“I
see those people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the news every year and I
wonder why they just can’t let it go. Hasn’t it been long enough already?”
These words were spoken to my wife
recently by a Japanese co-worker when we returned from Nagasaki. This attitude
might seem startling to peace activists in Japan and throughout the world who participate
in memorial events every year on August 6th and 9th, but it is a sobering
reminder that many people in Japan and throughout the world have let the memory
fade, not even knowing what they don’t know about the perils of nuclear weapons
as they exist in today’s world.
In a consumer society based on employment
in a military economy, the institutions people pass through in their formative
years do very little to teach history, political consciousness or the meaning
of citizenship. Whatever lessons exist are delivered as tedious, obligatory
lectures, followed by multiple choice tests. Lessons might also have come
from elders in the form of scoldings about how tough things were during the
war, how “you youngsters” have no idea and so on. The only thing worse than no
history lessons is bad history lessons. Japanese people, in particular, may be
inured to them because of an overdose of obligatory exposure to the rituals of
remembrance.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki also invoke
uncomfortable feelings of shame about losing the war, and shame about responsibility
for it. The hibakusha and all the
memorials in the two bombed cities evoke these conflicted feelings, so many
Japanese would rather turn away, just as many Americans would rather turn away
for inverse reasons.
While living in Japan I have met people
who talked about visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they never mentioned the
atom bomb. The only thing they wanted to talk about was the local foods they
ate, or maybe a visit to Dejima, the old Dutch and Portuguese trading post in
Nagasaki that used to be the most famous thing about the city. They talked
about these visits like they would talk about a visit to any other place.
Likewise, residents of the two cities have millions of good reasons to
appreciate everything that happened before the war and after it, all the things
that make their cities just like other cities. No one wants their city to be
just about that one traumatic thing that happened one day long ago.
I had lived in Japan for many years
before I visited either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, partly because I had other
priorities, and partly because it just felt a little strange to visit a place
just for that. I knew the history
quite well, but I still questioned my motives. I finally went when I had
someone to visit there, someone who just happened to be a historian who
specialized in the cultural impacts of nuclear technology.
That was Robert Jacobs, who was interviewed
on a local Hiroshima English language podcast shortly after President Obama’s
visit to Hiroshima on May 27, 2016. During the interview he shed some light on
why people are becoming less reluctant to visit traumatized places and engage
in what has recently become known as “dark tourism:”
I met a religious studies scholar… who
said… dark tourism has replaced religious pilgrimage... Going to places where
history happened, especially traumatic history happened… gives your life more
authenticity... This has been on the rise, and it’s partly a way to infuse our
lives with meaning and connection to a world that is often at a distance from
us… to infuse your own life with a deeper sense of the importance of
peace because you’ve been to some place where peace is so important. It’s an
emotional and a spiritual renewal to go to places like that, and the use of the
word “dark” doesn’t mean that there is a dark meaning. It just means that it’s
sites of historical trauma. People go there not to gawk at trauma or death but
because these are the sites that resonate in our mythology of the world we live
in. Religious sites don’t resonate so much the way that they used to, but
people like to visit places that give their lives a sense of being connected to
mythic things. In our lives the mythic things are often large historical
tragedies, and in coming to a place like Hiroshima... “dark” just implies a
place where a dark thing happened, but the motives of the people who come here are to increase their sense of connectedness and their sense of meaning...
People will invoke having been to Hiroshima as a means of having authority.
They will say, “I’ve been to Hiroshima… I can tell you about how bad nuclear
weapons are...” These are empowering reasons that people visit… The phrase “dark
tourism” certainly doesn’t imply that the motives of people are in any way
dark. [1]
There could be a downside to claiming
authority just because one has visited a place where something bad happened. It
depends on what one learns about the entire context of the traumatic event. Visitors
to Hiroshima could leave with widely divergent interpretations of what happened
there in 1945. In the end there is much to be said for a pilgrimage to a local
library in order to connect and infuse one’s life with a deeper connection to
history.
I can say that my visits to Hiroshima
and Nagasaki achieved something that was missing in all that I knew about what
happened there in August 1945. No matter how much I had learned from books and
films and second-hand reports, it didn’t become fully real in a certain sense
until I could confirm it with my own senses, when I stood at ground zero,
walked through the cities, visited the museums, and talked to eyewitnesses to
the events. That’s what is meant by “connection.”
One of the great things about both
cities is the streetcars. They still run down the routes that existed in 1945,
and though they must have been rebuilt and refurbished many times since then,
they haven’t been modernized. They look, and feel, and sound just like the
streetcars of old, and they are the means by which most visitors get from the
central train stations to the atomic bomb memorial sites.
On August 8th I rode the streetcar in
Nagasaki with my wife and son, from downtown to the Urakami district where the
museum and hypocenter are located. As we got closer the streetcar became very
crowded, as groups of students were in town to attend the annual memorial the
next day. I was standing, and my wife and son were sitting. A white-haired woman
in her late eighties got on. She was stooping over a cane, but she pushed her
way through the crowded aisle with considerable force. I tapped my son and told
him to give up his seat. She took it with quick smile of gratitude then immediately
began to talk to my wife:
Everyone’s going to the Peace Park
today. That’s good. Good to see so many young people here… I wasn’t here that
day. I was living down the line in Sasebo, but I had been called up to work in
a factory here. For some reason I didn’t have to go to work that day. But then
later I was told to get to Nagasaki and report for work. I got down to Sasebo
station, and when that train from Nagasaki came in, people just fell out of it
and collapsed right there on the platform, never got up again. Piles of them,
blackened and sick. They just spilled out of the train car. I’ve never seen
people in such a horrid state. Every city was getting bombed. We expected it,
but obviously something very strange had happened in Nagasaki. I didn’t ride
the train that day, but I went later… Sorry, I’m talking a lot, but I have to.
Tomorrow the prime minister will come and make his speech again. So useless. We
are really disappointed in him. I never used to talk to strangers like this,
but now I talk to everyone because we have to. There are so few of us left.
Obviously, this is a translation and a
paraphrase of a conversation recalled by my wife and related to me when we got
off the streetcar. The reader may think I’ve embellished it, but this was the
gist of it: the determination to tell the story, the need to condemn the
present direction of the country, and thus the loss of all concern about what
anyone might think about the unsolicited sharing of these stories with
strangers on a streetcar. Looking back on it now, it seems to be the best way
to explain to that smug, ignorant co-worker why people can’t and don’t have to “just
get over it.” The experience also taught me why people should dare to be “dark
tourists” and take in everything they see and hear when they visit places of
historical trauma, whether it’s Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Wounded Knee. In this
case, there was nothing like getting the story firsthand on a Nagasaki
streetcar.
Our short visit to the city had other
highlights. I was invited to join a
study tour led by the historian of American University, Peter Kuznick
(co-author of The Untold History of the United States),
and there I met his students and others from Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University. A
famous spokesperson for the hibakusha community was also there,
71-year-old Koko
Tanimoto Kondo, who has devoted her life to speaking about the atomic
bombings in both Japanese and English. Her father was Reverend Kiyoshi
Tanimoto, [2] a Methodist minister who was portrayed in John Hersey’s Hiroshima,
the first report that exposed American audiences to the horror of what had
happened on the ground on August 6th, 1945. [3][4] Reverend Tanimoto began a
campaign to have nations dedicate August 6th as World Peace Day, and Koko, who
was only eight months old at the end of the war, continued her father’s mission
as she grew older.
Another hibakusha, Kazutoshi Otsuka,
spoke to the study group about the life he has devoted to telling the world
about the necessity of abolishing nuclear weapons. He was ten years old at the
time of the blast, and survived because he was at the edge of the zone of worst
damage and was indoors at the time. He emerged from the debris that had fallen
over him to find the city in ruins, utterly transformed from what it had been
just a short time ago. The downtown area had been spared, but in Urakami almost
all the buildings and thousands of people had just vanished. The last human
voice he heard before the blast was his friend calling from outside, “The
cicadas are singing. Let’s go catch some.” Did he die instantly in the blast?
Did he run home and get caught in the fires? Did he die more slowly from
radiation? Mr. Otsuka searched for his friend for a long time afterward, but it
became obvious that he had vanished on the wind just like the last words he had
spoken. For seventy-one years, while he has told his story to all who will listen,
Mr. Otsuka has carried with him those simple words of invitation from his friend to enjoy a
summer day.
The most famous icon of the atomic
attacks is the Hiroshima Dome, one of the few structures left standing, but one
which was almost demolished in the rush to rebuild the city and erase all signs
of what had happened there. Those who wanted it saved had a hard time
convincing city hall that it would be worthwhile to preserve it. There is
nothing similar in Nagasaki, except for some portions of the walls of Shiroyama
Elementary School near the hypocenter. Like the dome in Hiroshima, its position
directly under the blast allowed it to be not completely demolished by the
lateral blast force. After the fires were out, the remnants of the school on a
small hill stood as the only desolate reminder of all that had been in this
section of the city called Urakami. However, it wasn’t as photogenic as the
Hiroshima Dome, and Nagasaki is more out of the way and receives fewer visitors,
so it never became an iconic symbol of the atom bomb. In any case, the rebuilt
school still functions as a school, so it wouldn’t be able to deal with a
constant stream of visitors.
The original wall with the new school built around it. |
We learned that every year on August
9th the school holds a remembrance ceremony for students, the community, and
any visitors who wish to attend. The students all come back for a day from
their summer vacations and dress up in formal attire in the 30-degree humidity.
It is a mourning ceremony, so the adults wear black funeral suits and dresses.
My wife and I decided to get up early on
the 9th and take our son to the ceremony. We had attended many Japanese school
ceremonies with our children before, and this one was just like all the rest,
but so different from all others as well.
A steep staircase leads up to the
school, and Koko Tanimoto was already there at the top, beaming a welcoming
smile to us. There was something from her father in that smile because she made
it feel like we were being welcomed to church on a Sunday morning. We walked
around the grounds and looked inside the restored section that holds artifacts and memorials for the disappeared. In a grove of trees just off the sports
ground they still sometimes find bone chips a few inches down in the soil.
After the ceremony, a teacher talks to a group of students about the grove. |
In his speech at the ceremony, the
principal said everything one would expect at such an occasion, going over the
events of that day and the weeks and months that followed, and the eventual
rebuilding of the school and the city. Several times he mentioned “passing the
baton,” stressing to the children their heavy responsibility to carry on the
memory that all other graduates of the school have carried into their adult
lives.
Shiroyama Elementary School, in the days after the bombing. |
Around the third time I heard that word
baton, I began to feel uneasy about
it. I started to wonder how many people had gone through that school wondering “Why
us?” They didn’t drop the bomb. They didn’t ask for this burden, and they must
wonder why the whole country and the whole world is not doing more to pass this
baton to future generations. I didn’t visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or make
friends in the peace movement, suffering from any delusions that it is easy to
change the world. I think most of my fellow travelers and the hibakusha feel the same. We know what we
are up against, and we know how badly the masters of war have betrayed us. The hibakusha’s commitment to peace makes
for a paradoxical taboo against expressing anger and rage, but I suspect the
survivors have reached old age bitterly aware that the world has done far too
little to act on their call for the elimination of nuclear weapons. It must
feel like cruel mockery as they reach their later years. There were many
hopeful periods, such as the thaw between Khrushchev and Kennedy that was
emerging just before JFK’s assassination, or the end of the Warsaw Pact in the
late 1980s, but each time, to borrow a line from Leonard Cohen, the holy dove was
caught again, bought and sold, and bought again. [5]
There must have been very many angry hibakusha over the decades, people who
kept their rage contained within them, people who drank, people who became
outcasts or extremists, but the openly angry people never got invited to
official ceremonies. One can only speculate about the motives of the anonymous person
who threatened to bomb Shiroyama Elementary School and other schools in
Nagasaki in August 2016 (at least there was an advance warning), but it speaks
to a very perverse disdain that exists in some people toward the victims rather
than the perpetrators. [6]
Overt anger has been kept out of sight,
but an acceptable outlet for covert anger is mainstream politics, where those
in the ruling party dream of restoring the glory of the empire and their notion
of “national honor” while accumulating plutonium from “the peaceful atom” and biding
their time under American subservience. This is how contemporary Japanese
society developed its neurotic ambivalence about its history and place in the
world.
The various forms of anger have been
reported by other writers who know the experiences of hibakusha well. Shortly after President Obama’s speech in
Hiroshima, the journalist and filmmaker John Pilger had this to say:
… the cynicism of great power and great
reckless power, in many respects is expressed at Hiroshima where… all the
evidence shows that both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed as America’s
first expressions of violent power in the Cold War that was then underway. So
for Obama to go and talk about the atomic bombs as if God dropped them... He
used the passive voice… and really quite vomitus language like “we must have
the courage to care.” So [according to Obama] no one dropped the atomic bombs.
The United States certainly didn’t kill all those hundreds of thousands of
people. It didn’t cause all that suffering. It’s something that we should all
express sympathy to. It was like a kind of high mass and the great divinity was
there, but not the United States. That [the US] is not to blame. That’s been
Obama’s role as a PR man extraordinaire, and he came into power and people fell
on their knees… This was a kind of second coming. There was a problem for the
last few years with re-igniting Afghanistan and Iraq, and destroying Libya and
so on, but the fawning has begun again as Obama’s time in office nears an end,
and for people, for journalists to report--as I say the deeply cynical action of
Obama and the United States in Hiroshima the other day--to report it without the
context of all those survivors–and I’ve interviewed many of them--of how angry
they were… they’re polite people and they’re very elderly… but they were angry.
[7]
Two months later The Mainichi reported more precisely on this anger in describing
how the secretary-general of the Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers
Organizations regretted his initial praise of Obama’s speech when he had time
to read an accurate translation the next day:
Terumi Tanaka, 84, was in attendance on
May 27 this year when Obama was making what was the first visit of a sitting
U.S. president to Hiroshima…
There was an interpreter for Obama’s
speech, but the speech was not handed out on paper… Sentences from the latter
part of the speech, such as his reference to a future in which “Hiroshima and
Nagasaki are known ... as the start of our own moral awakening,” had stuck with
him, and he praised the sentence as “excellent words.” He noted, however, that
he was “disappointed” that Obama had said, “We may not realize this goal (of a
world without nuclear weapons) in my lifetime.” The next morning… Tanaka opened
a page containing the Japanese translation of the speech. It began, “Seventy-one
years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world
was changed.” Tanaka was stunned. “Death did not ‘fall from the sky.’ This is
making the death abstract. This is absolutely unacceptable,” Tanaka thought.
While on board the train he opened his laptop and began to write his “Essay of
Regret.” As he typed, erased and retyped, he says, “I began to get angry and
stopped midway. They ‘created’ the death. As a sign of apology, I want them to
eliminate nuclear weapons,” he says. [8]
Another expression of this anger came
from Setsuko Thurlow, a hibakusha who
has lived for many years in Toronto. She was received at the White House in
June, where she met the man who wrote the Hiroshima speech and hand-delivered a
message for the president in which she listed the concrete measures that need
to be taken to make the speech amount to more than aspirational fluff:
1. Stop the U.S. boycott of
international nuclear disarmament meetings and join the 127 countries that have
endorsed the Humanitarian Pledge to create a new legal instrument and new norms
for a nuclear weapons ban treaty as a first step in their elimination and
prohibition.
2. Stop spending money to modernize the
US nuclear arsenal, a staggering $1 trillion over the next three decades, and
use this money to meet human needs and protect our environment.
3. Take nuclear weapons off high alert
and review the aging command and control systems that have been the subject of
recent research exposing a culture of neglect and the alarming regularity of
accidents involving nuclear weapons. [9]
Much more could be said by the hibakusha community about issues not
relating directly to disarmament, such as the worsening mistrust between the
nuclear powers and the proliferation of conventional military power that leads
so many nations to favor the “cheap and easy” asymmetrical nuclear deterrent. [10]
The obstacles to peace are stacked high, and anger seems to be the only logical
response. But I will hold onto the memory of Koko Tanimoto smiling at the top of those
stairs at Shiroyama, greeting the late pilgrims like me who’ve finally decided
to make this simple journey.
Notes
[1] J.J. Walsh, interviewer, “Professor
Bo Jacobs on the Obama Visit,” Get
Hiroshima, May 30, 2016, 18:00~
[2] “Hiroshima
Survivor Meets Enola Gay Pilot,” This
is Your Life, 1955. The full interview with Reverend Tanimoto can be viewed
on YouTube.
[3] Robert Jacobs, “Reconstructing
the Perpetrator’s Soul by Reconstructing the Victim’s Body: The
Portrayal of the ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ by the Mainstream Media in the United
States,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia
and the Pacific, Issue 24, June 2010.
[4] Tadatoshi Akiba, L. Wittner and T.
Taue, “Why
Hiroshima and Nagasaki Day Events Matter,” Asia Pacific Journal, August 1, 2007.
[5] Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” The Future, Columbia Records, 1992.
[7] Afshin Rattansi, interviewer, “ISIS in Fallujah & World War III with John
Pilger (Episode 350 of Going Underground),” Russia
Today, June 4, 2016. What John Pilger described as a “passive voice”
construction could more accurately be called a usage of an intransitive verb
which conceals the agent of the action. The speech writer had various
syntactical choices available: President
Truman ordered the bombs to be dropped or The crew of the Enola Gay dropped the bomb, The bomb fell or, at the level of greatest possible abstraction, Death fell from the sky.
[8] Terumi Tanaka, “Hibakusha: A-bomb sufferers’ group official regrets
praising Obama speech,”
The Mainichi, August 2, 2016.
[9] To
Barack Obama from Setsuko Thurlow, International Campaign to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons, August 6, 2016.
[10] Richard Rhodes, Arsenals
of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007),
101. Many who favor nuclear deterrence believe that it has prevented a third
world war that would have been fought with a massive arsenal of conventional
weapons, with millions of casualties. In this argument, a nuclear arsenal is
preferable, and it comes at a bargain price for nations large and small. Rhodes’
book argues for abolition of nuclear arms, but he noted how their “low cost” (not considering what economists call “externalities”) became
a rationale for their development: “Nuclear warheads cost the United States about
$250,000 each: less than a fighter bomber, less than a missile, less than a patrol
boat, less than a tank.”
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