Peace Park

Shortly after President Reagan and Secretary Gorbachev meet in Moscow, an event of profound symbolic significance will take place at the opposite end of the vast Soviet landscape. An Alaska Airlines 737 jetliner will sojourn from Nome to the Soviet city of Provideniya on the Bering Sea. This "friendship flight" will be carrying the governor of Alaska, the state's congressional delegation and about 100 Americans of Siberian Yupik Eskimo heritage from St. Lawrence Island and the Alaska mainland.

Crouched in his lush green rice fields on this agricultural plain northeast of Tokyo, Masaru Umezawa works the land as his father and grandfather did before him. On a humid late-summer afternoon, the only sound is the buzzing of the cicadas from a nearby thicket of trees. Then it starts -- slowly at first, and building in intensity until it reaches a deafening pitch: the roar of a shiny supersonic jet lifting off the runway at the Japanese military's Hyakuri Airfield. Nearly 100 times a day, the jets take off and land, performing training maneuvers overhead and creating a racket that makes it impossible for the stocky farmer and his family to watch television or talk on the telephone, let alone hear themselves think.

The City Council calls it a peace park, but the planned tribute to an antiwar activist is creating conflict. The council approved funding for the $93,000 downtown park. The city plans to build a Wall of Consequence there that will include debris from attacks on civilians around the world, including the World Trade Center; Hiroshima, Japan; and the Alfred B. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Dig down below the 3 feet of topsoil that was dumped atop the ruins of central Hiroshima to make a memorial Peace Park and you'll still turn up bones, remains of Japanese civilians incinerated when an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic fireball over this spot one August morning in 1945. The Peace Park is a graveyard, the most visible scar of Japan's disastrous imperial war and ground zero of its postwar, anti-nuclear conscience.

It is a drab, misty morning in Peace Park. At this early hour, the park belongs to the doves--pigeons, actually--which sit cooing in the dampened trees or peck contentedly at scraps of food in the grass. Throngs of tourists and children on school outings can be expected even on the slowest of days, but for now there are no distractions along the broad paths to the Peace Bell, the Children's Peace Monument and the concrete-and-granite Memorial Cenotaph. Here, under a dull gray arch near what was once ground zero--today, "city center" is the preferred term--are enshrined the names of 186,940 people who lost their lives because of the world's first atomic bomb attack.

President Clinton said today that the United States intends to further reduce its "footprint" here on Okinawa, which is home to about 26,000 American troops whose presence remains a source of resentment among many islanders. Clinton, the first U.S. president in four decades to visit this island, made his announcement shortly after arriving for the annual meeting of the Group of 8--the seven leading industrialized powers plus Russia. He did not give any specifics. Noting that the U.S.

During World War I, he risked his life as a Red Cross ambulance driver, rescuing the wounded on battlefields in France. During World War II, he helped Jews flee Nazi Germany. Back home, he stood up for Japanese Americans sent to U.S. internment camps. And when the atomic dust settled, he went to Hiroshima, where he built houses for survivors of the devastating bomb attack. In the 1950s he helped rebuild South Korea after the war there.

Every few days, as a luxury foreign cruise ship emerges from the Inland Sea of Japan and enters the harbor, the old woman watches. The ship takes the same route the Portuguese did hundreds of years ago, rounding a natural anchorage and heading for a berth at one of Nagasaki's piers. Tugboats greet the ship with toots of their horns.

Dig down below the 3 feet of topsoil that was dumped atop the ruins of central Hiroshima to make a memorial Peace Park and you'll still turn up bones, remains of Japanese civilians incinerated when an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic fireball over this spot one August morning in 1945. The Peace Park is a graveyard, the most visible scar of Japan's disastrous imperial war and ground zero of its postwar, anti-nuclear conscience.

It is a suggestion that can make a U.S. veteran of World War II red-faced with anger--that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was unnecessary, that Japan was on the verge of surrender anyway. But now, 50 years later, what happened on Aug. 6, 1945, is a topic of fresh examination. What then seemed clear-cut is now less so, the subject of a spate of new books, articles and discussions. Some of them argue the war would have ended just as quickly even if President Harry S. Truman had not approved the first use of the atomic bomb.

Those who escaped the sizzling temperatures inland found their path to paradise a little less congested than usual on Labor Day, marked by many as the symbolic end of summer. "I'm not sure what's going on -- maybe it's the gas prices," said Shannon Tubbs, who drove to Huntington Beach from San Dimas with her husband and three children. "There was no traffic at all." At the beach, people were enjoying a little more peace and quiet than they expected.

The City Council calls it a peace park, but the planned tribute to an antiwar activist is creating conflict. The council approved funding for the $93,000 downtown park. The city plans to build a Wall of Consequence there that will include debris from attacks on civilians around the world, including the World Trade Center; Hiroshima, Japan; and the Alfred B. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

During World War I, he risked his life as a Red Cross ambulance driver, rescuing the wounded on battlefields in France. During World War II, he helped Jews flee Nazi Germany. Back home, he stood up for Japanese Americans sent to U.S. internment camps. And when the atomic dust settled, he went to Hiroshima, where he built houses for survivors of the devastating bomb attack. In the 1950s he helped rebuild South Korea after the war there.

Re: "Parks Board Aims to Relocate Gun Range," Nov. 17. Is any consideration being given to creating a Grant Park that is peaceful and quiet? Why must we have entertainment and razzmatazz at the park? How about viewing benches, picnic tables and nature walks in this jewel we have in our downtown? TRUDY CLARK Ventura

President Clinton said today that the United States intends to further reduce its "footprint" here on Okinawa, which is home to about 26,000 American troops whose presence remains a source of resentment among many islanders. Clinton, the first U.S. president in four decades to visit this island, made his announcement shortly after arriving for the annual meeting of the Group of 8--the seven leading industrialized powers plus Russia. He did not give any specifics. Noting that the U.S.

The Cold War's terrifying nuclear past united with the quiet of nature this weekend when the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy opened a new state park high above Encino and Brentwood. From 1956 to 1968--long before perestroika or the dawn of Russian elections--a tiny knob of dirt 1,950 feet above the Pacific Ocean, between the San Fernando Valley and Brentwood, was the last line of defense to protect Los Angeles and its teeming aerospace factories from Soviet bombers.

Sadako Sasaki was 2 years old the day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. She lived only a mile from the detonation site. Ten years later, lying in a hospital and dying from radiation poisoning, she began folding paper cranes, since Japanese lore teaches that 1,000 cranes will cure any illness. When Sadako died, 365 cranes short of her goal, her classmates made 365 more and placed them in her coffin.

Some of the most scenic wilderness in North America has been dedicated to peace and international cooperation, but man's encroachment is threatening its future. Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park spans the border between Montana and Alberta. Composed of Glacier National Park and Waterton Lakes National Park, it was designated a "peace park" in 1932 by the U.S. Congress and the Canadian Parliament.

It is a suggestion that can make a U.S. veteran of World War II red-faced with anger--that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was unnecessary, that Japan was on the verge of surrender anyway. But now, 50 years later, what happened on Aug. 6, 1945, is a topic of fresh examination. What then seemed clear-cut is now less so, the subject of a spate of new books, articles and discussions. Some of them argue the war would have ended just as quickly even if President Harry S. Truman had not approved the first use of the atomic bomb.

It is a drab, misty morning in Peace Park. At this early hour, the park belongs to the doves--pigeons, actually--which sit cooing in the dampened trees or peck contentedly at scraps of food in the grass. Throngs of tourists and children on school outings can be expected even on the slowest of days, but for now there are no distractions along the broad paths to the Peace Bell, the Children's Peace Monument and the concrete-and-granite Memorial Cenotaph. Here, under a dull gray arch near what was once ground zero--today, "city center" is the preferred term--are enshrined the names of 186,940 people who lost their lives because of the world's first atomic bomb attack.