unshaded streets.

A camphor tree, symbol of life, was joyfully planted, and doves were released from the high platform as a message from General Douglas MacArthur was read. He warned “all men of all races that the harnessing of nature’s forces in furtherance of war’s destructiveness will progress until the means are at hand to exterminate the human race.”

Hiroshima, however, was stressing construction and optimism. Just a year ago the city began a boomtown effort of clearing and building. New and restored structures are everywhere; a Hiroshiman guide apologizes with old U.S. booster hyperbole: “Sorry, but these buildings were not here yesterday.”

When The Bomb went off, more than 250,000 lived in Hiroshima. Of these, 175,000 survived the blast. Today, Hiroshima’s population has grown back to 210,000. Almost every woman has a baby on her back. Of 60,000 dwellings destroyed, 23,000 have been replaced. The most significant feature of this effort is that 98% of it is black-market construction carried out by the people themselves in defiance of plans and rules.

Hiroshima and its fellow bomb victim, Nagasaki, are the most pro-U.S. cities in Japan. American visitors are bombarded with questions as to how Hiroshima can be made a Mecca for peace-loving pilgrims. Hiroshimans feel that The Bomb purged them of all war guilt; perhaps that is why Hiroshima is free of the paralysis that palsies most of the rest of the world.

The Thinkers. In spite of MacArthur’s apocalyptic warning and Hiroshima’s prayers, the nations were not making much progress toward secure international control of destructive forces, atomic or otherwise. It was worth noting that the U.S. had made The Bomb faster than the nations could make an agreement about it.

In an effort to close the perilous gap between the progress of science and the progress of morals, Yale University announced last week that it will double its science courses for liberal arts students, double required courses in the humanities for science majors. Said Dr. Edmund W. Sinnott, director of Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School: “Science alone may make monsters of men.”

Where, if not to the physics textbooks, could the postwar world turn for a new moral impetus which it so obviously needed? The Christian churches were locked in a struggle with materialism, which had been growing for 150 years and of which Communism was the deadliest projection. There could be no evading this defensive struggle; however, it absorbed a very high proportion of the energies of Christian institutions needed in other vineyards.

France, so often a beacon of Western civilization, was sunk in torpor. Silly fads, from existentialism to intimatism, ruffled the scum at the surface of French thought.

Frenchmen, preoccupied with day-to-day living, ignored the great philosophic questions to which their fathers contributed so much. Britain was even more obsessed with shortages; TIME’S London Bureau last week cabled: “Britain’s net situation is as nearly hopeless as any undestroyed and undefeated nation’s can be.” The U.S., a powerhouse of farm and factory production, had reluctantly assumed the political leadership of the West. Its steps were uncertain, its destiny only dimly understood by its own restless people.

The Old Women. Back in Hiroshima, Kiyoshi Kikawa lies in the hospital for bomb victims. His arms and back are covered with a mass growth of scar tissue called keloids. Said he last week: “Tell them in America that I would have been happy to die, but I am living with this [pointing to his back]. Something good must come of this. I now want to be sent to the U.S. so doctors can experiment with my body. It does not matter if I die so long as I can be of some use to a world of peace.”

Not far away from the hospital a humble little old lady, Aki Komatsu, rested from the sun with two other old ladies in the black hollow of a burned-out tree in the center of the Hiroshima city graveyard. She had little to share but the shade, she said. But she was sharing much more. “I lost my husband and my three children,” she said, pointing a crooked finger to a rubble heap near by. “I lived. These [pointing to her companions], lost theirs also. Now we three old ladies live in a little hut near the city hall. We are clearing away the rubble here and putting the gravestones back in place, trying to make this little garden neat. There is so little else that we can do. For us there is no hope. But there is for the young people, and we live and work for them.”

At the Sorbonne and at Yale, in the Kremlin, at Westminster, and on Capitol Hill, they could use a hollow tree.