Arcata Lantern Floating Ceremony Origins
This event is an opportunity to offer spiritual consolation for people we miss, departed loved ones, our ancestors, intercultural harmony, healing and all we hold dear.
When we’re not social distancing and sheltering in place, we meet the second Saturday of August for Lantern Making at the Arcata Farmer’s Market – Tables are set up and there will be supplies. Then in the evening people gather at the Arcata Marsh & Wildlife Sanctuary by Klopp Lake at the end of South I Street.
Introduced thirty eight years ago by the Arcata Nuclear Free Zone Commission, to commemorate the tragic loss of life in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ceremony is now sponsored by the City of Arcata with the Humboldt chapters of GI Rights Hotline, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Society of Friends (Quakers), Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Social Action Committee, Veterans for Peace, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Lantern floating ceremonies have been traditional in Japan for many centuries. An event held annually in Hiroshima is dedicated to those who suffered and died in the bombing, but long before that, the lanterns carried messages of loving remembrance of friends and family who have passed away. Arcata’s ceremony now includes this older meaning, as well as being an occasion for the community to rededicate itself to the cause of peace.
U.S. Atomic Bomb Attacks on Japan
On August 6, 1945, the U.S. targeted the city of Hiroshima with the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare. Three days later, on August 9, the U.S. dropped a different type of atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. The Hiroshima blast instantly killed at least 80,000 people and reduced 5 square miles of the city to rubble. Another 70,000 were killed in Nagasaki, plus tens of thousands more died from radiation poisoning and other consequences of the bombings in the following months.
In his address to the public after the dropping of the first bomb, President Harry S. Truman said, “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” Civilians, however, comprised nearly all the casualties in both cities. During the decades since the bombings, the Japanese have continued to suffer after-effects such as increased rates of birth defects and cancers.
President Truman justified the bombings as necessary to end the war with Japan quickly, without the necessity for a land invasion of Japan. Many analysts disagree with this assessment saying that Japan was already thoroughly defeated and surrender was not far off. In a 1963 Newsweek interview, General Dwight D. Eisenhower (U.S. President from 1952-1960) stated, “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
So, why, really, did the U.S. drop the atomic bombs? One opinion is that the United States was demonstrating its military might, especially to the USSR, sacrificing 200,000 Japanese people in the process, and ensuring the on-going nuclear arms race.
Our country continues to develop new nuclear weapons, including depleted uranium that we’ve been using ever since the Gulf War in 1991. In defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, we are not engaging in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament and are actively opposing inspection and verification provisions; we’ve failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and G. W. Bush withdrew the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The U.S. is home to the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons on the planet, and is still the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
This ceremony offers spiritual consolation for everyone effected by the bombings. It helps bring awareness to the dangers of nuclear proliferation and advocates for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.
