In this one–hour video (in two parts), I tell the story of how I started on the Neutron Trail and where it led me, with a focus on my time in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Japan Healing and Systemic Constellation Work
Bert Terpstra, mathematician & Constellation facilitator, Olivia Fermi, Hisako Morioka, Constellation facilitator (left to right), Tokyo, November 2014.
Preamble
In response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, USA of 1941, the Allied Forces unleashed a series of fire bombings on Japan. 70 years ago today on March 10, 1945, US B-29’s flew over Tokyo dropping incendiary bombs. In a single night more people lost their lives than in any other act of war in all of human history. Perhaps 100,000 died, many more were injured or dislocated, with vast tracts of Tokyo destroyed. Ultimately the Allied forces destroyed or partially destroyed 67 Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, if not a million or more. The true count will never be known.
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Japan’s Prayer Culture in Action: Nagasaki Healing
Inosuke Hayasaki (早崎猪之助) (83), atomic bomb survivor, shares his story and message of peace at Nagasaki Peace Park. Photo: © Olivia Fermi 2014.
“Nuclear war ended in Nagasaki! Nagasaki is the period! Peace starts from Nagasaki!” – Takashi Nagai (永井 隆), Peace Tower
A life long desire to experience traditional Japanese culture, aesthetics and spiritual practice motivated my first trip to Japan, along with a more recent urge to follow the Neutron Trail to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US dropped atomic bombs on both cities in August 1945, ending World War II. To this day, humanity struggles to make sense of what happened. Victory? Tragedy? These questions are part of a larger movement toward healing that I hope to support with my Neutron Trail journey. When a Japanese friend and photographer Noriko Nasu Tidball (則子 那須) said she wanted to witness my pilgrimage and offered to accompany me, I was delighted.
Posted in Buddhism & the Bomb, Neutron Trail
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Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Survivor Heals Herself by Speaking Out
被爆体験を伝えることの大切さ、そしてヒーリング
Toshiko Tanaka, atomic bomb survivor, and I sharing stories about our lives; thoughts on art, action and healing over tea in her home, Hiroshima, Japan. Photo: © Noriko Nasu Tidball 2014. (被爆者である田中稔子さんの被爆体験、彼女のアートを通しての行動、お互いの人生について話をする二人。田中稔子さんの広島の自宅にて。)
The highlight of my visit to Hiroshima earlier this week was meeting Toshiko Tanaka now 76, a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor. She shared her story with me. Toshiko was 6 years and 10 months old when the bomb fell. She, her mom and her little sister were living 2.3 km from the epicenter and suffered severe burns and radiation sickness, but all survived. Her father was away fighting in the war. In the next generation of her family there are thyroid problems and cancer. Toshiko showed me the scars on her arm that are almost gone and said, “It takes longer to heal inside.”
Posted in Conversations, Neutron Trail
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A Visit to Hanford
Sketch of Enrico Fermi and his colleagues at Hanford (c. 1944), Enrico Fermi’s Office, Hanford B Reactor Museum Photo: © 2012 Olivia Fermi
I’m thinking about the different challenges you confront when sometimes you know something isn’t right, but yet you still do it.
I’m thinking about history, and how society and science influence each other. What we do today will influence the future.
– Neutron Trail workshop student participants, October 2012, Richland, WA
In Southeastern Washington at the confluence of three rivers, the Yakima, Snake, and Columbia, is the traditional home of the Wanapum, Yakama and Walla Walla native peoples. The land and the rivers gave these peoples a home and sustenance. Later, they were almost entirely displaced by a wave of European settlers who established towns there, including Richland, now one of the Tri–Cities. Another wave of displacement came in 1943 when the US military evicted Richland area citizens to build the Hanford Nuclear Site, a top secret plutonium refining facility (now decommissioned), and the town of Hanford (which no longer exists), to house its workers.
Today Hanford is the site of the largest environmental cleanup project in the world.
Posted in Neutron Trail
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Full Body Burden: A Personal Review
Guest blogpost by Adam Kullberg
Kristen Iversen’s Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (Crown 2012) is a book about the power of secrets and of silence. In a masterful fusion of memoir and thought-provoking investigative journalism, Iversen braids together her less-than-ideal suburban childhood—peppered with an alcoholic father, a melancholic mother, and a neighborhood tinged with radioactive runoff—with the controversial Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Colorado. Rocky Flats, open from 1952 to 1992, built plutonium triggers for the United States’ ever-growing nuclear stockpile during the Cold War. Employing a spectrum of artifacts, court records, press releases, and interviews, Iverson focuses her journalistic lens on the history, people, and repercussions of Rocky Flats. She reveals how the worlds we imagine we can isolate ourselves within, may so easily leach into and transform the worlds of others.
Posted in Nuclear Movie & Book Reviews
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Reflections on ‘Things Left Behind’
Photos: Ishiuchi Miyako
Sometimes on the Neutron Trail I have experiences, which exist more in the realm of emotion and feeling than in linear thoughts. These experiences have a coherence of their own, before words, yet they yearn to be expressed and shared.
Nuclear Disarmament: Don’t Stop Now!
Jean Gore, former US section President of Womens International League for Peace and Freedom speaking July 8, 2012 at Neutron Trail Nuclear Disarmament: Don’t Stop Now” talk, Frasier Meadows Retirement Community, Boulder, CO. Photo: Alan Cogen, © Olivia Fermi 2012.
I’ve just returned from a Neutron Trail trip which began in Boulder, CO, where I gave a public talk on the world nuclear disarmament movement to approximately 75 people. In our planning conversations, the organizer at the retirement community hosting the event emphasized how engaged and articulate the audience would be. Wow was she ever right!
Posted in Conversations
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Tsunami-struck Fukushima Community Inspires Creative Recovery
Fukushima Game Jam, August 2011. Kids playing games w developers in Minami-soma. Photo: Ryo Shimizu
A Japanese farming community of 70,000 torn apart by the earthquake and tsunami, on the edge of the Fukushima Dai–ichi nuclear exclusion zone, is finding a way to move forward through video games.
Posted in News
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TEDxTransmedia Rome, Italy
What if socially responsible human beings? On September 30, 2011, I gave a seven-minute TEDx talk: Becoming the Inspiration You Seek: the Alchemy of Opposites. It was part of TEDxTransmedia Rome: What if… socially responsible media?, a one day speech fest at the MAXXI Museum sponsored by the European Broadcasting Union, RAI 5 and others.
This poem is a synopsis of my speech:
between
reality and imagination,
a pressure cooker of contradictions.
be curious
embrace opposing forces
as Buddha suggests, build a stainless vessel*
within
to contain the most difficult opposites
in your life and your work…
grow
reach out
become our own heroes!
~ ~ ~
* Buddhist dedication: By whatever boundless merit we have attained through practicing the precious genuine dharma of the supreme yana may all beings become a stainless vessel of the supreme yana. Dharma = teaching, Yana = method
Here is a link to playlist of all of the TEDxTransmedia Rome 2011 talks.
Posted in Buddhism & the Bomb
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