When Alan met Soh-san by Tam Martin Fowles

 
​In October 2012 I visited Hiroshima for the second time.
I had been so affected by the city and its peace community when passing through the previous year that I'd felt compelled to return and learn more. It was these initial visits that inspired me to create Hope in the Heart, and share the lessons of Hiroshima with survivors of adversity in the UK and around the world. 

I stayed at the World Friendship Centre, a not-for-profit peace organization founded in 1965 by American Quaker Barbara Reynolds, “Where people from many nations can meet, share their experiences and reflect on peace”. The WFC motto is “to foster peace, one friend at a time.” Volunteers and staff are dedicated to providing a place to share the stories of Hibakusha (Atomic bomb survivors), unique tours of the Peace Memorial Park, and tailored experiences for visitors interested in the history of Hiroshima. 

​It was here that I first met Soh Horie. 

​The WFC’s then-director Michiko Yamane, who has since become a friend, accompanied me to meet Soh-san, intending to interpret for him. However, he had been practicing at the WFC’s regular English Conversation class, and I had the honour of being the first visitor to hear him give his testimony in my language.

---

​A quiet, thoughtful man, with sparkling eyes, a ready smile and a deep, tangible intelligence, Soh-san greeted me warmly, apologising for his poor English. I assured him that, as my Japanese consisted of about five words, I had nothing but admiration for his bilingual skills.

---

Despite being somewhat technically challenged, I had brought an iPad to record Soh’s story, some of which, along with a written version of his testimony, you can see here. 

After showing me a photo of the lantern ceremony that takes place every August 6th, Soh-san asked “Do you remember what happened when you were five years old?” I responded that I had some vague memories, but nothing very clear.

In fact, my most prominent recollection from that age is of standing in my family's garden talking to a neighbour over the fence while my mother gave birth to my brother inside the house, telling her “Mummy’s having a baby in the living room”. 
​

---

​Soh-san’s memories are very different. He went on to describe how he had lived with his family, three kilometres from the hypercentre, on August 6th 1945; the day the US Airforce dropped the atomic bomb on their home city. 

---

Soh-san recounted how he and his elder sister, aged 15, were walking along a hillside road, when suddenly a strong light flashed, followed by an overwhelming blast of wind.  His sister covered his small body with hers, and they lay flat for a while and then found shelter. They managed to get home, where they discovered all the windows and sliding doors had been blown off by the blast, the tatami matting lifted from the floor.  

Before long, many badly burned people came to their house seeking shelter. Soh's mother dressed their wounds with bandages made from children's kimonos. 

Illustration from the book "I will never Forget that Day" by Kiyomi Kohno, 14 when the bomb fell

​As his home filled with seriously injured people, Soh-san played outside. Suddenly "black rain" began to fall, heavy with radioactive particles. Soh-san hurried home, and saw his father's underwear among the laundry hanging out to dry. It was stained black. His father had been in his office close to the epicentre when the bomb exploded. He died from the effects of radiation six days later. The blackened underwear was eventually donated to the the Peace Memorial Museum.

Later that Day, and in the days that followed, dead bodies near their house were cremated in the playground of the nearby Elementary School. Soh-san remembers the revolting smell. Now, annually, on the evening of August 6, a memorial ceremony for those cremated there is held in the playground. Soh-san attends it every year. 

Many more members of Soh-san's family, and Soh himself, have suffered the consequences of radiation exposure, including cancers, in the intervening years. Meanwhile, Soh-san has devoted his life to the pursuit of peace as part of the extraordinary Hiroshima Peace Culture community, and the wider global campaign for an end to nuclear weapons.

---

When I returned to England following that second visit I told my husand Alan about Soh-san’s experience.
​Twenty years my senior, and just a few months older than Soh-san, Alan has his own vivid memories of being five years old during World War Two, on a different continent, in what was then an “enemy nation”.

Alan lived in North London during the Blitz. He told me about the war planes and doodlebugs he and his small friends watched as they flew overhead, the German prisoners of war who lived in his community. The scarcity and rationing of food, the children's gas masks, made to look like Mickey Mouse so they wouldn’t be too scary. When Alan first met his new baby brother Arthur, the tiny infant lay in an adapted cot, like an oversized gas mask. Their older brother Brian was evacuated to the countryside for safety, but Alan stayed at home. 

​I was amazed by the clarity of Alan’s memories – that same clarity I’d seen when listening to the Hibakusha – and fascinated by the stories I had not previously heard him tell. ​

---

---

​In 2019, as a collaboration with the wonderful Oleander Inititiatve and Peace Culture Village,  I went back to Hiroshima with a group of UK educators I had recruited to attend an Oleander peace education programme. I was delighted to meet Soh-san again as part of the schedule. 

He was more practiced at giving his testimony in English now, and used a power point presentation to share it with the group. He still began “Do you remember what happened when you were five years old?” Later I told him “My husband remembers being five in London during the Blitz. He remembers playing on bomb sites and watching German planes fly overhead.” Soh-san replied “I would like to meet your husband some day”. ​

---

​This summer – five years on - I organised for a group of valued work associates to accompany me to Hiroshima for another Oleander programme. This time Alan came too. My colleague Ray Matsumiya, who heads the Oleander Initiative, arranged for Soh-san to give his testimony to the group, at the World Friendship Centre, and for there to be time for Alan to respond with his own wartime story. Alan and I prepared a power point, and it felt deeply meaningful to introduce him to Soh-san on the first day of the programme.

As always, our group was shocked and moved by Soh-san’s testimony, which began with the familiar question “Do you remember what happened when you were five years old?”.  When he had finished speaking, Alan joined him at the front of the room, and told him “When I was five years old I lived in Edmonton, in London, one of the first places to be bombed during what would become known as The Blitz”. 

Soh-san, and the group, listened attentively as Alan described his experience, showing slides, as Soh-san had just done, of his home city, his family, the devastation wrought by war. Two little boys from very different cultures had lived extremely different lives, each innocent and unaware of history playing out around them. Each had survived a world war that claimed too many victims on both sides. But Alan’s experience of survival had been very different to Soh’s. The effects of conventional warfare on London were extreme, and cataclysmic. It remained etched upon Alan’s memory forever after. But, unlike Soh, he doesn’t recall his childhood experience as traumatic. Although lasting trauma and memories of intolerable loss and horror plagued numerous British citizens for the remainder of their lives, within the turmoil all around him, five-year-old Alan remained sheltered; protected, and safe.

Alan ended his presentation with a photo of his family and neighbours celebrating Victory in Europe Day with a street party. He remembers asking his mother what they were celebrating. When she said “The war is over” he responded “What’s a war?” Born in 1940, war was all he'd ever known. After it ended, his community gradually went back to “normal life”. But life would never be the same for little Soh. ​

---

The impact of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was vast, catastrophic and eternal. It still reverberates today, tangible in the ruins of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a skeletal structure that looms in eerie commemoration over the river near Ground Zero; one of the few buildings that remained standing in the kilometre-wide wasteland where no life remained on That Day. In that same river, a short distance away, floated countless bodies, bloated and burned beyond recognition.

​At five years old, little Alan played on the bombsites of East London. Little Soh stepped over the dead and dying and mourned lost loved-ones, and a vanished city.
​
Now those once-five-year-old boys, unknowing enemies in childhood, today approaching their mid-eighties, clasped each other’s hands in friendship, recognition and mutual respect. Each expressed his appreciation for the other, and for this unique sharing of the stories that had shaped both lives. Each expressed his heartfelt wish for a world in which lives are no longer shaped by memories of war. A world in which nucelar weapons are never used again. A world where peace prevails. ​

---

Would your school, group or organisation like to hear Alan talk in person about his memories of World War Two, with contrasting excerpts from Soh-san's testimony, and accompanying artefacts and items from Hiroshima?
A Hope in the Heart creative workshop, based on the narratives, is also available, and can be tailored to your group's requirements. Please contact [email protected] for more information or to book.