When I was planning my trip to Japan, I knew I couldn’t skip Hiroshima. I’m still a history student at heart, and skipping over the site of one of the most monumental developments of the 20th century was a no-go. So I booked a hostel for a night and in the morning visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
In front of the museum is a large fountain, with a small dedication beside it:
“The fountain, ‘Spring of Prayers’, was donated to the City of Hiroshima by The Hiroshima Bank, Ltd. in November, 1964 to commemorate the atomic bomb victims who died crying for water on the scorched city and to pray for lasting peace.”
It’s a powerful image, and I knew immediately I was in for a sombre morning.
Learning about the atomic bomb is a very dry affair on the victors’ side. We know that it was powerful enough to level a city – powerful enough to end a war – and that thousands of people died instantly. But most textbooks cover it as a list leading up to the end of a chapter: Battle of Okinawa, atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surrender of the Japanese Empire, on to the Cold War.
The museum describes the bombing of Hiroshima from the perspective of the people that survived it. The stories are hard to read, and harder to forget. Survivors walking around so badly burned that their skin hangs off them like curtains. Parents searching for their children in a river full of bodies, people trapped beneath the rubble as uncontrolled fires spread through the debris. One mother finding her daughter and four of her classmates lying on the ground; they ask for water and she goes to find it. When she gets back, all she can do is dab the water on their lips: all of them died while she was gone. Pictures of people with their faces scorched off, their visages an unrecognizable slate of mottled scar tissues. And, if it wasn’t hellish enough, the smoke and dust raised by the bomb creates a pitch-black rain, full of radiation, that desperate survivors open their mouths to drink just to get some relief from the atomic heat.
And then the radiation. People that survived the initial blast suddenly falling ill a week or two after the explosion, hair falling out, bleeding uncontrollably from the nose and tongue – “conscious and lucid until the end,” in the case of one survivor. The burns form massive keloids, raised knobs of scar tissues that hurt and never heal, and cancer stalks those who make it out of the city. It’s hard to read about the suffering the survivors went through and think that those who died instantly were the lucky ones.
One thought bothered me while going through the exhibition, though. It goes like this: While nobody could ever deserve to have the horrors of the atomic bomb inflicted on them, the people of Hiroshima were working to support a regime that had not only started this bloody war, but was also responsible for some of the most vicious and brutal war crimes in modern history. Can you say they were entirely innocent?
It’s not a question of culpability – that puts too much weight on the cause-and-effect. The American military is “culpable” for the hell that the people of Hiroshima went through, justified or not. But while reading about the suffering of Hiroshima, I couldn’t help but also think of those who suffered during The Rape of Nanjing, when the Imperial Japanese Army raped and murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in an orgy of violence that still makes me genuinely nauseous to read about. Surely the war efforts in Hiroshima contributed in some way to what happened in Nanjing, but is that relevant when talking about the atomic bombing?
I don’t want to come across as saying that the people of Hiroshima deserved the atomic bombing, any more than I would want to say that the people of Nanjing deserved the Japanese massacre. Nor do I want to push the “both sides” narrative that’s often used as a tactic of historical denialism – e.g. “Germany committed the Holocaust, but the Americans firebombed Dresden, both sides did bad things, therefore the Holocaust wasn’t that bad”. None of what I’m writing should be taken as trying to downplay how wantonly cruel and senseless both incidents were, nor indeed any war crimes past and present.
The lesson I take away in the end is this: these atrocities are an inherent part of war, which is what makes it so despicable. Humans are capable of incredible acts of cruelty against each other, and war gives us an excuse to unleash horrors that no one deserves to experience. We spin myths about glorious or justified war, of cleansing atomic fire, then look away from the hell on earth it unleashes. That’s why the museum and memorials at Hiroshima are so important. I’m glad I went, and I think everyone should – it’s a poignant reminder of why peace is so important, and what ends up happening when it’s shattered.
Harmon Moon 