Harsha Prabhu
Kumiko Nishikawa at Hiroshima Day in Byron Bay on Tuesday. Photo Kurt Petersen
‘Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people’ – Chief Seattle’s cry on the desecration of the Earth rang loud and true from a ceremonial circle conducted by Anna Parker to mark Hiroshima Day at the Sunset Drumming Circle in Byron Bay on Tuesday.
Whales cavorted in the bay; Benny Zable’s anti-nuclear flag flapped in the wind; and Paul Adolphus began the Hiroshima commemoration by calling in the spirits via his Shakuhachi. Then Adarsha played a haunting melody on the Koto. The tune, Tori no Yoni – Free Like a Bird, was composed by Tadao Sawai, her master’s master, and is a homage to Sadako Sasaki. Sadako is the young girl who was two years old when the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima. She died of leukaemia when she was 12. Her wish to make a thousand origami cranes was never fulfilled but lives on in our hearts as a symbol of the innocent victims of atomic war and our collective wish to live in peace with all.
Adarsha’s own mother was 40 kilometres away from Ground Zero and was a witness to the terrible suffering that followed. This was dramatised via a Butoesque dance performance by Aya Nambu and Kumiko Nishikawa, who embodied the ghosts of their ancestors come to life, fed by the flowers of our remembrance.
BANG (Byron Against Nuclear Group) members spoke out against the toxic nuclear industry, especially the mining of uranium in Australia. This was happening against the wishes of the traditional Aboriginal custodians of the land, who had expressed their grief about Australian uranium being in the leaking reactors in Fukushima. The day had a poignant urgency as news had just come in of the ongoing radiation leaks from the crippled Fukushima reactors, spewing deadly poison into the sea; as well as the leaking, ageing reactor at Lake Michigan in the US. Activists called for an international consensus to resolve the nuclear crisis, describing it as ‘a dark cloud that hangs over all of us, our children and even the whales that we love to see in Byron’.
Activists also expressed solidarity with the peoples’ movements to shut down nuclear power stations in India; the mothers of Fukushima calling for greater transparency from their government and said the crisis was also an opportunity for people to come together as planetary citizens.
Said one speaker: ‘Let us send our love to the people of Japan who have become guinea pigs in a monstrous experiment that will destroy the planet. May our prayers, our thoughts, our feelings of helplessness, our rage be transformed by focused action into a global movement to dismantle this edifice of deadly toxicity and create a nuclear-free future for all.’
The evening ended with a recital of Omm Mani Padme Hum, the Buddhist prayer for universal peace. But it was the sunset wind that had the last word, striking the Koto and creating its own harmonics so it seemed to be playing itself. It was a mournful tune but it carried with it the hope of redemption from the deadly karma of the nuclear cycle. It was a simple tune and it went something like this: ‘Stop uranium mining. Leave it in the ground!’