Hiroshima: City of Water

In Hiroshima water is the element that binds life and death. The seven rivers that flow through the city gave it the name City of Water. Scattered around this huge metropolitan city are monuments to the dead - those who perished both in the moment, and also the aftermath, of the detonation of a nuclear weapon by American forces on 6th August 1945. These monuments mark the places where schools, hospitals and municipal buildings once stood - remnants of the old city tucked away in the shadows of the towering steel and glass buildings of the new Hiroshima. At these monuments, visitors give offerings of water to those who perished; those who begged for water to sooth their scorched mouths and those who threw themselves into the rivers to relieve their burning skin and subsequently drowned. For Hiroshi Hara, these are the ‘Rivers of Souls’. Places where he makes tribute to the dead by painting with what he calls the ‘spirit water’ - water from the rivers he describes as being covered by a carpet floating corpses. Across the city Buddhist rituals take place on the great day of remembrance when monuments are washed with water amidst prayers of remembrance and messages to souls lost are floated down the rivers.