Niagara Group To Hold Hiroshima and Nagasaki Commemorative Lantern Service

By Fiona McMurran and Timothy Healey

Every year, Project Ploughshares Niagara holds a memorial service in the Peace Garden in Rennie Park in Port Dalhousie, to remember those who perished when the Americans bombed the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed on August 9, by the bombing of Nagasaki.

Lighting up the dark, from a previous Ploughshares memorial event in Niagara.

The bombing of those two cities marked the first use of nuclear weapons in wartime and ushered in the nuclear age.

As well as the actual deaths from the bombs themselves, many thousands died from the radiation and these deaths continued for years. At the service, we recognize our connectedness to those in Hiroshima, and in other towns and cities in Japan and all over the world, who observe this date every year. We take the opportunity to offer our prayers for all those who have died in war, and we renew our commitment to the peaceful resolution of conflict and to the abolition of nuclear weapons.

The ceremony is a simple one. Participants may read poems or short statements, and others offer music. At dusk, the candles in the paper lanterns are lit, and placed in the stream that divides Rennie Park and the small island beside it.

Operation Ploughshares Niagara head Timothy Healey

Lanterns have been a part of the ceremony since it was first held in the late 1980s, at the municipal beach on Lake Ontario. Those first lanterns did not stand up to the wind and rough water coming off the lake. This led the participants at one windy ceremony to abandon the beach and proceed through Port Dalhousie seeking the calm waters of Martindale Pond.

From then on, Rennie Park was the site of the ceremony. The rejuvenation of the park in 1999 created a channel between the original parkland and an island made from the landfill, where the lanterns could safely be placed.

A Japanese school teacher who once attended the memorial service provided a new model for the present lanterns, which are more stable and can therefore withstand light winds. Those lanterns currently in use were made by children who attended the Art of Peace Festivals held in Montebello Park, St. Catharines. They are set out in the garden around the fountain for the duration of the little service, after which the participants place them in the stream.

Every ceremony is different, but all are marked by quiet and serenity. Speeches are short, prayers and readings are moving. Last year, music by Bag of Hats added a new level of emotional content. People often stay long past the end of the ceremony talking and exchanging stories and recommitting to the peace process.

Passers-by often join in, sometimes adding their own thoughts about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other similar incidences of man’s inhumanity to man. An elderly German once told of having been forced as a child of 15 or 16 to fight in the last days of the war; the memory brought him to tears. He was very adamant that we should never repeat that terrible time. He stayed long into the night standing and looking at the shining lanterns, deep in thought with his memories.

This year we will carry on the tradition of commemorating the destruction of Hiroshima, and remembering the lives lost and those forever changed by the first use of nuclear weapons.

Project Ploughshares Niagara invites you to join with us and to bring your own “peace offering” if you like, in the form of a song or a story or a poem.

Rev. George Addison from Trinity United Church and Fiona McMurran (Council of Canadians, South Niagara) will lead the ceremony, and Bag of Hats and Neil Gertler will provide a musical touch.

Come and place a lighted lantern in the stream to say  “Never Again” and to symbolize your own thoughts for peace and social justice.

Fiona McMurran is  a representative of the Niagara south branch of the Council of Canadians  ande Timothy Healey is a representative of  Project Ploughshares Niagara.

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