Hiroshima
President Obama is about to visit Hiroshima and has made it clear that
he will not apologize for us having dropped the bomb. Emphatically, he is right
not to do so. The war had been going on for four years and its next task would
have been an allied invasion of Japan, mostly by American armed forces. Such an
invasion, necessary to defeat Japan, would have been immensely costly in
equipment and, especially, in human lives. Paul Fussell, a soldier in the war
and later a distinguished professor of English, has vigorously defended the
dropping of that bomb1 for
saving the thousands of lives that would have been lost in an invasion of
Japan. I was in boot camp when the bomb was dropped and soon came to realize
that instead of becoming an endangered cog in the wheel that would finish off
the Japanese, I would have a peaceful career in the US Navy.
Indeed,
that’s what I had. It took me to China where I was able to visit several
cities, but my ship made only one quick trip to Japan, to Sasebo. Even there I
did not get beyond the harbor, not to mention to nearby Nagasaki, where the
second, and in my view unnecessary, atomic bomb was dropped.
But
many years later, not as a teenager, but as a white-haired retired professor, I
did get to Hiroshima, as a tourist on a boat, that stopped at many interesting Japanese
sights. We visited Hiroshima, now sixty-something years later, a city elegantly
reconstructed, with prominent features that memorialized its past as a victim
of the most powerful explosion ever.
One of these
is a museum—not a big one, but not tiny either, the Peace Memorial Museum. I
don’t remember all of its exhibits, but I remember the main theme that runs
through just about all of them. What I found annoyed me to the degree that I
started a lengthy discussion with my fellow travelers when we were all gathered
back on the ship.
Succinctly, the museum’s main theme, maybe its only one, is how we
Japanese—and not only we inhabitants of Hiroshima—were victims during the Second
World War, how in many different ways we suffered. The exhibits depicted the
Japanese as victims, as sufferers. There is just one small reference in that
museum that quietly declares that Japan started the war. Only a very alert and
thoughtful Japanese visitor to the museum would become conscious of the fact
that there would not have been all that Japanese suffering had Japan not
brought the United States into the war by bombing Pearl Harbor on December 7,
1941. Needless to say, there is nothing about the fierceness of Japanese
fighting, the murderous oppressiveness of Japanese occupations--think of the massacre at Nanking--nor about the
cruelty of Japanese prisons.
I know
very little about Japanese history, nor about the country’s sociology, so that
I have only a rather vague notion as to why the Japanese are so reluctant to
recognize the sins of their past. Their attitude is very different from that of
today’s Germans who for many years have acknowledged the evils of their Nazi
history. Perhaps the difference in attitudes is rooted in an important difference
in the postwar history of the two countries.
Today’s
Germany is in many ways discontinuous from its past of those dozen years ruled
by Adolf Hitler. When German defeat was in sight, Hitler committed suicide and
the leaders of the German government either fled the country or also committed
suicide or they were arrested by the Allies and then tried at Nuremberg, though
many quietly stayed in their jobs. At the highest governmental levels, the
break was pretty sharp. After le deluge—Adenauer.
As for the German people, they had the choice of either rejecting Nazism or of
keeping their mouths shut.
In
Japan, the Allies—mostly the US under General MacArthur—insisted on installing
a parliamentary government, a major change. But there was continuity nevertheless,
importantly symbolized by the fact that Hirohito, who was Emperor of Japan
throughout the war continued to be Emperor of Japan until his death in 1989.
These
political facts are by no means enough to explain the reluctance of many of
Japan’s leaders to acknowledge the country’s past transgressions and leave it
to students of Japanese civilization to provide explanations for this
reluctance to face up to Japan’s history.
I grant that a museum in Hiroshima is
not obligated to exhibit the many Japanese actions that prompted their
opponents to resort to that horrendous measure to win the war, of using a
weapon that demolished an entire city in a thrice. But it would also be
appropriate for such a museum to make it clear that if Japan had not started
that war, Hiroshima would not have been destroyed.
I hope
that on his visit to Hiroshima, President Obama will make it clear that the
destruction of their city was a response to Japan's horrendously aggressive role as our enemy in the second World War.
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1https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf
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