Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (24 page)

Belated sensitivity to the enduring social and psychological legacies of the bombs introduced new euphemisms into the lexicon of nuclear victimization. One spoke not merely of “A-bomb orphans,” such as the children Nagai Takashi left behind, but also of the “elderly orphaned,” in reference to old people bereft of the children who ordinarily would have supported them in old age. The painful disfiguring scars known as keloids were said to have a spiritual counterpart in “keloids of the heart,” just as the radiation-caused leukemia had its psychological counterpart in a “leukemia of the spirit” among survivors. In the cruel vernacular of everyday discourse, youngsters who were born mentally retarded due to exposure to radiation while in the womb became known as “
pika
babies,” in reference to the blinding flash of the bombs.
³⁶

Such new information and perceptions gave greater concreteness to the victim consciousness that always had accompanied popular recollections of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time, however, fixation on Japan's nuclear victimization proved unexpectedly subversive—for the closer the Japanese looked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the clearer it became that more nationalities than just the Japanese had been killed there. Hiroshima prefecture was one of the major areas from which Japanese emigrated to the United States. After Pearl Harbor, many second-generation Japanese Americans who had temporarily gone to Japan were stranded there—and it is estimated that around thirty-two hundred may have been in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. If that is true, then extrapolating from overall casualty rates it is probable that at least one thousand American citizens were killed by the Hiroshima bomb.
³⁷

While these American deaths in Hiroshima are of slight interest in Japan (and, involving ethnic Japanese, of negligible interest to most Americans), by the early 1970s the Japanese found themselves confronting a more troublesome question of victimization. For it had become apparent by then that thousands of Koreans also were
killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a Japanese colony, Korea was a source of extensively conscripted and heavily abused labor in wartime Japan, and it was belatedly estimated that between five and eight thousand Koreans may have been killed in Hiroshima, and fifteen hundred to two thousand in Nagasaki.
³⁸
Such laborers were, in effect, double victims—exploited by the Japanese and incinerated by the Americans. By the same token, the Japanese were revealed as being simultaneously victims and victimizers. Indeed, as the story unraveled, it was learned that even in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear holocaust, Korean survivors were discriminated against when it came to medical treatment and even cremation and burial.

A small number of Japanese read a large lesson in this, concerning the complexities of both victimization and responsibility. In 1972, for example—over two decades after they first started portraying the Japanese victims of the bombs in their collaborative paintings—the Marukis exhibited a stark mural entitled “Ravens,” depicting the black scavengers descending on a mound of Korean dead, plucking out eyes. In the Hiroshima peace park itself, however, the guardians of memory thus far have succeeded in keeping a memorial to the Korean victims from violating the central, sacred ground. Even in the peace park, the Japanese unwittingly reveal themselves to be both victims and victimizers.

These tensions—racial and ethnic bias and dual identity as victim and victimizer—never will be entirely resolved in Japan. Since the 1970s, however, they have become more transparent and openly debated. Acknowledgment of the Korean victims of the atomic bombs in the early 1970s, for example, coincided with restoration of Japanese relations with the People's Republic of China—and, with this, renewed attention by liberal and left-wing writers to Japanese atrocities in China, beginning with the Rape of Nanking. Until then, and despite the zealous didacticism associated with the war-crimes trials conducted by the Allied victors during the occupation period, it seems fair to say that most Japanese regarded Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the preeminent moments of atrocity in World War II
in Asia, towering above all other acts of war just as the mushroom clouds had towered over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Belatedly reencountering China changed this. Here, again, memory was reconstructed after an abnormal interlude of silence, during which defeat followed by Cold War politics isolated Japan from China and essentially smothered recollections of Japan's aggression and atrocious war behavior there.
³⁹
The struggle to reshape memory of the war has become more intense since then—increasingly so as other Japanese atrocities have been exposed, such as the murderous medical experiments carried out by Unit 731 in Manchuria and the forced recruitment of Asian women to serve as prostitutes (
ianfu
, or “comfort women”) for the emperor's loyal troops. To the extent that popular consciousness of victimization and atrocity has changed in contemporary Japan, this has entailed greater general acknowledgment of Japan's own war crimes vis-à-vis fellow Asians.
⁴⁰

Even this remains contested, of course, as the May 1994 resignation of the newly appointed minister of Justice, Nagano Shigeto, attests. Nagano was forced to step down after calling the Nanking massacre a “fabrication,” characterizing the
ianfu
as “public prostitutes,” and referring to the war in Asia by the patriotic old name “Great East Asia War” (
Dai T
ō
a
Sens
ō
)
⁴¹
In all this, he was repudiated by his government, which formally acknowledged that the war against Asia had been a war of aggression. That same month, however, in the face of considerable domestic pressure, the same conservative coalition government also canceled plans for the emperor, Hirohito's son, to visit Pearl Harbor while on a state visit to Hawaii. This, it was argued, was too great a concession—for, after all, no American head of state ever had visited Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or even expressed regrets for those terrible deaths.
⁴²

For most Japanese, the war against other Asians was different and more regrettable in a moral sense than that against the Americans, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki account for much of this difference.
⁴³

__________________

*
I have revised this sentence about atomic bomb fatalities to indicate the most plausible estimates at the time this present collection of essays is being compiled. As indicated in the endnote, in 1994, when this article was written, Japanese government deliberations concerning death-benefits compensation to the families of
hibakusha
put the total number of deaths prior to 1969 at upwards of 300,000.

For several decades after World War II, doing “proper” history in the American academic milieu generally was understood to involve working with official documents and pronouncements; with formal decisions and developments; with “hard,” quantitative data; with the writings, including memoirs, letters, and diaries, of prominent individuals. Attentiveness to “lesser names”—the aspect of E.H. Norman's pioneer scholarship that Japanese scholars admired—was seldom regarded as worthwhile. The vast numbers who left no names at all to history remained ignored and invisible. “People's history” had yet to become a respectable professional preoccupation
.

There were, of course, ways to rectify and counterbalance this academic elitism; and where the intimate human experience of the atomic bombs was concerned, the most accessible gateway to lesser names and hitherto invisible people was through journalism and trade publications. By far the most influential English-language portal of this nature was John Hersey's
Hiroshima,
based on interviews with six survivors and originally published in an August 1946 issue of the
New Yorker.
(U.S. occupation authorities blocked publication of a Japanese translation of this for several years.) In 1955, an engrossing survivor's account was published in English and a score or more European languages under the title
Hiroshima Diary.
The author, Hachiya Michihiko, was a medical
doctor whose hospital was shattered by the bomb and who was himself seriously injured. His diary, focusing on the surviving staff and patients in the ruined hospital, covered the weeks between August 8 and the end of September and had been serialized in a Japanese medical journal between 1950 and 1952
.

The essay that follows was written as an introduction to the reissue of
Hiroshima Diary
in 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing
.

*
*
*

A
half century has passed since Dr. Michihiko Hachiya wrote his diary in the ruins of Hiroshima. Forty years have gone by since his observations became available to English-language readers through the devoted translating and editing of an American doctor, Warner Wells. The translation was hailed as an extraordinary literary event when it first appeared in the United States in 1955, and it retains its capacity to move us today.

This is a remarkable accomplishment, for what we encounter here is an account of the end of a ferocious war that is intimately Japanese and simultaneously transcends national, cultural, and racial boundaries. The diary speaks to the human heart and human condition, and does so without artifice, for it was not intended to be published. Dr. Hachiya himself was severely injured by the blast effects of the atomic bombing. At one point he notes in passing that his face and body still showed around 150 scars. By August 8, 1945, however—two days after Hiroshima was devastated—he was well enough to begin keeping a record of his convalescence in the hospital he himself administered. That record is what we have here, and there is nothing comparable to it.

As a rule, Westerners, and Americans in particular, have been reluctant to look closely at the world in which Dr. Hachiya lived between August 6 and the last day of September, when his diary ends. In the heroic American narrative of the war, the destruction of Hiroshima commonly ends with the mushroom cloud, followed by a quick fast-forward to Japan's surrender nine days later. The
Soviet declaration of war against Japan on August 8 receives little mention in this narrative. The dropping of a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9 is similarly neglected. The power of the Hiroshima bomb receives lavish, even loving, attention. By contrast, commentary about the human consequences of the bombs on the largely civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki generally is shunned, for this undermines the heroic narrative and raises troubling questions about “the good war.”

Episodically, almost in a cyclical manner, it is true that the American public has shown interest and sensitivity concerning what took place beneath the mushroom cloud. John Hersey's
Hiroshima
, a terse collection of portraits of atomic bomb victims, deeply affected many readers in 1946. Dr. Hachiya's
Hiroshima Diary
was seriously received in the mid-1950s, and over a decade later the translation of the greatest Japanese account of death from radiation sickness, Masuji Ibuse's
Black Rain
, was hailed as a classic in the United States and Britain. In the early 1980s, the apocalyptic spectacle of nuclear death and devastation witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was transposed to the global level in an extraordinarily successful futuristic best-seller by Jonathan Schell entitled
The Fate of the Earth
.

The averted gaze has been the easier, more persistent response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, and in mainstream U.S. circles commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia has strengthened this tendency. For understandable reasons, Americans wish to celebrate victory over an aggressive, fanatic, atrocious enemy. Most choose to see the atomic bombs as weapons that
saved
countless lives. In this heroic rendering, Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply hastened the end of a terrible global conflagration.

These sentiments emerged strongly in the closing months of 1994 and opening months of 1995, when the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., was forced to drop plans for a major exhibition on the atomic bombs that would have included photographs and artifacts from ground zero. These were, critics
declared, “emotionally loaded.” Intimate depiction of civilian Japanese victims (in the parlance of the heroic American narrative they are “casualties”), it was argued, distorted the reality of a war in which the Japanese over and over again had victimized others atrociously. The chief historian of the U.S. Air Force publicly asked how the Smithsonian could have blundered so badly on such a “morally unambiguous” subject. The U.S. Senate unanimously approved a resolution condemning the institution for failing to celebrate the manner in which the atomic bombs had brought the war to a “merciful” end.

In this highly charged emotional and ideological climate, the reissue of Dr. Hachiya's diary is a salutary event. His simple account tells us, as no one but the Japanese who experienced the bombs can, about the human consequences of nuclear weapons. It reminds us of the larger tragic narrative of World War II, in which heroism coexisted with moral ambiguity, and the same act could seem simultaneously merciful and merciless.

From the Japanese perspective, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not only an end but also a beginning: the beginning of grotesque lingering deaths, lifelong bereavement, unprecedented physical harm from radiation, and ceaseless psychological trauma, of course—but also the beginning of a new sense of the preciousness of life. Shuffling through the filth and debris of his ruined, overcrowded hospital; watching patients and acquaintances die, often mysteriously; assailed by the stench of bodies being cremated wafting through the hospital's shattered windows—through all this Dr. Hachiya moved with composure, compassion, and keen appreciation of the smallest pleasures of so-called normal life.