I sat staring at what appeared to be giant red balloons in the shape of male horse genatalia. The score was 3-0 in favor of the visiting team, and the Hiroshima Carp were messing up. Exasperated baseball fans hemmed and hawed at a bad call from the first base umpire, who called the last out of the inning with a shady judgment call. The batter was clearly safe after knocking a single down the third base line, and the fans were not happy. The packed stadium stood up on their feet and started yelling. One of the coaches of the Carp stormed on the field and started yelling at the umpire, forcefully pointing his finger in the umpire’s face. This went on for a few minutes and then with a swift hand motion upward he ejected the coach from the game. More oohs and awwws and screaming and clapping errupted from the crowd, but the call remained unchanged.
It was a great site to behold, mostly because I didn’t understand anything anyone was saying, but I still understood what was happening.
The couple sitting next to us passed us two red balloons to inflate ourselves. By this point, practically everyone had either blown up a balloon or was in the process of doing so. So away we went, blowing two red dong shaped balloons up to be more or less a part of the action. It was hard to get them started, but eventually I got the hang of it, and proceeded to blow it up more. And then-
POP!!!!!
The balloon exploded in my face and I nearly scared to death everyone sitting near me. A small child directly on from me jumped a few feet in her chair and looked back at me laughing. Then everyone turned to look at the idiot who popped his balloon and before I knew it, practically everyone within a few rows front and back of me were staring and laughing at the silly white guy who didn’t know how to properly blow up his bright red penis balloon.
But luckily this didn’t last long, and before I knew it, everyone was chanting a song and waving thier balloons in the air. A sea of red dongs bobbed to and fro, and at the end of the jingle everyone released the balloons in the air, sending them zipping and soaring into the nighttime sky and out of the stadium.
Earlier in the day the mood wasn’t as festive. As you know, Hiroshima was the first city to get bombed by an atomic bomb, back in 1945 during World War II, which killed nearly a 3rd of the over 300,000 people that lived there at the time, not to mention all the complications from burns and radiation that followed. It was a truly horrible thing to have happened, and standing there as a US citizen, looking at the Atomic Bomb Dome, an old building that withstood the blast and was left up by the city as a symbol of international peace, not war, I couldn’t help but feel emotional at the whole scene.
War, nuclear or otherwise, is pretty much the worst thing in the world. So much death and destruction can come of it, mostly to innocent people, living thier lives, just like you and me.
Hiroshima’s Peace Park exists to exemplify this truth. To make the world remember what senselessness looks like, so that it doesn’t have to make the same mistake twice.
