Leadership, Peace, and a Powerful Visit with a Hiroshima Survivor

Samantha Howden sat in a room in Hiroshima, Japan, and listened intently to every word the 84-year-old man spoke.

“Even more than what he was saying, it was the things he didn’t say,” says Howden, a rising senior economics major at LSA. “His eyes said a lot as he was talking, looking off into the distance.” 

The speaker was Soh Horie-san. Eighty years ago, on August 6, 1945, he was running an errand, walking on a hillside path with his older sister. A bright light flashed, followed by what he described as “an overwhelming blast of wind” and a thunderous boom. His sister covered his nearly-five-year-old body with hers, shielding him from the worst of the debris and black rain. 

The U.S. Army Air Forces had just dropped the “Little Boy” atomic bomb, destroying the city and killing some 70,000 people instantly.

Howden, nine other U-M students, and Barger Leadership Institute Director Ram Mahalingam were in Japan for a three-week course in May called ALA 370: “Mindfulness and Peace Global Leadership.” They studied at the Japan Center for Michigan Universities in Hikone, Japan, with excursions to Hiroshima and other locations.

In Hiroshima, they were hosted by the World Friendship Center, which is documenting the stories of hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bomb. After Horie-san spoke, Howden processed his words and message the way she often does: by writing and drawing in her journal. “Peace,” she wrote, followed by several bullet points: “dignity; not the absence of conflict; … to hurt another is to hurt yourself.” 

One of Howden’s drawings depicted a story Horie-san told of his sister protecting him from the bomb’s impact. She wrote of how his family members died: Their father died six days after the attack; their mother had breast cancer at age 60 but lived to 83. His sister died of colon cancer at age 55. Horie-san was one of many in Hiroshima to develop cancer; his was a lymphoma in 2011, and he still goes to the doctor every three months. 

“He had a quiet demeanor, one that parallels the nature of an ocean,” Howden recalled later. “There are parts of the ocean that are very calm on top, and underneath there’s all this activity, all this depth.”

The talk made Howden think about the ripple effects that a person can have, and she applied it to how she thinks about leadership. Looking at it from Horie-san’s perspective, she imagines him thinking, “‘It’s so valuable that these younger generations are able to come here to Japan and I’m able to speak with them because it’s going to be on you to carry these stories forward.’”

Peace Ambassadors 

The Barger Leadership Institute hosts immersive and interdisciplinary undergraduate leadership experiences at LSA. Howden attended a Mindful Leadership Fellows retreat at BLI, where she first learned about how mindfulness practices can complement leadership development, and she took a “Foundations in Leadership” (now “Foundations in Leadership and Followership”) class in her freshman year. She was struck by how much she gained through a class that was taught by her peers. Since then, she has become more involved with BLI, currently serving as a leadership teaching fellow.

Mahalingam, the BLI director and a professor of psychology, thinks the experiences Howden and the other students had on the trip will stay with them for many years to come. “I hope the course provided them with their own personal tools to think through intellectually what mindful leadership means to them, to think of themselves as peace ambassadors—not in an idealistic way, but knowing that there are real people doing this work.”

Howden continues to think about the trip every day. Recently, she spoke during a phone interview while she walked through New York City to her summer internship. “I think about it now, just walking through this city,” she said. “I think about how I need to hold people in my life closer to me, but also how you incorporate those legacies when they aren’t with you any longer, the legacies they left behind. I think about the humanity of it all; these were people who were just going through their everyday lives.”

In her essay reflecting on the experiences of the trip and about peace global leadership writ large, Howden wrote: “It’s simple: the value of life is inherently invaluable. Life is not a bargaining chip to be used in geopolitical games. Humankind has a responsibility, as some of the most conscious creatures on this planet, to take ownership of our creations and the sustainable and foreseeable future. 

“Take ownership not just of our own future, but of the future of all life for this planet or another. We have an innate responsibility to recognize the deep interconnectedness within ourselves, with others, and with the environment that we share with all sorts of other beings.”

Prof. Mahalingam will teach a variety of mindfulness practices in a three-day Mindful Leadership Retreat at Camp Michigania during the fall break, Oct. 10-13. Learn more.

Images, from the top: The Cenotaph for the Victims of the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima; a page from Samantha Howden’s journal on the trip; students meet with Soh Horie-san, a survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima; and Samantha Howden during the trip to Japan with BLI. Images courtesy of the Barger Leadership Institute.