Paul Salopek: The whole downtown, they call the Hypocenter, where the bomb fell, is a series of interlocking peace parks, memorial parks. So, they’re green spaces. And there’s one ruined building that has been left standing, his famous domed building, as a monument to the blast that occurred back in 1945.

Yeah, no, they’re scattered throughout, including in some streets beyond. I mean, you just see this big old tree standing there, and often they’re leaning; sometimes they have scarred surfaces, their trunks are scarred from the heat of the blast. But, they all have a little monument marker because they’re national monuments in Japan, each one of these 159 trees.

Yeah, Mr. Chikara Horiguchi was 80, and he had been taking care of the trees. That was his job for the city for more than 30 years. And he treated them somewhat like family patients. He was very devoted to them. He had very thick binders full of charts about their condition. He would check on them over time, trying to keep them alive for as long as possible. He was saying that their roots, Marco, even today, grow away from where the bomb blast was targeted. It’s very strange. Even underground, there’s this kind of wounding.

Well, you know, you’re absolutely right. The motto of my project is that people are my destination, but I often write about the environment, the climate crisis, environmental change, etc. But what struck me about this aspect of the story is that we have these creatures, these organisms, these beings … that are like silent witnesses. They can’t talk, right? You can walk up to them. You can lay your hand on their trunks. And in some ways, that’s as powerful as being told the story of what happened that apocalyptic day. They’re kind of in their silence; they carry power.

You know, the hibakusha, as they’re called, A-bomb survivors, many of them were just children. The ones that are still alive, right, they’re in their 80s, in some cases, 90s. I interviewed one man who was in utero. I mean, he was, you know, in his mother’s womb when he experienced the shock waves. And yet their lives have been, as you would imagine, irrevocably changed by this event. Like, a hole is blown through their lives for a multitude of complicated reasons that I get into in the story.

That’s really the kernel of the story that I wrote. It’s about, you know, the power of memory, but also how memory changes from these catastrophic events, mass violence of war? The Japanese individuals I interviewed who were older, the hibakusha, the survivors, often lamented that younger people just don’t appreciate, and, of course, can’t appreciate that kind of tragedy anymore. They get a bit of it in their history books and school textbooks. There’s a famous manga about it that was written in the 1970s, a time when manga comic books were popular. But, they claim that they struggle constantly to make it real for young Japanese, who lead lives as distracted as anybody’s today, in our modern world.

You know, I interviewed one of the leaders of the peace activist groups of A-bomb survivors in Japan who won the Nobel Peace prize last year, right, this group, Nihon Hidankyo. I interviewed one of the main activists, Mr. Toshiyuki Mimaki, and he was actually surprisingly dejected. He had spent decades of his life fighting. They’ve been trying to ban nuclear weapons, right, to get nukes off the face of the earth. That’s a Herculean task today. And it’s even more depressing, Marco, for them now, because there seems to be a proliferation, right? Look at what’s in Iran. Look at North Korea. Israel, of course, has nukes. So, I think there was a mixed feeling of pride among these survivors, but also tempered by a kind of sobering realization that this haunting problem, this cataclysmic problem, is still very much with us.

This is something I reflect on as well, walking through my projects on foot, so I have time to kind of absorb cities like Hiroshima. I entered from the outskirts, you know, maybe paddy fields, hamlets, villages, go into the outskirts and then walked into the center, crossing these big, busy traffic bridges. Hiroshima is noted for its rivers. It has six or seven rivers running through it. And it’s very modern. It’s got malls, it’s got, you know, funky, chic coffee shops. Looking at this city through the modern prism, it’s very much leading its own life right now. If you didn’t visit the downtown memorial parks, you would see no evidence that it was … two-thirds of it was wiped out by a nuclear blast 80 years ago.

You know, as you know, I’m a former war reporter myself, and I’ve covered human cruelty often. It was very strange, very surreal and very sobering to see still these problems kind of very much manifest in these monuments. These were the paradox, the irony is that they’re presented as peace monuments, right? Of course, which they have to be. We have to grab onto hope. Even these trees, these survivor trees, are kind of icons of hope and resilience. But as I left Hiroshima, I must say, I was not in an up mood. It was pretty depressing, given the state of the world.