Tess watched as an atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. This is what she wants the world to know
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ABC News
2 days ago
- ABC News
Ancient texts on show at World of the Book at the State Library of Victoria offer a portal to the past
In the presence of a tightly rolled, yellowed scroll in the State Library of Victoria, it is hard not to feel a bit awe-struck. Inside a glass cabinet in the centre of the library sits the oldest known mass-printed text in the world, the Hyakumantō Darani. The finger-length item is a Buddhist prayer scroll that circulated more than 700 years before the invention of the Gutenberg press. Its name translates as "1 million pagodas and Dharani prayers", explains Dr Anna Welch, principal curator at the library. The Hyakumantō Darani is a surviving example of what are thought to have been 1 million woodblock-printed scrolls and mini wooden pagodas originally commissioned by the Japanese empress Shōtoku in 764 to send to Japan's 10 major temples. And it is the centrepiece of the library's 20th anniversary World of the Book exhibition. The flat version of the scroll on display in the cabinet is a facsimile, but Dr Welch was there when the original was unfurled. "It was extremely moving," she says. "We all held our breath. "What a privilege to be around something that tells us the beginnings of the story of printed text and has survived 1,300 years. "There are so many cultures immersed in the production of this Buddhist scroll in medieval Japan, printed using Chinese characters. It's an extraordinary fusion. That's the history of the book. It is a global history." In the World of the Book, this global history spans 4,000 years of technological development in recorded writing, beginning with the oldest object in the library's collection: a cuneiform tablet. The matchbook-sized stone piece from Southern Mesopotamia (now Iraq), dated at 2050 BC, is a proto-tax receipt. "It's the script that's used to record the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the oldest surviving work of literature … in the world," Dr Welch says. New to the library's collection and also on display for the first time is a medieval scribe's knife. Thought to have been made in Germany or the Netherlands in the 15th century, the knife was used to hold down the vellum, a post-papyrus parchment invented by the Romans and made of animal skin. "Because it's a skin, it reacts to humidity and it'll curl up in the air," Dr Welch says. As well as being used to hold down parchment using one hand — while writing with a quill and ink with the other — the knife is also "a correction tool". "It's kind of a white-out of its day, in that you could use it to scrape off a mistake that you'd written," Dr Welch says. It is from an era when scribes, artists and skilled craftspeople painstakingly made books by hand. As is the oldest book in Australia, the De Institutione Musica (Principles of Music), dated at 1100 AD, which is also on display. Set next to the book, with its ornate leather binding, yellowed pages with precise script and richly illustrated borders, the practical — yet beautiful — scribe's tool seems to bring the world of these books to life. You can almost smell the vellum, hear the scrape of the ink-dipped quill against the parchment. This, Dr Welch says, is one of the intentions of the exhibition: to get people to think about the materiality of the book and what it signifies. "Not just what's in the book, but how is it made? What does its form tell us about its cultural context, its meaning and about our own assumptions of it?" The Darani was the curatorial inspiration for a section within the exhibition that explores cross-cultural connections and differing perspectives of Japan's influence on the West (and vice versa) — particularly after the 17th century. The mini exhibition showcases some of the pre-Gutenberg history of mass printing and the artistry of Japanese woodblock prints, from Hokusai to Kawanabe Kyōsai. Seeing Japanese editions of popular Western books, and Westernised versions of Japanese art, in context with the original is a little like peering through Alice's looking glass: culture reflected, refracted and reframed. A manga version of Les Misérables sits next to an English translation of Astro Boy. Beneath lies a series of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles books — heroes in half-shells with nunchaku and ninja stars. The World of the Book circumnavigates one of the upper galleries of the State Library's striking domed reading room, presenting more than 300 works from its collection across five thematic areas. Some particular beauties include a 1688 edition of the first science fiction novel written by a woman, The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish; illustrated editions of Oscar Wilde's novels by Aubrey Beardsley and André Derain; the collection of surrealist and Dada art books, with illustrations by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Max Ernst; and the section on colour theory, featuring an essay with hand-painted watercolours by Mary Gartside, a French edition of Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting and print works from Bauhaus artist Josef Albers's Interaction of Color. The exhibition showcases a diverse range of printing and book manufacturing technologies — most of which must be carefully protected from the fading effects of light by controlling how frequently they are handled and displayed. With one peculiar exception: a large codex art book by Lebanese Australian artist Deanna Hitti, featuring the figure of a woman hidden in a wash of blue. "This is a cyanotype," Dr Welch says. "It's a non-camera form of photography that was developed in the 19th century. What's really amazing about cyanotypes is that they're light-sensitive. When you display them like this, they fade quite quickly. But if you close the book, it recharges." Might this collection of precious, ancient books talk to each other, after dark, Night at the Museum-style? "Oh, they have lives," Dr Welch says. "They absolutely have lives, these books … They're like magic books to me. "There's an intangible quality to them that transcends their material form, but comes from it. "It is a kind of time machine." The World of the Book is free and running at the State Library of Victoria until May 17, 2026.
News.com.au
3 days ago
- News.com.au
Restored Nagasaki bell rings in 80 years since A-bomb
Twin cathedral bells rang in unison Saturday in Japan's Nagasaki for the first time since the atomic bombing of the city 80 years ago, commemorating the moment of horror. On August 9, 1945, at 11:02 am, three days after a nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. After heavy downpours Saturday morning, the rain stopped shortly before a moment of silence and ceremony in which Nagasaki mayor Shiro Suzuki urged the world to "stop armed conflicts immediately". "Eighty years have passed, and who could have imagined that the world would become like this? "A crisis that could threaten the survival of humanity, such as a nuclear war, is looming over each and every one of us living on this planet." About 74,000 people were killed in the southwestern port city, on top of the 140,000 killed in Hiroshima. Days later, on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, marking the end of World War II. Historians have debated whether the bombings ultimately saved lives by bringing an end to the conflict and averting a ground invasion. - 'Invisible terror' - But those calculations meant little to survivors, many of whom battled decades of physical and psychological trauma, as well as the stigma that often came with being a hibakusha. Ninety-three-year-old survivor Hiroshi Nishioka, who was just three kilometres (1.8 miles) from the spot where the bomb exploded, told ceremony attendees of the horror he witnessed as a young teenager. "Even the lucky ones (who were not severely injured) gradually began to bleed from their gums and lose their hair, and one after another they died," he recalled. "Even though the war was over, the atomic bomb brought invisible terror." Nagasaki resident Atsuko Higuchi told AFP it "made her happy" that everyone would remember the city's victims. "Instead of thinking that these events belong to the past, we must remember that these are real events that took place," the 50-year-old said. On Saturday, 200-300 people attending mass at Nagasaki's Immaculate Conception Cathedral heard the two bells ring together for the first time since 1945. One of them, 61-year-old Akio Watanabe, said he had been waiting since he was a young man to hear the bells chime together. The restoration is a "symbol of reconciliation", he said, tears streaming down his face. The imposing red-brick cathedral, with its twin bell towers atop a hill, was rebuilt in 1959 after it was almost completely destroyed in the monstrous explosion just a few hundred meters away. Only one of its two bells was recovered from the rubble, leaving the northern tower silent. With funds from US churchgoers, a new bell was constructed and restored to the tower, and chimed Saturday at the exact moment the bomb was dropped. - 'Working together for peace' - The cathedral's chief priest, Kenichi Yamamura, told AFP "it's not about forgetting the wounds of the past but recognising them and taking action to repair and rebuild, and in doing so, working together for peace". He also sees the chimes as a message to the world, shaken by multiple conflicts and caught in a frantic new arms race. Nearly 100 countries were set to participate in this year's commemorations, including Russia, which has not been invited since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Israel, whose ambassador was not invited last year over the war in Gaza, was in attendance. An American university professor, whose grandfather participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons, spearheaded the bell project. During his research in Nagasaki, a Japanese Christian told him he would like to hear the two bells of the cathedral ring together in his lifetime. Inspired by the idea, James Nolan, a sociology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, embarked on a year-long series of lectures about the atomic bomb across the United States, primarily in churches. - 'In tears' - He managed to raise $125,000 from American Catholics to fund the new bell. When it was unveiled in Nagasaki in the spring, "the reactions were magnificent. There were people literally in tears", said Nolan. Many American Catholics he met were also unaware of the painful history of Nagasaki's Christians, who, converted in the 16th century by the first European missionaries and then persecuted by Japanese shoguns, kept their faith alive clandestinely for over 250 years. This story was told in the novel "Silence" by Shusaku Endo, and adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2016. He explains that American Catholics also showed "compassion and sadness" upon hearing about the perseverance of Nagasaki's Christians after the atomic bomb, which killed 8,500 of the parish's 12,000 faithful. They were inspired by the "willingness to forgive and rebuild".
ABC News
4 days ago
- ABC News
Tsutomu Yamaguchi: The man who survived both atomic bombs
There are not many people who have survived a nuclear attack. There is only one person who officially survived two. On this day, 80 years ago, young engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was telling his boss about the horrors he had seen in the Japanese city of Hiroshima when the room went blindingly white. "I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima," he told UK Newspaper, The Independent. Yamaguchi was an engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yamaguchi, then 29, was in Hiroshima for a business trip when the bomb known as 'Little Boy' was deployed, killing tens of thousands in a flash, and leaving scores with burns so severe their skin draped off their bodies. The young engineer was around 3 kilometres from ground zero and suffered temporary blindness and deafness in one eardrum. After staying in a bomb shelter the first night with other survivors, he quickly made his way back to his hometown of Nagasaki. Then on August 9, 1945, he went to work and told his colleagues about the horrors he saw. "When they realised that I had returned from Hiroshima, everyone gathered around me and said, 'I'm glad you're alive,' and 'great that you have survived,'" he recounted to Japanese broadcaster NHK. But his boss did not believe him. "He replied, 'you're badly injured, aren't you? Your head must be damaged too. I can't believe what you're saying. How could a single bomb destroy such a vast area like Hiroshima?'" Just at that moment, the United States dropped its second atomic bomb, known as 'Fat Man', killing some 40,000 people instantly. "I immediately recognised it as an atomic bomb," he told NHK. "I hid under a desk right away." The city of Nagasaki will pause today to remember the atomic blast that inflicted so much horror on the unsuspecting city. Within months, 74,000 people were dead after radiation sickness took hold. The bombing of Nagasaki is often overshadowed by the deadlier and earlier attack on Hiroshima, which killed some 140,000 people by year's end. Part of the tragedy of Nagasaki is it was not the original intended target. Two B-29 bombers were sent to destroy the industrial city of Kokura, which was a major hub for ammunition manufacturing. But the city was hidden under cloud cover, so the pilots diverted to their secondary target: Nagasaki. About 165 people are thought to have survived both atomic blasts, known as nijyuu hibakusha. But Yamaguchi is the only person to be officially recognised by the local governments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For decades, he kept his unique story under wraps and worked a blue-collar job. Many atomic bomb survivors, known as hibakusha, feel compelled to speak out, hoping their experiences will spur the world to abandon nuclear weapons. But the family of Yamaguchi feared he looked too healthy, which would undermine the message of survivors. "My entire family opposed it," his daughter Toshiko Yamasaki explained at a peace conference in 2011. "If my father, who had survived two atomic bombings, engaged in peace activities, people might think, 'even after being exposed to radiation twice, he's still healthy, so the atomic bomb isn't scary.'" But Yamaguchi did suffer a lifetime of health problems, as is often the case for hibakusha due to radiation exposure. "My father had cataracts, was deaf in one ear, suffered from leukopenia, lost his hair for 15 years after the war, and had after-effects from burns," Toshiko explained. His family endured sickness, too. His wife and son died of cancer. It was only in his final decade that Yamaguchi started to speak more openly, hoping his ordeal would help in the fight against nuclear weapons. "I have walked and crawled through the bottom of hell," he told the ABC in 2009. "I should be dead. But it was my fate to keep on living." Irish journalist David McNeill was one of the last journalists to interview him before his death. "What struck me was how modest he was," he explained. "Like many hibakusha, he really didn't want to discuss his extraordinary life. He had to be pressed into it because he thought he was better off than many of the people who surrounded him, who were getting sick and dying from cancer." Yamaguchi died in 2010, aged 93. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were one of the final and most devastating acts of World War II. After the first nuclear attack, Japan would still not surrender, instead deciding to send a fact-finding team to the city after communications went dark. The second attack on Nagasaki was part of the American strategy to make Japan believe it had unlimited supplies of such bombs. Many historians argue the Soviet Union declaring war on Japan was more influential in securing Japan's surrender, as it suddenly exposed its entire unprotected north. Making a single uranium bomb that exploded over Hiroshima was incredibly challenging and chewed up much of the budget and resourcing of the multi-year Manhattan Project. Japan knew how challenging it would be. But the United States had also developed a plutonium bomb — far easier and cheaper than a uranium bomb. This is what detonated over Nagasaki. And the commander of the Manhattan Project boasted the United States could then create two or three atomic bombs a month to assist in the planned land invasion of Japan, scheduled for November 1945. "They had the capacity to make two or three bombs a month by that point," Professor Mordecai Sheftall from Shizuoka explains. "Because the plutonium production facilities in Hanford, Washington State, were going at full tilt." Japan finally surrendered on August 15, but only after the emperor intervened and broke a deadlock in his war council. The army still wanted to fight on. There are few hibakusha left old enough to remember the blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the survivors are still determined to keep telling their stories. After all, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. "As a double atomic bomb survivor, I experienced the bomb twice," Yamaguchi told The Independent in 2010. "I sincerely hope that there will not be a third."
