JAPAN –  HIROSHIMA AS THE CONSCIENCE OF THE POST-WAR WORLD?

The bullet train ride from Kyoto to Hiroshima takes only one hour and 37 minutes.  It is an amazing ride, almost numbing in its ease.  I have difficulty upon arrival finding a reasonably priced hotel, but that is an issue related to Freestyle Travel, and not a shortcoming of my perfectly behaved Japanese hosts.  I received help from a complete stranger in exchange for a meal, and thus got my introduction to “Hiroshima pancakes.”

The Okonomi-yaki as they are called, are wonderful creations. They consist of flour batter fried into a thin pancake, and while the crepe is setting up it is laid over with spring onions, stir-fried cabbage, sprouts, squid, shrimp, scallops, buckwheat noodles, and Japanese herbs coated with lobster sauce.  They taste like a crunchy seafood tostada.

I settle in with my happenstance hotel finder over said pancakes, Caesar salad and Kirin beer and discuss Hiroshima’s present day claim as The Peace Capitol of The World.

This advocacy has come about as a result of being the target of the world’s first wartime use of a nuclear weapon when, on August 6^th of 1945, the American B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay dropped a single thermonuclear bomb (called “Little Boy”) which exploded 1800 feet above the city and caused one of the greatest horrors ever experienced in human history.

Over 70,000 people (the majority of them civilians) were killed immediately from the heat and explosive force of the blast.  They may have been the lucky ones.  Over 140,000 total were eventually lost to the effects of the bomb, with many of them lingering miserably before succumbing to burns, radiation sickness, infection, outright wounds, starvation, and drowning.  Yes, drowning …

The ten thousand degree flash heat of the bomb caused unprecedented medical burns.  Some victims were virtually vaporized, and remained only as shadows seared into concrete surfaces following the blast.  Some were turned into charcoal.  Tens of thousands had terrible burns over the majority of their bodies.

Many of them stumbled into local rivers for pain relief, and denuded of strength, could not survive the shock of the water and weakened attempts to extricate themselves from the steep banks.  The cadaver count under bridge abutments was mind boggling in spots.

I take a late night stroll down to the Nakajima District, location of the Aioi-bashi Bridge, a T-shaped target that was used by the crew of the Enola Gay as their “Ground Zero” aiming point in 1945.  The bridge survived.  Everything else for a four kilometer diameter around it did not.

About the only thing remaining to pierce the skyline after the blast was the concrete shell of the nearby Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall – now known simply as The Atomic Dome.  It remains the most famous landmark in Hiroshima (and was selected as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996).

At night particularly, this ruin only 160 meters from the hypocenter of the blast stands out in stark relief from its surroundings.  It is a quiet period when there are many fewer visitors.  It becomes easier at such times to hear potential ghosts.  Soft white floodlights illuminate its crumbling high-walled exterior, buoyed by steel reinforcement, yet buckling against time and an unimaginable blast wave long since departed.

It is lit from within by contrasting orange lamps.  One imagines this could be the residue of a deadly blaze which never really burned itself out … or is perhaps a kinder, softer flame that now symbolizes the hope for eternal worldwide peace.

Its signature steel roof girders, in the shape of a dome, are silhouetted against the night sky.  They look like the arched bony fingers of a Terminator robot clawing its way out of the abyss.  Or of a phoenix attempting to flap its way out of the ashes with barely restored wings.  In either case, it sends a message of renewal and rebirth: “Never again.”

Across the Motoyasu-gawa River along a snakelike projection of land leading to the city harbor lies the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.  Its primary features include a Memorial Cenotaph bearing the epitaph “Let all the souls here rest in Peace, for we shall not repeat this evil.”  The arched structure hovers over a bin containing the names of the deceased from the A-bomb.  It is said to act as a shelter for the souls of the victims.

Through the arch it is possible to see the Atomic Dome across the river.  Between the two is aligned a continuously lit Peace Flame, first ignited in 1964 and whose symbolic purpose is to console the souls of the A-bomb victims.  It is to remain lit until all atomic weapons on earth are eradicated.  Nearby are the ten Peace Gates.  The first nine are meant to represent the nine gates of hell.  The tenth is simply entitled “Hiroshima.”  Each of the ten is inscribed with the word “peace” in 49 languages.

Off to the side, is a Memorial Mound, a grass covered circular knoll containing the ashes of 70,000 unidentified victims of the bombing that were collected within a few days of August 6, 1945.  Closer to the Atomic Dome is the Children’s Peace Monument, a statue depicting a girl with outstretched arms and a folded paper crane rising above her.

It reflects the true story of high school junior Sasaki Sadako, who believed if she folded 1000 paper cranes she would recover from her severe radiation burns.  Like so many she did not survive, but thousands of cranes are sent from all over the world or delivered in person daily there in the young lady’s honor.  

Brief mention must also be made of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall.  The government built Hall seeks to mourn the victims of the A-bomb, and expresses the desire of the Japanese people to achieve long-lasting peace.

The Museum is the primary attraction of the park, displaying a substantial number of articles surviving the bombing.  Photos and memorabilia are included.  My only critique of this display is that it shows no recognition of a cause-effect relationship between Japan’s brutality as a colonial master and combatant, and the means chosen by the Allies to end in the shortest possible time a war clearly started by Japan.

The most telling monument of the entire park is a pillar on top of a turtle-shaped platform, which is based on the belief that souls of the dead travel to heaven on the back of a turtle. A crown inscribed with a pair of dragons sits on top of the pillar. It was not added to the park until 54 years after the most fateful morning in Japanese history.

The Korean Atom Bomb Victims' Memorial was first erected in Hiroshima on April 10, 1970 by the Hiroshima branch of the Korean Residents Union – at its own expense. It was only in 1999 that the Hiroshima city government finally allowed resident Koreans to relocate the memorial inside the Hiroshima Peace Park. Till then, the memorial had stood across the river at the foot of a bridge on a tiny corner lot.

The annexation of Korea as a Japanese colony in 1910 caused many Koreans to lose their livelihoods, and many of these were forced to come to Japan to find work. In addition, 634,000 Korean men were co-opted as forced laborers or requisitioned workers in order to resolve labor shortages in Japan. Over 10,000 females were also brought in later as “comfort women” (sex slaves) to provide companionship to Japanese troops.

At the end of World War II, there were approximately three million Koreans in Japan, and it is believed that up to 50,000 of them were eventual victims of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima – 20,000 of them as immediate fatalities on the day of the bombing. Afterward, Japanese dead were incinerated, but Koreans were left to rot in the streets.  “We are discriminated against even in death,” complained one Korean forced laborer.

One of the many subjects of resentment between Korea and Japan since has been the deliberate exclusion by Japan from treatment and benefits of the Korean victims, and especially those who chose to return to Korea. On the whole, only Japanese nationals have been qualified to receive full financial and medical support for A-bomb related ills.

Many of those afflicted by radiation sickness managed to return to Korea, but were unable to find work due to their bomb-related disabilities (in South Korea it is generally believed that the atomic bombings brought liberation and independence, so it has been difficult for A-bomb survivors to gain sympathy).  No specialized doctors or hospitals were available for A-bomb-related afflictions. Caught up in a vicious cycle of no cure, no jobs and no money, these Korean A-bomb survivors pitifully remained in financial limbo in their own homeland. 

Until 1990, the speeches of Japanese elites at the annual Peace Memorial Ceremony on August 6th never referred to the 20,000+  assumed Korean A-bomb victims, who comprised between 10-20% of the total population estimated to have been immediately killed by the bombing.  The reasons why are cryptic but easily explained.

In putting such emphasis on the Peace Park and its standing as the only target of a nuclear weapon during wartime, Japan has two objectives: one is to memorialize the victims and educate observers.  The other is to endow itself with renewed moral and diplomatic authority lost as a result of Japan’s aggressive excesses as a colonial power during 15 years of war leading up to 1945.

In positioning itself as a victim (and a unique victim at that), Japan employs a leveling tactic which in essence says: “Don’t look at details of what happened.   Look at the big story.  We are victims too.”  They ignore relativities such as how many more citizens were killed in Allied firebombings of Tokyo and other metropolitan targets than perished at Hiroshima, and Japanese atrocities such as the 1937 Genocide of Chinese at Nanking which alone surpassed the combined total fatalities of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which was hit with a second nuclear bomb three days later).

Recognizing Korean victims in the A-bomb attack would disrupt Japanese framing of “The Bomb” as a uniquely Japanese experience in suffering.  It undermines the playbook for sole victim status and forces Japan to examine its historical treatment of Koreans.  It would require explanation of: “And what were all those Koreans doing in Hiroshima (second most important Japanese military base) at the time of the blast anyway?”  Hint: they were not there voluntarily!  It further increases the need for Japan to recognize and apologize for its brutal colonial legacy.

This disingenuous approach to its past in favor of selectively posturing as a “Mecca of World Peace” has already cost Japan a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.  As the Chinese representative to the UN was quoted as saying: “A country unable to face up to its aggressive history should not be permitted to sit on a peacekeeping body.”

Let us smoke the woodchuck from the woodpile:  Just how much would Japan and Hiroshima specifically be positioning itself as a bastion of world peace, had it won or experienced stalemate in World War II?  Had Hiroshima not been the first city to experience the horrific effects of a nuclear bomb, would we be hearing the same pious pronouncements each 6^th of August on Japan’s unique responsibility to carve out a growing role for itself as a “Ban the Bomb!” leader and authority for world peace? 

We may never know.  But we may have already seen the answer to that.  Ask the Koreans how fair, caring and pious Japanese leadership is when not under powerful dominion or moral pressure themselves.