Japan, I have heard, is the odd place where film and vintage camera brands still hold some sway over digital and automatic photography. I decided spending a week traveling across the country would be the perfect time to learn to shoot film. My camera of choice is a Canon AE-1, which I bought second hand—though it was not exactly cheap. They’re in high demand these days, apparently.

To make sure I didn’t develop a highly anticipated roll of film only for it to turn out poorly, I decided to shoot a test set of photos on the first day in Japan. I painstakingly sought out 36 different backdrops and subjects—some much better than others.

I scoped out online a camera store and film lab in Hiroshima, where we would head from the ferry port in Shimonoseki, which cemented my idea to shoot a test roll. As soon as we arrived in Hiroshima, I ran over to drop off my roll of film. It would be, I was sure, a smooth and painless process. And at first, it seemed to be.

The employee kindly rolled my film into a canister—I had no idea I needed to, much less how to. I began to fill out the forms, and even paid. Then came the dreaded answer to a question I hadn’t asked.

“Four days,” he told me. “Come back in four days.”

I hesitated, then responded, “I won’t be here in four days.”

We stared at one another in an uneasy silence.

“Can you email it?” I asked, hopeful.

“No,” he replied, cordial.

He asked, awkwardly, “Refund?”

I responded, equally as awkward,“I guess?”

Then I followed up, “Are there any other places to develop film in town?”

He thought for a second, then responded, confidently, “No.”

Dejected, I sauntered back to the hotel and assessed the state of affairs. The entire point of shooting the first roll of film seemed defeated—I would have to wait until we arrived in one of the larger cities of Kyoto or Tokyo to develop my shots. I considered whether to continue shooting in the meantime at risk of taking terrible photos, or hold off entirely. But when I woke up the next morning, an appealing third option crystallized: What if there were in fact another place in town to develop film?

First, of course, was a day spent touring Hiroshima, on which a nuclear bomb was famously dropped on August 6, 1945. Growing up in the United States, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are fabled places of wars long past—in elementary school, photos of the destruction inspire awe and fear; in university classrooms, the merits of the decision to drop the bomb itself are subject to debate. In either case, and most others, the town is discussed in the abstract.

I was unsure what to expect in Hiroshima other than a sense of sorrow that, I was confident, would permeate the town. However, when we arrived at the modern Hiroshima Station and took a pastel street car through bustling streets and commercial districts, I was surprised.

To be honest, you would have no idea that Hiroshima ever saw such devastation. At first, I felt sort of uneasy—it felt like the city was trying to shed its harrowing past. Our class had spent an entire module on the atomic bombing and the impact on its survivors, called hibakusha. We examined questions of dark tourism and the legacy of tragedy.

In this sense I am grateful for my theological education. Not because it offers concrete answers to these questions, but because it has offered frames of reference through which to examine them. I am reminded of Ecclesiastes, the ancient Jewish book of sayings, which proposes that there is a time to weep and a time to mourn, but also a time to sing and a time to dance. Then, I would add, there is also a time to rebuild and a time to remember.

The city of Hiroshima has done an excellent job in constructing its Peace Park, museum, and various memorials. What more a testament to the city’s tenacity it is to have everyday life, and so much of it, in full bloom: corporate employees briskly walking to work in formal attire, parents and their kids strolling in the park, scents and flavors wafting from restaurants and cafés.

Still, reminders of the horrors of atomic weapons are found across the city in the form of signs and stories. Though our group had planned to meet with a nonagenarian Korean survivor of the atomic bomb, she fell under the weather and instead directed us to a representative of the hibakusha, a younger man who had dedicated his retirement years to telling their stories.

In great detail, he explained the tale of Lee Eung-in, a Korean man who passed as Japanese in Hiroshima in the ’30s and ’40s. At that time, Koreans were subjected to much discrimination in Japan, then its colonial power. On the day the bomb was dropped, Lee was in central Hiroshima on his way to work. His mother, in search for her son, traversed the devastation in vain looking for him. She assumed he had died.

When he arrived back at their house, or what remained of it, she was in shock. His face had been severely burned. They later learned his sister had died in the explosion. He would later recall that as they embraced, one of his mother’s tears rolled down his own cheek. His mother said that perhaps he should have died, because the burns would make his life difficult to live.

But as fate would have it, an elderly neighbor brought him grape seed oil and instructed him to apply it. Miraculously, his burns all but disappeared. In the years after the explosion, when the effects of radiation remained unknown and atomic survivors were often feared to be contagious, Lee hid both his status as a hibakusha and as a Korean—an identity that would have subjected him to two distinct forms of discrimination.

Much like Hiroshima, Lee faced a choice—suffer indefinitely in the 

After our tour wrapped up in the late afternoon, I hopped straight on a city bus toward Hiroshima Station, where a number of large electronics retailers surely offered an option to develop film. Traffic clogged Hiroshima’s streets, but cars didn’t honk and pedestrians didn’t jaywalk. It was orderly and pleasant, and we arrived soon enough at the station bus depot.

I walked into a glowing mass of phones, computers, and cameras at the first store, where I hoped—much like the day before—to quickly drop off my roll of film and hit the road again.

To make a long story short, I could not develop my photos at the first, second, or even third store, though each urged me on to the next location. At last, I arrived at my final option. A kind old man greeted me and we pulled out our respective translators.

“Yes,” a robot voice from his phone said in English. “I can do it.”