The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections 9781498550208, 9781498550215

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Defending the Indefensible
2: Article 9 as Memorial
3: Atomic Bomb Literature for Children
4: Fading Lights
5: Two-Way Mirror
6: Hibaku Jumoku, Nature, and Hiroshima’s Recovery after the A-Bomb
7: “In the Shadow of the Cloud”
8: The Flowers of Hiroshima
9: The Manhattan Project Historical National Park
10: Hi-Roshimon
Bibliography
Index
About the Editors and Contributors

Citation preview

The Unfinished Atomic Bomb

NEW STUDIES IN MODERN JAPAN Series Editors: Doug Slaymaker and William M. Tsutsui New Studies in Modern Japan is a multidisciplinary series that consists primarily of original studies on a broad spectrum of topics dealing with Japan since the midnineteenth century. Additionally, the series aims to bring back into print classic works that shed new light on contemporary Japan. The series speaks to cultural studies (literature, translations, film), history, and social sciences audiences. We publish compelling works of scholarship, by both established and rising scholars in the field, on a broad arena of topics, in order to nuance our understandings of Japan and the Japanese. Advisory Board Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis Aaron Gerow, Yale University Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University Koichi Iwabuchi, Monash University T. J. Pempel, University of California, Berkeley Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame Dennis Washburn, Dartmouth College Merry White, Boston University Recent Titles in the Series Resilient Borders and Cultural Diversity: Internationalism, Brand Nationalism, and Multiculturalism in Japan, by Koichi Iwabuchi Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone, edited by William H. Bridges and Nina Cornyetz Japan Viewed from Interdisciplinary Perspectives: History and Prospects, edited by Yoneyuki Sugita Single Mothers in Contemporary Japan: Motherhood, Class, and Reproductive Practice, by Aya Ezawa Creating Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force, 1945–2015: A Sword Well Made, by David Hunter-Chester Rethinking Japan: The Politics of Contested Nationalism, by Arthur Stockwin and Kweku Ampiah The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism: 1945–52, edited by Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hirokazu Toeda Yokohama and the Silk Trade: How Eastern Japan Became the Primary Economic Region of Japan, 1843–1893, by Yasuhiro Makimura The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections, edited by David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller

The Unfinished Atomic Bomb Shadows and Reflections Edited by David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books “Let Us Be Midwives” and part of “City Ravaged By Flames” from Black Eggs, by Kurihara Sadako (The University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 1994), are included in chapter 7 with permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-5020-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-5021-5 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: An Unfinished Atomic Bomb David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller  1  D  efending the Indefensible: The Tragic Life of Hiroshima Pilot Paul Tibbets, Jr. Peter J. Kuznick  2  A  rticle 9 as Memorial Carolyn S. Stevens

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 3  A  tomic Bomb Literature for Children: Tatsuharu Kodama’s The Lunch Box and Shin’s Tricycle 65 Alyson Miller  4  F  ading Lights: Digital Visualization and the Legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Mick Broderick

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 5  T  wo-Way Mirror: The Significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the U.S.–North Korea Nuclear Crisis Adam Broinowski

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 6  H  ibaku Jumoku, Nature, and Hiroshima’s Recovery after the A-Bomb Glenn Moore

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Contents

 7  “ In the Shadow of the Cloud”: Hibakusha Poets as Public Intellectuals Cassandra Atherton

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 8  T  he Flowers of Hiroshima Monica Braw

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 9  T  he Manhattan Project Historical National Park David Lowe

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10  H  i-Roshimon: What We See When We Look at Hiroshima: Walking in the Peace Park Robert Jacobs

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Bibliography 199 Index 221 About the Editors and Contributors

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of our contributors for sharing their research and expertise; it has been a pleasure making contact and working with such an eminent group of scholars. We would also like to acknowledge a number of people who assisted in the writing and publication of this book. Thank you to Glenn Moore for his correspondence with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and his assistance with many aspects of the proposal and production of this manuscript: he did much more than write a chapter for this book. We are also very grateful to Celeste Thorn, for her tireless work as a research assistant and to Murray Noonan, for the initial preparation of the manuscript. Indeed, the support of the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University has been an important factor in the production of this book: https:// blogs.deakin.edu.au/contemporary-history-studies/ We would like to thank the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) and specifically Jeffrey Hart, Chief Public Relations and Publications Officer, and Eric Grant, Associate Chief of Research, for talking to us about their work, about the function of the RERF today and answering our questions. Thank you to Mark Selden, editor of Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal, for his enduring support. Mark granted permission for the republication of earlier versions of Cassandra Atherton’s and Peter J. Kuznick’s chapters in this book, which originally appeared as “‘Give Back Peace That Will Never End’: Hibakusha Poets as Public Intellectuals”: http://apjjf.org/ Cassandra-Atherton/4328.html and “Defending the Indefensible: A Meditation on the Life of Hiroshima Pilot Paul Tibbets, Jr”: http://apjjf.org/-Peter -J.-Kuznick/2642/article.html. Mark also granted permission to reproduce haiku by Ichiki Ryujoshi, Hatanaka Kyokotsu, and tanka by Koyama Ayao, and their translations from Atomic Bomb – Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kyoko Iriye Selden and Mark Selden (eds.) (New York: M.E. vii

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Sharpe, Inc., 1989) in Cassandra Atherton’s chapter. A small section of David Lowe’s chapter appeared first in David Lowe and Tony Joel, Remembering the Cold War: Global Contest and National Stories (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). Thank you, also, to Karen Thornber for granting permission for the use of her translations of “August Sixth” and “At a Field Dressing Station” from her wonderful, award winning book of translations: Tōge Sankichi, Poems of the Atomic Bomb (Genbaku shishū), trans. Karen Thornber: https:// ceas.uchicago.edu/sites/ceas.uchicago.../Genbaku%20shishu.pdf; and Bryan Birchmeier for his correspondence in gaining permission to reprint “When We Say Hiroshima” from When We Say “Hiroshima”: Selected Poems, by Kurihara Sadako (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 1999) and part of “City Ravaged By Flames” and all of “Let Us Be Midwives” from Black Eggs, by Kurihara Sadako (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 1994). Importantly, we would like to thank The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum for giving permission to use the image of “Shigeru’s lunchbox” on the cover of this book. We’d like to thank Nakanishi Rie from the Cultural Division at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum for all her assistance, and Orimen Shigeko, the mother of Shigeru, for allowing the use of the image of Shigeru’s lunchbox on the front cover; it is an incredible image and makes an enduring statement about the abolition of atomic warfare. Finally, we would like to thank Brian Hill and Eric Kuntzman (and the team at Lexington Books) for their enduring patience, professionalism, support, and guidance.

Introduction An Unfinished Atomic Bomb David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller “We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.” —Edward Bond

The seventieth anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima was marked by a solemn ceremony in the Hiroshima Peace Park on August 6, 2015. The forty thousand-strong crowd paused at 8:15 am while the peace bell tolled to mark the dawning of the nuclear age. On that day, the anti-nuclear sentiments the anniversary spawned were complicated and compromised by politics. The mayor of Hiroshima, Matsui Kazumi,1 called for an end to nuclear weapons. The Japanese prime minister, Shinzō Abe, agreed, but at the same time sought to renounce the pacifist Article 9 of the Constitution and re-arm Japan. Indeed, after the conservative Liberal Democratic-Komeito bloc won a landslide victory in the October 2017 election, hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) have become increasingly concerned that the political mood in Japan makes revision of Article 9 of the Constitution a very real possibility. President Barack Obama hesitated before committing to visit Hiroshima the following year, for fear of offending an American public that overwhelmingly believes that dropping the bomb was justified. Highlighting the complexity, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest promised that there would be no presidential apology for the bomb, whilst also criticizing North Korea for developing nuclear weapons. Obama is the first incumbent U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. He urged “those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles [to] have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them.”2 Six months later, in an act of symbolic reciprocity, Abe became the first Japanese leader to visit the USS Arizona Memorial and ix

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the first to visit Pearl Harbor with a U.S. president. While Abe, similarly, did not apologize for the attack, he offered “sincere and everlasting condolences to U.S. servicemen” in what was called an “historic gesture that showed the power of reconciliation.”3 The seventieth anniversary provided an important opportunity for those who had remained silent for so long, to educate people about their experiences. Many had refused to identify themselves as hibakusha for fear their children would be bullied and discriminated against as “second-generation hibakusha.” However, time had also afforded many hibakusha the opportunity to see how “speaking out about experiences [of the atomic bomb] was a powerful and cathartic way to educate people about the ugly realities of nuclear warfare.”4 Ogura Keiko, a seventy-eight-year-old hibakusha, who has been a peace activist for more than thirty-five years, publicly called on Group of Seven foreign ministers to face the terror of nuclear weapons and have the determination to abolish them.5 In the events leading up to the 2015 commemoration ceremony, she and two other hibakusha spent weeks giving witness testimonies on the dropping of the bomb to large audiences in an effort to promote a nuclear-free future. Indeed, eighty-four-year-old Takeshi Inokuchi had learnt his testimony phonetically in English as a response to the need for his story to reach a broader audience. Ogura identified the power of imagination in the abolition of nuclear weapons. John Whittier Treat, in his exceptional book, Writing Ground Zero, identifies the way in which the reader of atomic bomb literature is asked to “cooperat[e] in a special relationship”6 with the writer. It is a relationship, Edward A. Dougherty argues, that is mediated by the imagination: It is Imagination, that elusive intelligence, which helps those of us who didn’t have to experience such extremity firsthand to remember the future. Imagination is necessary, therefore, not only to listen to their testimony but to understand our own role in history, our force in culture, and our duty both to the dead and to the living.7

Indeed, many hibakusha were initially driven by survivor guilt and many used writing about their experiences—in part to help work through some of the trauma and fulfill responsibilities they believed they had to those who did not survive and to future generations. Kurihara Sadako, a public intellectual hibakusha poet, stated: “That is the responsibility, the duty that survivors owe to those who died. The atomic landscape does not allow me to rest.”8 In this way, writers—including historians, politicians, journals, literary studies scholars—attempting to write about the atomic bomb are similarly presented with a powerful double bind. On one hand, they are thwarted by the argument that tragedy is “unspeakable,” however, if no one attempts to write



Introduction xi

about these tragic events, then the horrors of war are silenced. The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections lobbies against nuclear warfare, by encouraging not only remembrance but discussion and interrogation of the atomic bomb. This can be challenging when, as Michael Perlman has argued: We resist remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only because of our tendencies to deny and avoid death, and also the nuclear reality; this resistance can also be imagined, not as ours, but as the resistance of place itself to the destruction of memories, of its distinct boundaries.9

The essays in this book explore the ongoing significance of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Since the seventieth anniversary, anti-nuclear sentiments spawned by the anniversary have continued to be complicated and compromised by politics. Recently, Ogura has gone on record to state that she is “horrified” by President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Japan might benefit from nuclear weapons and has urged the president to visit the site of the tragedy so he can “educate himself.”10 Similarly, former mayor of Hiroshima Akiba Tadatoshi wrote a letter to Trump just before his inauguration, “urging him to make ‘wise and peaceable’ decisions regarding nuclear weapons.”11 Implicit in these pleas is the idea that memories of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, whether the personal memories of hibakusha, or the monuments in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, provide the world with a cautionary tale. As custodians of these memories, the Japanese continue to champion the goal of nuclear non-proliferation, but they have to juggle this with their reliance on the United States’ “nuclear umbrella” for protection against the threat posed by North Korean missiles and an increasingly assertive China.12 All of this complexity, however, simply highlights the ongoing relevance of Hiroshima, and the need to continue to seek deeper understandings of the bomb. Responding to this compulsion to understand why the bomb was dropped, and its effect on the city and its people, the essays in the book explore historical imaginings and re-imaginings, from the impact of the bomb on politics, history, and diplomacy, to creative interpretations via poetry, fiction, and picture storybooks. In suggesting that the atomic bomb is “unfinished” this book acknowledges the surplus of remembering around the first atomic bomb, but also the enduring sense of disconnection between some of the main mnemonic threads. The physical features of Hiroshima itself continue to invite contemplation in ways that confirm the city’s standing as a magnet for those who would make the pilgrimage—and essays herein by Glenn Moore and Robert Jacobs remind us that certain features, such as 170 survivor trees, and less-frequented parts of the Peace Park complex and its surrounds, provide alternative anchor points for the humans who lived through and past the

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immediate impacts of the bomb. Such an anchoring is emphasized by Mick Broderick whose creation of technologies that enable the digital visualization of Hiroshima and its memorial landmarks via augmented reality environments speaks to the need to experience the city’s trauma through increasingly immersive modes. Hiroshima also travels in transnational lines of cultural memory. In 1982, the mayors for Hiroshima and Nagasaki founded the Mayors for Peace group, a global network of now more than 7,000 cities joined in their mission to abolish nuclear weapons. It is also possible, argues Adam Broinowski, in a challenging argument, to see the Hiroshima bomb as the start of a nuclear age for East Asia in which successive teams of U.S. defense planners have shown a readiness to wield atomic weapons in strategic equations, most notably and most recently, in relation to North Korea. Several papers here delve into the memorialization and historical memory of the bomb. As Robert Jay Lifton has argued, in his foreword to Kyoko Iriye and Mark Selden’s The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The problem is that the atomic bomb defies memorialization. There is no adequate way of representing an event of that magnitude to future generations . . . The world is insufficiently aware of the terrible value of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the two cities in which atomic weapons have been used on human populations, they alone can convey to us certain human truths. These truths serve us well, even though we are aware of how “tiny” the explosive power of the weapon used on each city is in comparison to our present nuclear stockpiles.13

The Atomic Bomb Dome (Genbaku Dōmu) and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum are not neutral artifacts—they present a point of view, serving as powerful, anti-nuclear statements. In a similar way, the Lantern Ceremony (Toro Nagashi), where people write messages to the dead on lanterns and float them down the river from the Bomb Dome, puts the emphasis on Hiroshima as a victim city, by implication deserving of an apology. The Peace Museum is not without its critics. Its quasi-religious aspect has attracted both admiration and criticism. Daniel Seltz has written that Hiroshima revels in its identity as a “Mecca of World Peace” but is, as a result, much less a place of learning. It is the re-telling of suffering and the vision of peace that dominate. It is the bomb that represents evil. In the last three decades, he argues, museums in other cities of Japan, such as Nagasaki, Osaka, and Kyoto, are more educational in intent, and more international in their depictions of war and issues around responsibility.14 Nor is it the case that other popular forms of remembering the bomb join neatly with the main messages emanating from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. One of the newest institutions of remembering, the Manhattan Project National Historical Park in the United States (opened in 2015), strug-



Introduction xiii

gles to join effectively with the messages from Hiroshima. As David Lowe writes in his chapter, celebrating the colossal achievement that produced the bomb speaks readily to a significant number of Americans. In some ways it extends Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation” theme15 to an endeavor of unparalleled size and success, but at the expense of deep contemplation of the bomb’s first uses. Carolyn S. Stevens shows in her chapter how Japanese attitudes have changed and also don’t connect as neatly with the peace message emanating from Hiroshima as they once did. This shift was reflected in the October 2017 election result, when Shinzō Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and its ally Komeito achieved the two-thirds majority needed to force a referendum to amend Article 9 of the Constitution. Although reflecting geopolitical realities, Stevens argues that this shift in political mood has required a change in the way the bombing of Hiroshima is remembered, and because Article 9 serves as “an apology” for Japan’s conduct during the war, it has required a softening of the memories of Japanese militarism. In addition to analyzing the physical and ceremonial memorialization of the bomb, the book responds to the need to make sense of the existing bomb scholarship. Until Gar Alperovitz’s revisionist 1965 book Atomic Diplomacy, there was a broad agreement that dropping the bomb was necessary to hasten the end of the war, saving American and Japanese lives. Alperovitz argued that the bomb was cynically used to keep the Soviet Union out of the war, leaving Japan safe from communism. In the years since, some historians have sought to find a middle ground, disputing the bomb’s military necessity while not entirely accepting the Alperovitz thesis, but no consensus view has emerged. Significantly, the bomb is being at least partly revised in American remembering, too, with the creation of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. In attempting to recapture the scientific challenges and excitement surrounding the building of the bomb, this development attempts to shift the mnemonic focus from 1945 towards the broader realm of the history of atomic science and the story of wartime collaborative achievement. There is also a clear need for analysis of bomb inspired poetry and literature, because while historians have tended to focus on why the bomb was dropped, it was through poetry and fiction that the world came to understand the bomb’s true horrors. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the bomb the only real insight into the bomb’s human impact came from poetry and prose written by hibakusha (in spite of censorship by the American occupation forces). Perhaps the most famous example of hibakusha writing was Kurihara Sadako’s Black Eggs, but there are many other examples that contributors have analyzed. As the hibakusha age, new writers in new genres have begun to tell of the bomb’s horrific effect; a key example is Nakazawa Keiji’s manga series Barefoot Gen, yet as Alyson Miller writes, Kodama Tatsuharu’s

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picture story books, The Lunch Box and Shin’s Tricycle, have also had a significant impact, functioning both as a form of memorialization, and as an educative tool to warn future generations of the dangers of nuclear warfare. Importantly, these texts utilize images as a way to combat the ineffability of atomic devastation, a mode through which to mitigate the unrepresentable, yet also to present the nightmare of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to generations increasingly distanced from its historical realities. Indeed, much atomic bomb literature is focused on this dual need to both portray the nightmare of the A-bomb and its aftermath, but also to ensure such devastation never recurs. Cassandra Atherton highlights the importance of hibakusha poets in this regard, observing how Kurihara Sadako and Tōge Sankichi can be understood as public intellectuals writing from the margins. The outsider status of these poets is crucial, speaking of the reluctance of the Japanese to accept hibakusha and their testimony, a silencing worsened by post-war censorship and the ineffability of atomic bomb annihilation. Yet it also reveals the potential to subvert traditional modes of poetic expression, which Atherton notes “stemmed from their belief that what came before the atomic bomb could not convey the experience of atomic warfare; there had been a rupture that traditional forms could not contain.” In this way, hibakusha poets sought new ways through which to express their trauma, often via subversions of the rules, tropes, and motifs of tanka and haiku, as means to represent the unrepresentable. As public intellectuals, Kurihara and Tōge produce poetry that is powerfully political, focused on “humanity at the centre of atrocity,” and with an “unwavering” commitment to world peace. As noted, the notion that the horrors of the atomic bomb are unspeakable has meant that atomic bomb literature has been relatively slow to appear; as Miller notes, the earliest published children’s book on the atomic bomb, Minami no Kaze no Monogatari (A Tale of South Wind, author unknown), was not published until 1961, while Monica Braw observes that “for many years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 the world knew very little about the conditions there, and it was not until 1959 that the first literary work was published outside of Japan. This was the novel The Flowers of Hiroshima by the Swedish-born author Edita Morris.” In the context of a literature for children, Treat observes that whilst the survivor accounts and literature emerging from the Holocaust have been “disseminated among school children the world over,” Japanese responses to the A-bomb have rarely appeared outside “their own language and geography.”16 As Treat argues, there is no counterpart to The Diary of Anne Frank.17 Indeed, it is interesting to note that one of the most told stories about Hiroshima’s experience of the bomb in schools around the world—that of Sadako and the



Introduction xv

thousand paper cranes—is a version written not by a Japanese author but by the Canadian writer Eleanor Coerr. The story of Sadako Sasaki has largely been co-opted by international authors; so much so that the Sasaki family have observed how they have been alienated by its telling, choosing to remain silent as they grew wary of how “Sadako had become commercialised,” and expressing “concern that the stories being told about her weren’t necessarily true.”18 As a result, their own testimony was not published until 2013, raising questions about the silencing of hibakusha, and the commodification of trauma under the guise of memorialization. The analyses offered in this book thus attend to poetry, fiction, and children’s books written both by and about hibakusha in order to understand how the trauma of the atomic bomb might translate into a sense of understanding, significant for both Japanese and non-Japanese audiences. Despite cultural and legal limitations, hibakusha accounts and literature were disseminated throughout Japan, to which Kurihara’s Black Eggs is testament. Yet as Braw contends, it took a long time before such literature was translated into foreign languages, thus the “real results of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, above all, the living conditions of the hibakusha, atomic bomb survivors, remained largely unknown, both in Japan and in the rest of the world.” Braw’s translation and analysis of Edita Morris’s The Flowers of Hiroshima highlights the political anxieties surrounding the publication of accounts of the Japanese experience of the war, particularly in terms of avoiding accusations of American responsibility. Yet as a non-hibakusha adopting a Japanese point of view, Braw also raises questions about Morris’s appropriation which, in line with the experiences of Sadako Sasaki’s family, suggest a “faulty” representation of Japanese culture, and the trauma of the atomic bomb. Indeed, as Braw notes, the content “sometimes suffers from the kind of exoticism that is shunned nowadays.” Yet despite such representational difficulties, Braw argues that Morris’s work underlines the potential for hope, and renewal. Indeed, as Atherton and Miller also note, while much atomic bomb literature is plagued with a series of issues relating to the portrayal of extreme trauma, the emphasis remains on revelation, and an insistence on peace. In order to achieve such a balance, atomic bomb literature is often fragmentary in nature, focused on the immediate, and the incredibly graphic, rarely shying away from the details of physical and psychological violence. In doing so, regardless of form, bomb inspired poetry and literature enables audiences to grapple with the horrors of nuclear devastation whilst offering a clear, if not pedagogical—or even understandably didactic—push towards a nuclear-free future. As Miller argues, while atomic bomb literature for children has often been criticized for its gruesome portrayals of death, it is in fact “the fragmentary and succinct

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nature of these narratives that offers such power, and the potential for transformation.” Moreover, as Atherton notes in relation to avoiding the jargon with which academic and intellectual discussion is often associated, atomic bomb literature and poetry eschews difficult and impenetrable language. As a result, hibakusha poets in particular have been criticized for their “use of simple language and its lack of sophistication,” yet as Atherton argues, such an approach is in the interests of provoking discussion, and of inviting audiences into public conversation. It is a quality that Braw also contends has been crucial to the effectiveness of Morris’s work, which offers “a skillful balance between the naïve and the insightful. The horrors of the bombing . . . are described in such simple, yet straightforward, terms that in some countries the book has been used in schools to teach about the results of atomic bombings.” As the title of the book suggests, the essays here are attuned to shadows and reflections, highlighting the ways in which the experiences, memories, and aftermath, both physical and psychological, of the A-bomb are without end. The destruction of Hiroshima continues to appear in contemporary politics and discourses about global relationships, in anxieties about representation and the difficulties of memorialization, and in deep-seated concerns about atomic warfare, which have not been lessened by time. Indeed, the impact of the atomic bomb remains potent, rippling across domestic and global political tensions, yet also caught within social and cultural conversations about responsibility, authenticity, and ownership. The iconic mushroom cloud is seared into public memory in ways which are perpetually unsettled, uncertain, and troublingly doubled—it is a symbol of atomic annihilation, as well as a signifier of a point of no return in arguments that insist on a nuclear-free and peaceful future. The diversity of essays represented in this book reveal the never-ending nature of the discussions provoked by the devastation of Hiroshima, a moment in history which continues to haunt us. Importantly, in its diversity of perspectives, The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections is testament to the ways in which contemplations of the A-bomb are endlessly shifting, rarely fixed on the same point or perspective. The compilation of this book is significant in this regard, offering Japanese, American, Australian, and European perspectives. In doing so, the essays here represent a complex series of interpretations of the bombing of Hiroshima, and its implications both for history, and for the present day. Peter J. Kuznick’s extensive biographical account of the Hiroshima bomb pilot, Paul Tibbets, and other participants in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, provides a reflective framing for the essays in this collection. His chapter raises contentious questions about the moral and strategic



Introduction xvii

efficacy of dropping the A-bomb and how that has resonated through time. This is bookended by Jacobs’s reflections on the different ways in which Hiroshima and its memorialization are experienced today. Each chapter considers how this moment in time emerges, persistently, in public and cultural consciousness. The discussions here are often difficult, sometimes controversial, and at times oppositional, reflecting the characteristics of A-bomb scholarship more broadly. The aim here is to explore the various ways in which Hiroshima is remembered, but also to consider the ongoing legacy and impact of atomic warfare, the reverberations of which remain powerfully felt. As Kurihara writes in “Shades: The Post-Doomsday World”: The world sinks towards evening; in the ashen sky shades drift, drift in the wind. Dawn, dawn: it will not come again.19

NOTES 1.  Japanese names are presented in Japanese style (i.e., surname first, given name last). 2. Barack Obama. Full text of Barack Obama’s speech at Hiroshima 2016, recorded by the New York Times, accessed August 26, 2016, http://time.com/4350339/ barack-obama-hiroshima-speech-full-text/. 3. “Shinzo Abe visits Pearl Harbor in what Barack Obama calls ‘historic gesture,’” The Guardian, December 28, 2016, accessed January 12, 2017, https://www .theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/27/shinzo-abe-pearl-harbor-visit-obama-japan. 4. Danielle Demtriou, “Hiroshima: 70 Years on, One Survivor Remembers the Horror of the World’s First Atomic Bombing,” The Telegraph, August 2, 2015, accessed January 12, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/ 11778250/Hiroshima-70-years-on-one-survivor-remembers-the-horror-of-the -worlds-first-atomic-bombing.html. 5.  “Hiroshima A-Bomb survivor urges G-7 foreign ministers to help rid world of nukes,” The Japan Times, April 11, 2016, accessed January 12, 2017, http://www .japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/04/11/national/translator-peace-activist-hiroshima -hibakusha-78-urges-g-7-envoys-work-rid-world-nukes/#.WT7giTOB2b8. 6.  John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32. 7.  Edward A. Dougherty, “Memories of the Future: The Poetry of Sadako Kurihara and Hiromu Morishita,” War, Literature & The Arts 23.1 (2011): 2, accessed August 17, 2016, http://wlajournal.com/wlaarchive/23_1–2/dougherty.pdf. 8.  Dougherty, “Memories of the Future: The Poetry of Sadako Kurihara and Hiromu Morishita,” 3.

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 9. Michael Perlman, Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 90. 10.  James Rothwell, “Hiroshima survivor ‘horrified’ by Donald Trump’s nuclear weapons stance, as she urges president to ‘educate’ himself about tragedy,” The Telegraph, February 10, 2017, accessed March 3, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2017/02/10/hiroshima-survivor-horrified-donald-trumps-nuclear-weapons -stance/. 11. Amy Wang, “As Trump takes control of nukes, Hiroshima’s ex-mayor urges him to meet atomic-bomb survivors,” Washington Post, January 23, 2017, accessed February 3, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/ wp/2017/01/23/as-trump-take-controls-of-nukes-hiroshimas-ex-mayor-urges-him-to -meet-atomic-bomb-survivors/?utm_term=.c3625413c47e. 12.  For instance, while other counties were represented at the opening meeting for the 2020 review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by ambassadors or bureaucrats, Japan sent its foreign minister, Fumio Kishida. To the Mainichi Shimbun, this demonstrated “Japan’s enthusiasm for nuclear arms reduction as the only atomicbombed country in the world.” Mainichi Shimbun, May 1, 2017. 13.  The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ed. Kyoko Iriye Selden and Mark Selden (New York: M. E. Sharpe 1989), 1. 14.  Daniel Seltz, “Remembering War and the Atomic Bombs,” in Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space, ed. Daniel Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 127–46. 15.  Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998), celebrates the generation who grew up in the Great Depression and then fought in the Second World War. 16.  Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 4. 17.  Whittier Treat, 4. 18.  Masami Ito, “Brother Keeps Sadako Memory Alive,” The Japan Times, August 24, 2012, accessed May 2, 2017, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/08/24/ national/brother-keeps-sadako-memory-alive/#.WQqNSVJL1E4. 19.  Sadako Kurihara, Black Eggs: Poems, trans. R.H. Minear (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994), 309.

Chapter One

Defending the Indefensible The Tragic Life of Hiroshima Pilot Paul Tibbets, Jr. Peter J. Kuznick On November 1, 2007, Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr.,1 the man who piloted the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died at his Columbus, Ohio home at age ninety-two.2 Throughout his adult life, he had been a warrior. He bravely fought the Nazis in 1942 and 1943. He fought the Japanese in 1944 and 1945. And he spent the next sixty-two years fighting to defend the atomic bombings. In the days following his passing, Tibbets was both lionized and vilified. Among the most laudatory assessments were a pair of blogs by Oliver Kamm that quickly shot up to number one at History News Network.3 Basing his judgment of Tibbets on the “accounts of those who knew him,” Kamm declared that Tibbets was “a humane man, who reflected publicly and thoughtfully on the A-bomb decision, the lives it cost and also the lives it saved.”4 A closer look at Tibbets’s life and comparison of his views with those of others who participated in the atomic bombings will shed light not only on whether Tibbets was as humane and thoughtfully reflective as Kamm suggests, but on why so many World War II veterans shared Tibbets’s difficulty in moving beyond official pieties of 1945 and today to understand the complex history of the end of the Pacific War, the role the atomic bombings played in the Japanese surrender, and their own position in the historical process.5 Paul Tibbets was born in Quincy, Illinois on February 23, 1915 and raised mostly in Miami, Florida. His father, a wholesale confectioner, sent him to Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois. As a young man, Tibbets had aspired to become a doctor. In his 1978 autobiography The Tibbets Story, in what some might consider ominous foreshadowing, Tibbets explained how his interest in medicine evolved. “The prospect of becoming a doctor was appealing to me,” he wrote. “On my grandfather’s farm in Iowa during the summers of my boyhood, I had been fascinated by such things as the birth of 1

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animals and the castration of pigs. The sight of blood gave me no squeamish moments.”6 But at age twelve, something new captured Tibbets’s imagination. Tibbets participated in a unique promotional giveaway while working for a candy company. He sat in the front seat of a tiny Waco 9 biplane and, as the barnstormer sitting behind him flew low to the ground over Hialeah race track and other places where people gathered, he dropped Baby Ruth candy bars with parachutes attached to people below.7 He later remembered the thrill and the sense of power this afforded, commenting, “No Arabian prince ever rode a magic carpet with a greater delight or sense of superiority to the rest of the human race.”8 Thereafter, medicine could not compare with the excitement of flying. After transferring from the University of Florida to the University of Cincinnati, he dropped out to join the Army Air Corps in 1937. His experience administering arsenic treatments to syphilitics in two Cincinnati venereal disease clinics convinced him that he was making the right choice.9 Though a mediocre student, Tibbets was a gifted pilot and quickly worked his way up the ranks. On August 17, 1942, as captain and commander of the 340th Bomb Squadron in the 97th Bombardment Group, he led a dozen B-17 “Flying Fortresses” in the first daytime raid by American bombers against German targets in occupied France, bombing railroad yards in Rouen. Subsequent strikes targeted marshalling yards, a shipyard, an aircraft factory, and a base for FW-190 fighter planes. Tibbets demonstrated both exceptional creativity and bravery in implementing U.S. tactical bombing strategies of the early war years. Daylight precision bombing was particularly important because it allowed the U.S. to pinpoint military targets in a way that minimized the deaths of civilians who were killed indiscriminately in the far-less-accurate night-time bombing raids conducted by the British. Before that first attack, Tibbets told a reporter that he felt great apprehension over the possibility of civilian casualties, admitting he was “sick with thoughts of the civilians who might suffer from the bombs dropped by this machine.” Watching the bombs fall, he thought, “My God, women and children are getting killed!”10 In all, Tibbets flew forty-three combat missions with the 8th Air Force in England and the 12th in North Africa. Following a run-in with Col. Lauris Norstad,11 operations officer of the 12th Air Force, the army transferred Tibbets back to the U.S., where he was given responsibility for testing and perfecting the new B-29 “Superfortresses,” the largest, best-equipped, and most modern bombers in the world. In August 1944, Tibbets was called to Colorado Springs, where he met with Col. John Lansdale, chief of security for the Manhattan Project, and then with General Uzal Ent, who commanded the 2nd Air Force, Navy Captain Wil-



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liam “Deak” Parsons, associate director of the Los Alamos laboratory, and physicist Norman Ramsey. Lansdale grilled him about having been arrested by the North Miami police, who caught him in the back seat of a car with a young lady. Convinced that such a blemish on his record did not disqualify him for what lay ahead, Ent, Parsons, and Ramsey proceeded to fill him in on the Manhattan Project’s efforts to make an atomic bomb and the special role that he was to play.12 General Ent’s initial words deeply impressed him. “This thing is going to be very big,” he informed the young pilot. “I believe it has the potential and possibility of ending the war.”13 At that first meeting, Ramsey said, “The only thing we can tell you about the bomb is it’s going to explode with the force of twenty thousand tons of TNT.”14 Ent put Tibbets in charge of planning for delivery of the atomic bombs when they were ready, including assembling and training the teams that would carry out that task. Tibbets, who Army Air Force Commander General Henry “Hap” Arnold described as “the best damned pilot” in the Army Air Force,15 handpicked the top pilots, bombardiers, radar operators, navigators, flight engineers, and crewmen and put them through rigorous training. “My job, in brief,” he wrote in his 1989 book Flight of the Enola Gay, “was to wage atomic war.”16 In all, the 509th Composite Group that he headed consisted of 15 B-29 “Superfortress” crews and 1,800 men. Tibbets was awed by the authority he was given at such a young age. He reflected, “Nobody in the future will ever be given the responsibility and authority that was given to a 29-year old man.”17 Those he selected endured extremely tight security while preparing for their mission at the desolate air base in Wendover, Utah. A security force of thirty special agents bugged telephones, opened mail, and eavesdropped on conversations. The agents quickly shipped out those they considered insufficiently discreet. Tibbets imposed the same discipline on himself, never divulging the nature of the project to his wife or closest associates. He admitted, “I learned to be the world’s best liar. People were always asking what I was doing. I was always thinking ahead of what would sound logical. Then if I met someone six months later I’d have to try and remember what I told him before.”18 Tibbets once described Wendover as “the end of the world, perfect.”19 His men weren’t so sure. Lieutenant Jacob “Jake” Beser expressed the prevailing view when he wrote, “if the North American Continent ever needed an enema, the tube would be inserted here at Wendover.”20 Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk agreed with Beser, describing the cold, termite-infested barracks and rancid drinking water as “a shanty town with plumbing.”21 On June 27, 1945, Tibbets relocated his men to Tinian Island in the Marianas for final preparations.

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While never revealing the precise nature of the weapon under development, Tibbets went out of his way to impress upon the men the importance of their endeavor. Forty years later, Beser, who was twenty-four at the time, recalled that the first thing Tibbets told the assembled men at Wendover was that if what they were training for worked, it would significantly shorten the war.22 Navigator Van Kirk, who had often flown with Tibbets in Europe, thought to himself at the time, “I’ve heard that before, too.” He would later change his mind and believe Tibbets had been “pretty correct.”23 Beser, who had been studying engineering at Johns Hopkins University when the war began, and Van Kirk both later claimed to have figured out what kind of bomb they were training to deliver. Shortly after arriving at Wendover, Beser was sent to Los Alamos for a security briefing by Norman Ramsey who spoke of fundamental forces and chain reactions. Beser put that together with the presence of famous physicists whose names he recognized and immediately understood the kind of bomb that was being readied.24 Van Kirk similarly reasoned, “if you had any scientific training at all, you knew something about nuclear fission. And if you knew about that, you knew that a nuclear weapon was theoretically possible. Plus, we were surrounded by some of the top nuclear physicists of the day throughout our training. It didn’t take much to put two and two together.”25 Others at Wendover, though aware that something major was afoot, would remain in the dark until the day of the Hiroshima bombing.26 Thirty-year-old Sergeant Joe Stiborik, an Enola Gay radar operator, recalled, “We never did realize, of course, just what we had.” He thought “The Thing,” as he called it, was a souped-up blockbuster.27 Most called it simply the “gadget” or the “gimmick.”28 Over the next eleven months, Tibbets remained involved in most aspects of planning. He made several trips to Los Alamos and met with J. Robert Oppenheimer on at least three occasions. He was fully aware that civilians were to be targeted and apparently, by now, felt no qualms about doing so.29 He got his chance on August 6, 1945 when he piloted B-29 No. 82 in the attack on Hiroshima. He named the plane after his mother, Enola Gay Haggard, formerly of Glidden, Iowa but at the time of Miami, Florida. His father had objected strenuously when he left school to join the Army Air Corps. His mother, however, gave him her blessing and encouragement. He showed his appreciation for her support by forever associating her with what would become the most controversial flight in history.30 In the days immediately preceding the flight, the men learned more about their historic mission and were again told of the tremendous contribution they would make to ending the war. Almost all would cling fiercely to this version of events throughout the rest of their lives. On August 4, Tibbets and Parsons briefed the crews of the seven planes that would participate in the historic mis-



Defending the Indefensible 5

sion. Parsons told them, “The bomb you are going to drop is something new in the history of warfare. It will be the most destructive weapon ever devised. We think it will wipe out almost everything within a three-mile area, maybe slightly more, maybe somewhat less.” Tibbets spoke later and told them that their mission would shorten the war by six months. “At least six months,” he emphasized.31 At the following night’s closed Strike Mission General Briefing for immediate participants, he estimated the bomb’s destructive force as equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT.32 Tibbets announced proudly, “Tomorrow, the world will know that the 509th helped end the war.”33 Abe Spitzer noted in his diary, “And you got the feeling that he really thought this bomb would end the war, period.”34 Prior to takeoff, only “Deak” Parsons, who went along as the weaponeer, the crew member in charge of preparing the bomb for release, and Tibbets actually knew for certain they would be delivering an atomic bomb. If the others needed assurance about the historic nature of their mission, though, they got it when they boarded the plane in the glare of klieg lights, flashbulbs, and cameras. Tibbets sat in the plane’s cockpit, smiling and waving to those recording the event for posterity. Twentyfour-year-old Van Kirk compared it to a Hollywood movie opening.35 Stiborik agreed. “The place looked like Hollywood,” he observed.36 It reminded Beser of a Broadway opening.37 Physicist Harold Agnew, who flew aboard one of the accompanying planes, compared it to “the opening of a drug store.”38 The Enola Gay crew posed in front of the plane for a final photo, with tail gunner George “Bob” Caron wearing his prized Brooklyn Dodgers cap. Tibbets had packed cigarettes, cigars, and a pipe. Before embarking, a flight surgeon handed Tibbets a dozen cyanide capsules to distribute to crew members in case the plane was shot down. The capsules, he said, would take three minutes to work. Although crew members possessed limited information, they were not to be taken captive. Tibbets was ordered to shoot anyone who refused, under those circumstances, to swallow the capsule. Tibbets explained, “I had been given the order by the Commander-In-Chief, Pacific, shortly before take-off. It was a helluva thing to know you might have to kill your own crew.”39 But Tibbets understood that there was very little risk of getting shot down. Lt. Morris “Dick” Jeppson, the crew’s weapons specialist, said Tibbets referred to the flight as “a milk run.” “And it really was,” Jeppson confirmed. “There were no problems, there was no opposition from the Japanese—the plane was flying so high their fighter planes couldn’t get that high anyway.”40 Tibbets boasted, “I wasn’t nervous. I tell people I was shot in the ass with confidence. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.” Twenty-seven-year-old Brooklyn-born Irishman Robert Lewis expressed his optimism differently by putting a packet of condoms into his flight jacket, wanting to be ready for the post-war party. When Tibbets told

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his co-pilot about the suicide pills, Lewis showed him the condoms. Tibbets did not find this amusing.41 The Enola Gay took off at 2:45 A.M. Parsons and Jeppson completed assembly of the bomb in mid-air. The plane rendezvoused successfully over Iwo Jima with the two accompanying planes—No. 91, which its crew later called Necessary Evil, and the Great Artiste. Pilot Claude Eatherly was in the advance plane Straight Flush. He sent a radio report that the weather was clear over Hiroshima and the bombers proceeded to its primary target. During the flight, Tibbets informed crew members that they would be dropping an atomic bomb. That information, in itself, did not dramatically change anyone’s perception of the task at hand. Several crew members, having already been awake for very long hours, tried to catch some sleep to be ready to perform their duties. An exhausted Beser fell asleep shortly after the plane lifted off. As they neared Japan, the men in the front of the plane entertained themselves by bowling oranges down the tunnel, trying to bounce them off Beser’s head. Jeppson armed the bomb, changing plugs and activating internal batteries, as the plane began its final thirty-mile approach to the target. Tibbets started his countdown with three minutes to go. Having taken no flak, they arrived at their destination only seventeen seconds behind schedule. Twenty-six-year-old Major Ferebee spotted the target, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge, which he recognized from photographs. He described it as a bridge “where all the fingers kind of came together—kind of like the wrist on a hand.” It was located in downtown Hiroshima, a city with approximately 300,000 Japanese civilians, 43,000 Japanese soldiers, 45,000 Korean forced laborers, and several thousand Americans, mostly children whose parents were interned in the U.S. The density was approximately 35,000 people per square mile. At 8:15, Ferebee released the 8,900-pound uranium bomb nicknamed Little Boy from 31,600 feet over the city of Hiroshima and shouted, “Bomb away!” Tibbets announced over the microphone, “Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.” Ferebee, watching through the plexiglass nose of the plane, saw the bomb hover momentarily: “It porpoised a little to pick up speed.” The bomb exploded only a few hundred feet off target forty-three seconds later at a height of 1890 feet, detonating with a force now estimated at sixteen kilotons.42 Within seconds, tens of thousands of people were dead. Tens of thousands more would die over the next few days and weeks. Others would suffer from the effects of the blast, burns, and radiation for the rest of their lives. Many still do so today. Upon releasing the bomb, Tibbets immediately undertook the escape maneuver he had been practicing for months, turning the plane, which had expectedly lurched upward when the bomb was released, at an angle of 155



Defending the Indefensible 7

degrees, descending 1700 feet, and speeding away to minimize damage from the shock waves, which still hit with a force 2.5 times that of gravity. Tibbets explained, “We got kicked in the butt with 2 ½ G forces.”43 Crew members thought they were taking flak. Lewis said it felt like a giant was smashing the plane with a telephone pole.44 The plane had gotten nine miles away by the time of the explosion. Still the explosion was so bright that some of the crew members feared at first they had been blinded.45 Only Staff Sergeant Bob Caron, sitting in his turret in the back of the aircraft, actually watched the bomb explode. Others waited about thirty seconds for the plane to complete its evasive maneuver and then Van Kirk saw “12 faces diving for windows.”46 The following day, Tibbets described what he had witnessed for reporters on Guam: “It was hard to believe what we saw. Below us, rising rapidly, was a tremendous black cloud. Nothing was visible where only minutes before the outline of the city, its streets and buildings and waterfront piers were clearly apparent.” “It happened so fast we couldn’t see anything and could only feel the heat from the flash and the concussion from the blast.”47 What had been Hiroshima was going up in a mountain of smoke. First I could see a mushroom of boiling dust—apparently with some debris in it—up to 20,000 feet. The boiling continued three or four minutes as I watched. Then a white cloud plumed upward from the center to some 40,000 feet. An angry dust cloud spread all around the city. There were fires on the fringes of the city, apparently burning as buildings crumbled and the gas mains broke.48

In his memoir, The Tibbets Story, he described “the awesome sight that met our eyes as we turned for a heading that would take us alongside the burning, devastated city.”49 The giant purple mushroom . . . had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, 3 miles above our own altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive. Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below. Fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar.50

On another occasion, he reflected: “If Dante had been with us on the plane, he would have been terrified. The city we had seen so clearly in the sunlight a few minutes before was now an ugly smudge. It had completely disappeared under this awful blanket of smoke and fire.”51 For many on board the Enola Gay and the two accompanying planes, the image of instantaneous destruction, even from miles above and miles distant from what was left of Hiroshima, was so terrifying as to be transformative.

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They would never be able to exorcise the apocalyptic images from their minds. The images were so indelibly imprinted that few ever changed their descriptions over the years, often using the exact same words to describe what they had seen.52 Tibbets had instructed Beser to record the crew’s reactions, for which he brought along a special disc recorder. Tibbets warned crew members to “watch your language—keep it clean.” For the most part they did, but their images remain hauntingly graphic nonetheless and merit reiteration at a time when many seem to have lost sight of what even these relatively tiny atomic bombs could do. Twenty-four-year-old Caron described the view as “a peep into hell.”53 Caron, the only crew member who had actually seen the bomb explode, observed, “A column of smoke is rising fast. It has a fiery red core. A bubbling mass, purple grey in color with that red core. It’s all turbulent. Fires are springing up everywhere, like flames shooting out of a huge bed of coals. I am starting to count the fires. One, two, three, four, five, six . . . 14, 15 . . . it’s impossible. There are too many to count.” ‘Here it comes, the mushroom shape that Captain Parsons spoke about. It’s coming this way. It’s like a mass of bubbling molasses.” “The mushroom is spreading out. It’s maybe a mile or two wide and half a mile high. It’s growing up and up and up. It’s nearly level with us and climbing. It’s very black, but there is a purplish tint to the cloud. The base of the mushroom looks like a heavy undercast that is shot through with flames.” “The city must be below that. The flames and smoke are billowing out, whirling out into the foothills. The hills are disappearing under the smoke.”54 Ferebee recalled, “There are no words to describe how bright the flash was. The sun doesn’t compare at all.”55 He noted, “At first, I saw this boiling on the ground and the stem (of the mushroom cloud) was going up and you could see buildings going up with the stem. It was all colors. You can imagine, I think— brown, red, white—and it was just spreading out in all directions. Then finally the stem formed completely and the top was there and it kind of broke off.”56 When interviewed by the London Mail in July 1995, Ferebee remembered, “The whole city was just covered with a mushroom cloud. The stem was forming and you could see pieces of houses sucked up in it, pieces of things flying through the air. You couldn’t see people, not at the height we were flying.”57 Robert Lewis recalled in 1982, “I’ll never forget that feeling. You could see a good-sized city, then you didn’t see it anymore. It was simply gone.”58 Van Kirk described the city as “a pot of black, boiling tar.”59 Twenty-fouryear-old Enola Gay assistant engineer Robert Shumard commented, “There was nothing but death in that cloud. All those Japanese souls ascending to Heaven.”60 George Marquardt, who piloted B-29 No. 91 that had accompanied the Enola Gay, told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1995, “It seemed as if the sun had



Defending the Indefensible 9

come out of the earth and exploded. Smoke boiled around the flash as it rose. It felt as if a monster hand had slapped the side of the plane.”61 Abe Spitzer watched from the Great Artiste and thought he was hallucinating: Below us, spread out almost as far as I could see, was a great fire, but it was like no ordinary fire. It contained a dozen colors, all of them blindingly bright, more colors than I imagined existed, and in the center and brightest of all, a gigantic red ball of flame that seemed larger than the sun. Indeed, it seemed that, somehow, the sun had been knocked out of the sky and was on the ground below us and beginning to rise again, only coming straight up toward us—and fast . . . At the same time, the ball itself spread outward, too, until it seemed to cover the entire city, and on every side the flame was shrouded, half-hidden by a thick, impenetrable column of grey-white smoke, extending into the foothills beyond the city and bursting outward and rising toward us with unbelievable speed. Then the ship rocked again, and it sounded as if a giant gun—some large artillery or cannons—were firing at us and hitting us from every direction. The purple light was changing to a green-blue now, with just a tinge of yellow at the edges, and from below the ball of fire, the upside down sun, seemed to be following the smoke upward, racing to us with immeasurably fast speed— although, we at the same time, though not so quickly—were speeding away from what was left of the city. Suddenly, we were to the left of the pillar of smoke, and it continued rising, to an estimated height, I later learned, of 50,000 feet. It looked like a kind of massive pole that narrowed toward the top and reached for the stratosphere. The scientists later told us they believed the pole was as much as four or five miles wide at its base and a mile and a half or more wide at the top . . . As I watched, hypnotized by what I saw, the column of smoke changed its color, from a grey-white to brown, then amber, then all three colors at once, mingled into a bright, boiling rainbow. For a second it looked as though its fury might be ending, but almost immediately a kind of mushroom spurted out of the top and traveled up, up to what some say was a distance of 60,000 or 70,000 feet . . . the whole column seethed and spurted, but the mushroom top shot out in every direction, like giant waves during an ocean storm . . . Then, quite suddenly, the top broke off the column, as if it had been cut away with a sharp blade, and it shot still further up; how far I don’t know; nobody did or does; not even the pictures show that, and none of the apparatus could measure it exactly. Some said it was 80,000 feet, some 85,000 feet, some even more. After that, another mushroom, somewhat smaller, boiled up out of the pillar.

Spitzer heard someone say, “I wonder if maybe we’re not monkeying around with things that are none of our business.”62 It fell to the youngest member of the crew, twenty-year-old radio operator Richard “Junior” Nelson, to transmit the two-word message “Results, excellent” back to U.S. authorities.63 Van Kirk remembered Nelson commenting after witnessing the devastation below, “This war is over.”64

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The crew of the Enola Gay ate sandwiches on the flight back to Tinian. They could still see the mushroom cloud from 250 miles away. Some claimed to see it from over 400 miles away.65 Joe Stiborik remembered the crew sitting in stunned silence on the return flight. The only words he recollected hearing were Lewis’s “My God, what have we done.” Stiborik explained, “I was dumbfounded. Remember, nobody had ever seen what an A-bomb could do before. Here was a whole damn town nearly as big as Dallas, one minute all in good shape and the next minute disappeared and covered with fires and smoke.” “There was almost no talk I can remember on our trip back to the base. It was just too much to express in words, I guess. We were all in a kind of state of shock. I think the foremost thing in all our minds was that this thing was going to bring an end to the war and we tried to look at it that way.”66 Spitzer reported almost complete silence on the Great Artiste too. Tailgunner Al “Pappy” DeHart said he wished he had never seen what he had just witnessed, adding, “I won’t be mentioning it to my grandchildren. Not ever. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing to be telling kids. Not what we saw.”67 On the flight back, Spitzer took some solace in his certainty that the war was now over—the Japanese would have no choice but to surrender immediately—and they would soon be heading home.68 The crews returned to a heroes’ welcome, with hundreds of cheering soldiers lining the taxiways. With over two hundred looking on, including what Van Kirk described as “more generals and admirals . . . than I had ever seen in my life.” Lieutenant General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, new chief of the strategic air force, pinned a Distinguished Service Cross on Tibbets’s chest. Captain Bill Long, who had delivered Little Boy to the bomb bay of the Enola Gay the previous day, remembered the crew’s response to the weapon’s destructiveness: “The guys on the crew were overwhelmed. They said they’d never seen anything like it. They said, ‘the war can’t go on after what we saw. The war’s over for sure.’”69 Authorities interrogated the exhausted crew members at a session that Van Kirk said “had more generals than Carter had pills.”70 On the way to the interrogation, Spitzer observed someone asking a young, dark-haired scientist if he was proud to have been a part of the bomb’s success. The scientist answered, “No. I’m not proud of myself right now.”71 Following debriefing of crew members, festivities included a softball game, a jitterbug contest, the Sonja Henie movie It’s a Pleasure, and a lot of eating and drinking. Each man received four bottles of beer and no ration cards were required. Beser later insisted the heavy drinking was not in celebration but in a desperate effort to relieve the pressure resulting from what they had just done.72 Spitzer drank more than he ever had before. He still couldn’t sleep, unable to get the vision of what he had seen out of his mind.



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He kept waking with nightmares of Hiroshima with trees and green grass and bridges and houses being covered with black smoke and a giant multicolored mushroom rising above the city.73 Three days later Tibbets chose another specially reconfigured B-29 from the 509th to drop the second atomic bomb. Major General Curtis LeMay expected Tibbets to fly the August 9 mission, but Tibbets convinced him to give that honor to Major Charles Sweeney.74 Spitzer said that he and other members of the Great Artiste crew, after what they had seen in Hiroshima, were incredulous to learn that a second city was to be wiped out. Just sit tight and give the Japanese time to surrender, he thought: “There was no need for more missions, more bombs, more fear and more dying. Good God, any fool could see that.”75 Besides that, hours before the start of the second bombing mission, the Soviet Union had declared war against Japan. As many historians now recognize, it was the Soviet invasion, even more than the atomic bombings, that effectively undermined both Japanese diplomatic and military strategies and convinced Japanese leaders to surrender.76 Enola Gay and Bock’s Car crew members had no knowledge that a Soviet declaration of war was imminent, but Truman and his advisors certainly did and fully recognized that this would likely deal the final death blow to desperate Japanese leaders. Truman contended that he went to Potsdam principally to press for and confirm Soviet entry. Upon receiving Stalin’s assurances, he wrote jubilantly, Stalin will “be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.”77 As a June 30 War Department report had stated, “The entry of the Soviet Union into the war would finally convince the Japanese of the inevitability of complete defeat.”78 And that was what happened. The Soviets invaded at midnight on August 8 and quickly overran the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Before Japanese leaders had a chance to react to the devastating news, the United States dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki. The bombs did not end the war. The invasion did. As the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C. now acknowledges, “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria on 9 August . . . changed their minds.”79 Despite the protestations to the contrary by the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car crew members, the evidence for this conclusion is overwhelming. On August 13, a naval doctor asked Prime Minister Suzuki Kentaro why Japan couldn’t postpone surrendering a few more days. Suzuki answered, “I can’t do that. If we miss today, the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States.”80 Realizing that the Japanese were already defeated and trying to surrender and that dropping

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the bombs was not necessary to end the war, seven of America’s eight fivestar admirals and generals in 1945 are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both.81 Kokura, the original target for the second bomb, was masked by cloud cover and visibility was further hampered by smoke from the previous day’s firebombing of nearby Yawata,82 Sweeney decided to switch to his secondary target—Nagasaki. As Bock’s Car approached the city, co-pilot Captain Don Albury, who had just three days earlier witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima on board the Great Artiste, confessed that on the flight to Nagasaki, “I asked God to forgive us for what we were about to do.”83 Visibility over Nagasaki was also very limited. When a hole appeared in the clouds, bombardier Kermit Beahan thought he had spotted the target, and released the plutonium bomb Fat Man. He missed the target by almost two miles, hitting the Urakami district north of the industrial center of the city. Beahan described the scene below: “I saw a mushroom cloud bubbling and flashing orange, red and green. It looked like a picture of hell. The ground itself was covered by a rolling black smoke. I was told the area would be destroyed, but I didn’t know the meaning of an atomic bomb.”84 Co-pilot Lieutenant Frederick Olivi offered the following description: “The atomic cloud rose directly toward us. I would imagine that all this took only seconds, but it seemed like a century. I could see tongues of flame shooting out of the mouth of the mushroom. It resembled a huge, boiling caldron. It was frightening.” Olivi insisted, however, that they had no other choice given the “fanatical defense capabilities of the Oriental.”85 Shortly after the formal Japanese surrender ceremony on board the USS Missouri on September 2, Tibbets, Sweeney, Van Kirk, and Ferebee traveled to Nagasaki to observe the devastation firsthand. Sweeney, who never loaded his gun, did so in Nagasaki. He wondered how they would sign the hotel register, assuming that their names were well known in Japan. Tibbets walked to the desk first and signed “Col. Paul Tibbets.”86 But Ferebee recalled that when one Japanese man asked them if they’d ever met the men who bombed Japan, “We said no we never met them.”87 Tibbets never visited Hiroshima, though, on this occasion, they flew low over the city to catch a glimpse. After the war, most of the Enola Gay crew members returned to civilian life and started families. Beser, Caron, Ferebee, Jeppson, and Van Kirk each had four children. Lewis had five.88 Many Americans considered them heroes, especially the hundreds of thousands of servicemen who were led to believe that the atomic bombs ended the war and, by obviating an invasion, saved their lives. Over the years, people repeatedly asked Tibbets if he felt remorse for what he had done. Not a bit, he always insisted, much like Harry Truman. He never



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wavered in his public statements about the rectitude of his actions, always crediting the bombs with ending the war and emphasizing the lives saved by avoiding an invasion rather than the lives lost in the bombing. Tibbets told Studs Terkel in 2002, “I had no problem with it. I knew we did the right thing. I thought, Yes, we’re going to kill a lot of people, but by God we’re going to save a lot of lives. We won’t have to invade Japan.” (italics in original)89 He told the Columbus Dispatch in 2003, “That’s what it took to end the war. I went out to stop the killing all over.”90 In 1994, upon receipt of the Air Force Sergeants Association’s Freedom Award, he broadened the justification by including Japanese lives saved and the long-term consequences: “We had a mission. Quite simply, bring about the end of World War II . . . .The objective was to stop the fighting, thereby saving further loss of life on both sides. Those of us who gained that victory have nothing to be ashamed of, neither do we offer any apology. Some suffered, some died. The million or so of us remaining will die believing that we made the world a better place as a result of our efforts to secure peace that has held for almost 50 years.”91 On another occasion, Tibbets stated, “we wanted to save lives. And I’ve had Japanese since [the war] tell me that we saved their lives, too, because the invasion would have been nothing but bloodshed. It would have been terrible.”92 Far from being ashamed, Tibbets was proud of his achievements. He told an interviewer in 1975, “I’m not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did.”93 Tibbets believed that nations at war would always use whatever weapons they had and could therefore not be constrained by rules of conduct. In 1995, he told an interviewer, “No. 1, there is no morality in warfare—forget it. No. 2, when you’re fighting a war to win, you use every means at your disposal to do it.”94 In that fiftieth anniversary year, in the U.S. public television documentary “The Men Who Brought the Dawn,” he turned the morality issue on its head, commenting, “It would have been morally wrong if we’d have had that weapon and not used it and let a million more people die.”95 Tibbets occasionally stumbled when he departed from this message. He justified killing non-combatants on the grounds that everyone in Japan contributed to the war effort. But on one occasion in 1995, he curiously compared killing Japanese civilians to the Japanese bombing a General Motors plant in Detroit and killing American women and children. He tried to explain, “That’s my point. You can’t distinguish. Everybody contributes to the war effort—to the ability of that nation to defend itself. So what you’re out to do is to destroy their ability to wage war, and, unfortunately, that means killing.”96 On other occasions, he said things that were either confused or easily disproven. He declared that Hiroshima was “the center of everything being

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done to resist an [Allied] invasion.”97 In August 2002, he maintained that he had been instructed, in September 1944, to prepare for coordinated attacks on both Europe and Japan. He announced, “My edict was as clear as could be. Drop simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific because of the secrecy problem. You couldn’t drop it in one part of the world without dropping it in the other.”98 In 2005, he made the surprising claim that “The urgency of the situation demanded that we use the weapons first—before the technology could be used against us.”99 He never indicated who might be in a position to do so and no one else would even test a bomb before August 1949. He also defended the legality of what he did. In 1961, during the Eichmann trial, Tibbets’ name was brought up by critics who said he deserved the same fate as the Nazi butcher. Tibbets insisted that he wasn’t bothered by such accusations because Eichmann’s acts were illegal and he had behaved in accord with international law.100 Even LeMay, the mastermind behind U.S. wartime firebombing of Japanese cities, understood that deliberately targeting civilians was a war crime. Robert McNamara was on hand in Guam when LeMay announced, “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” McNamara agreed: “On that last point, I think he was right. We would have been.”101 In 1995, Tibbets told William Lowther of the Glasgow Herald, “Right after we dropped the bomb, I felt much the same as I do now except that I hadn’t drunk as much coffee that morning.” He added, “I was satisfied that I had accomplished my mission. I had no emotion about it then, and I have none to this day except to tell you that war is hell. I know. I have had the experience. If you are trying to get an emotional expression out of me, you won’t do it. I’m a cold fish.”102 Whether Tibbets was indeed a “cold fish” or a man desperately trying to repress deep conflicts, he adamantly refused to express any remorse. When asked about his feelings in 1985, he responded: I’ve got a standard answer on that. I felt nothing about it. . . . I’m sorry for Takahashi and the others who got burned up down there, but I felt sorry for those who died at Pearl Harbor, too. . . . People get mad when I say this but—it was as impersonal as could be. There wasn’t anything personal as far as I’m concerned, so I had no personal part in it.103

“It wasn’t my decision to make morally, one way or another . . . I did what I was told—I didn’t invent the bomb, I just dropped the damn thing. It was a success, and that’s where I’ve left it.” When August 6 rolled around each year “sometimes people have to tell me. To me it’s just another day.”104 In 1980, Tibbets commented, “I would be hypocritic if I said I suffered remorse. I had to do this in the best interests of my country. I was following orders from competent authority.”105 Though this was rarely Tibbets’s primary line



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of defense, his friend Van Kirk should probably have qualified his comment that “I was always proud of the fact that, unlike the Germans, none of us ever used the excuse that we were just following orders.”106 Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton and co-author Greg Mitchell characterized Tibbets’s stubborn refusal to admit remorse as an “extreme version of numbing” designed to “ward off ever-threatening feelings of guilt.”107 Tibbets, however, always viewed dispassion as a virtue. He contended, “The doctors who are failures are the doctors who begin assuming the symptoms of the patient. They begin to identify too much with them. To think about what was happening on the ground was like the doctor identifying with the patient.” Tibbets said he responded to breaches of discipline at Wendover by controlling “my emotions so nobody knew what I was thinking, often to the chagrin of my parents and people close to me. I schooled myself to take things away from the emotional into reality.”108 In 1985, Tibbets disclosed that he would go even further to banish painful thoughts from his mind. “If I decide I don’t want to think about something, I turn it off,” he admitted.109 To prove how clear his conscience was, he often bragged about how well he slept, in much the same manner that Truman did. “I sleep well every night,” he assured an interviewer in 1975.110 On another occasion, he said, “I can assure you that I sleep just as peacefully as anybody can sleep.”111 “I’ve never lost a night’s sleep over it, and I never will,” he told a Canadian television interviewer.112 Truman, whose conscience must have been even clearer, claimed he never even lost a minute’s sleep over the bombings. The two sound sleepers met only once, a few years after the event that, more than anything else, would define their place in history. Truman invited Tibbets to the Oval Office in 1948 and asked him, “What do you think?” Tibbets responded, “Mr. President, I think I did what I was told.” Truman replied, slapping the table, “You’re damn right you did, and I’m the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me.”113 In The Tibbets Story, however, he relates the conversation a little differently with Truman advising him, “Don’t you ever lose any sleep over the fact that you planned and carried out that mission. It was my decision. You had no choice.”114 In 1980, Tibbets insisted that his critics were few and far between: “Only one in a thousand people criticize me. Those who do forget we were fighting a popular war against an unrelenting enemy. I looked on bombing Hiroshima as an act in defense of our country. And so it was.”115 Over the years, others involved in the fateful August 6 and August 9 missions defended their actions in much the same terms as Tibbets and often contended that if again faced with the same circumstances, they would behave in a similar fashion. They, too, took solace in calculating that the numbers

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who would have died in an invasion exceeded the numbers killed in the atomic bombings. In order to adhere to this questionable version of events, they refused, in the succeeding years, to consider the mounting evidence that even with the bomb an invasion would have been unlikely or to grapple with the broader consequences of their actions. Perhaps this is a testament to their fundamental decency. But there is no indication that they—or Tibbets—knew, as did Truman and other top policymakers, of Japanese leaders’ willingness to surrender if they could secure acceptable terms.116 Few of the other participants, however, were as combative as Tibbets, who, when asked about regrets in 2005, shot back, “Hell no, no second thoughts. If you give me the same circumstances, hell yeah, I’d do it again.”117 Tibbets and the others demanded that their actions be judged in the context of the times in which they were performed, not with the wisdom of hindsight. But it was clearly Tibbets who, in the public mind, bore more responsibility than other the Enola Gay crew members and who stuck most blindly to his version of history, as if the tiniest concession to his critics would open a door that could never again be slammed shut. Most of the other participants acknowledged far greater misgivings about what occurred. And many were much more vocal than Tibbets about their desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons to ensure that such actions were never repeated. In fact, contrasting Tibbets’s unapologetic and combative words with the generally more humane reactions of his fellow crew members yields valuable insights into participants’ motivations and the lessons they learned and provides a contemporary basis for understanding and assessing Tibbets’s actions. Among the staunchest defenders of the bombing is navigator Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, who graduated from Bucknell after the war and spent thirty-five years as a chemical engineer with DuPont. The son of a truck driver from Northumberland, Pennsylvania, and the last Enola Gay crew member to pass away in 2014, Van Kirk flew fifty-eight combat missions over Europe and Africa. He was convinced the bombings ended the war without an invasion that would have been “a bloodbath,” given what had happened on Okinawa and other Pacific islands.118 He understood that his views may have been influenced by his low wartime opinion of the Japanese. He had never met any Japanese before the war and felt inundated with newspaper images of buck-toothed Japanese who were “horrible monsters” and he knew what they had done to his friends in prisoner-of-war camps: “I knew a navigator,” he recalled, “who was shot down and subjected to horrible indignities, including being put on display in a cage in Tokyo Zoo.”119 Because they were fanatics, he reasoned, the Japanese refused to surrender even though, from a military standpoint, the “war was over before we ever dropped the atomic bomb.” The bombs simply helped convince the Japanese to accept U.S. sur-



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render terms.120 Moreover, he believed, the bomb saved the lives of thousands of Allied prisoners who were near death and about to perish. He was gratified that many had written to thank him for saving their lives.121 In 2000, he remained steadfast in his conviction that what he had done was right. He told an interviewer, “Everybody keeps trying to get me down on my knees and cry about it and say I am sorry and everything. None of us ever have.”122 But, when the San Francisco Chronicle asked in 1995 if he was sorry, he replied a bit less stridently: “I really don’t think ‘sorry’ is the right word. I think it’s more about regret. I regret this weapon had to be used. But I also believe we did have to use it. We used it to stop the war, to stop all that killing. It was definitely the lesser of two evils.”123 In later years, though his defense of the bombings never wavered, he spoke more forthrightly about the need to rid the world of nuclear weapons and avoid war. He attended the September 1994 reunion of the 509th. One of the attendees, intelligence officer Norris Jernigan, defended the gathering, explaining, “Everyone thinks we’re gathering to celebrate the devastation. But we’re here for the camaraderie we developed. The whole group went over and the whole group came back. None of us celebrates war.” During the reunion, Van Kirk also denied that the purpose was to celebrate war: “I don’t want anyone to get the impression we’re for nuclear war. We’re as anti-war and anti-nuclear war as anyone you’d ever see in your life.”124 On the sixtieth anniversary, Van Kirk criticized war as an instrument for solving problems and thought it time that all nuclear weapons be eliminated. He explained, “The whole World War II experience shows that wars don’t settle anything. I personally think there shouldn’t be any atomic bombs in the world—I’d like to see them all abolished.” But he wasn’t ready for the U.S. to disarm unilaterally, wanting his country to retain at least one bomb more than its enemies.125 Van Kirk told another interviewer the week before that anniversary, “I pray no man will have to witness that sight again. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of life. We unleashed the first atomic bomb, and I hope there will never be another . . . I pray that we have learned a lesson for all time. But I’m not sure that we have.”126 Van Kirk never broadcast his wartime role and assumed his next-doorneighbors in Novato, California had no idea what he had done.127 He regretted that subsequent generations, who couldn’t appreciate the way it felt to Americans in 1945, sometimes judged the participants too harshly. “People forget how it was,” he complained in 1995. “The war involved the entire country. Everyone suffered and sacrificed. My wife lost two brothers, one in the Death March of Bataan and one in the invasion of Makin Island in the South Pacific.”128

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Van Kirk participated in a 1995 forum at Sonoma State University at which a student asked, “How do you feel about killing 100,000 people?” He explained to a reporter who observed the exchange that students no longer understood the context in which he and his colleagues acted: “There’s a popular feeling now that we should feel guilty and remorseful. . . . It comes from the differences between generations, differences between the world as it is now and as it was then. But the survivors of that time understand why it was necessary to do what we did.”129 Unlike Tibbets and Van Kirk, several of the crew members managed to keep their feelings pretty much to themselves over the years. In their rare public statements, they neither gloried in what they’d done nor disavowed their involvement. Radio operator Richard Nelson was born in Moscow, Idaho but raised in Los Angeles. After spending six months at the University of Idaho, he joined the Army Air Force in 1943, hoping to become a pilot until poor eyesight forced him to abandon that dream. After the war, he studied business administration at the University of Southern California and later worked in industrial sales. In 1995, he told the Riverside Press-Enterprise that he didn’t regret what he’d done: “War is a terrible thing. It takes and it destroys. Anyone feels sorry for people who are killed. We are all human beings. But I don’t feel sorry I participated in it. If I had known the results of the mission beforehand, I would have flown it anyway.”130 At thirty-two, Wyatt Duzenbury was the oldest member of the plane’s original crew. The son of a carpenter, he dropped out of high school in Lansing, Michigan and worked as a tree surgeon and gas station attendant before being drafted at the start of the war. Tibbets added him to the crew because of his skill with engines and put him in charge of making sure all the engines ran properly. Duzenbury always felt he was just doing his job and had no reason for regrets. “That was my job,” Duzenbury told an interviewer. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the military or not, but when you’re told to do something, you don’t ask questions or argue about it. You go and do, whether it’s right or wrong.” On the other hand, he never expressed pride in what he and his comrades had done: “We were ordered to do it. I don’t think anybody can be glad when they take 100,000 lives.” After retiring from the Air Force in 1970, he worked as a country club storeroom manager in Atlanta. Like many veterans, he rarely spoke of his wartime experiences. His son said, “I talked to him a couple times about it. We didn’t go into it very deep. He didn’t want to talk about his wartime experiences.” In 1985, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution wrote about his “lonely life” following the death of his wife four years earlier. He never attended one of the 509th’s reunions. He told the paper, “Frankly, I don’t do anything. I stay at home.” He let his white hair and white beard grow long and watched television almost constantly.



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Duzenbury had surgery for prostate cancer in 1989 and died of bone cancer in 1992.131 When asked in 1956 if he had had any sleepless nights, radar operator Joe Stiborik, a Texas native who studied cotton grading at Texas A&M before volunteering for the Army Air Corps, responded, “No. It was part of a dirty job that somebody had to do. If it hadn’t been us somebody else would have had to.” Stiborik, who was of Czech descent, was motivated to sign up by Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. He worked after the war as a superintendent of maintenance for a power generating company. So far as he knew, crew members had all drifted apart and never held a reunion.132 Bob Caron commented in 1978, “No bad dreams. No remorse. It had to be done without delay. Statisticians say a million American lives were saved by not having to invade the Japanese Empire, plus probably as many Japanese lives.”133 Caron used the word “guilt” on one occasion, after seeing photos of the burned children and other victims. He said, “That is the only time I might have had a partial feeling of guilt.” “I wish I hadn’t seen them,” he added. Robert Shumard understood that feeling. “You don’t brag about wiping out sixty to seventy thousand at one time,” he said.134 Shumard who, like the others, thought the bombing justified, declared, “If it had to be done all over again, I wouldn’t hesitate,” moved to Detroit after the war and sold plumbing supplies. He died of leukemia at age forty-six. His doctor and his wife both attributed the fatal illness to excessive radiation.135 Jacob Beser recalled that when Dick Jeppson, a twenty-three-year-old Mormon from Logan, Utah, returned on August 6 to Tinian, he appeared “slightly shaken and . . . [was] finding it difficult to reconcile what he had seen with his fine sense of humanity.”136 But Jeppson later asserted that the bomb “did, in fact, end the war,” which, he reasoned, “saved a lot of U.S. armed forces and Japanese civilians and military. History has shown there was no need to criticize [Tibbets].”137 After the war, Jeppson studied physics at Berkeley. He worked for a while developing the hydrogen bomb at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, before going into business for himself.138 He started one company that built electron beam accelerators for cancer therapy and another that made microwave systems for industrial heating. In 1960, he told an interviewer that a demonstration might have ended things “without the need for destroying a city.” He later wrote of his “sorrow” at the “great tragedy” in Hiroshima.139 He was glad that he didn’t have to make the decision to use the bomb: “There’s always the wondering that maybe there would have been a better way to end the war. But at the young ages of all of us then, and being in the military and the war, you accept what you are told to do and that gives you a reasonable out for the situation.” In 1985, he wrote to President Reagan outlining a plan for cutting nuclear arms. He explained,

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“I keep thinking about the reducing of nuclear arms in a reasonable way. It’s something that must be done and there hasn’t been a reasonable way to do it thus far.”140 Reflecting fifty-eight years later on the only combat mission he had ever flown, Jeppson admitted, “It’s not a proud thing. It was a devastating thing.”141 But he still held to the belief that the bomb probably saved hundreds of thousands of American lives and far more Japanese lives. In 2005, he again insisted he had no regrets and told an interviewer that his wife‘s car sported a bumper sticker that read, “If there hadn’t been a Pearl Harbor, there wouldn’t have been a Hiroshima.”142 Bombardier Thomas Ferebee had aspired to be a professional baseball player before the war, even trying out for the St. Louis Cardinals. Raised on a farm in Mocksville, North Carolina, Ferebee had joined the Army after attending Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, North Carolina for two years. A football knee injury kept him out of the infantry. He tried flight school, wanting to be a pilot, but didn’t succeed and was sent to bombardier school. He flew on the same bomber crew in England with Van Kirk and Tibbets, participating in the first daylight bombing raid over France and serving as lead bombardier in the Allies’ first one hundred plane daylight raid in Europe. In all, he flew sixty-four bombing missions in Europe and North Africa.143 He, too, always maintained that the bombings were justified, explaining, “I’m not proud of killing all those people, but I’m proud of saving all the lives we did.”144 In 1995, he told the London Mail, “I don’t believe in killing, but this was a war where we were fighting for survival. Millions of people are alive and free because of what our mission accomplished. Sure, Hiroshima was horrible. But war is horrible. I saw what the Germans did to Coventry and London, and I saw what the Japanese did to Allied prisoners of war. If we hadn’t forced the surrender, there would have had to be a land invasion of Japan and estimates are that one million Americans and as many Japanese would have died in it. None of us who were on the Enola Gay ever lost a minute’s sleep over it. In fact, I sleep better because I feel a large part of the peace we have had in the last 50 years was what we brought about.”145 In 1982, Ferebee commented, “If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. I saw the American prisoners who came out of Japan—they were eyeballs and bones.”146 He was motivated by the desire to end the war as quickly as possible: “People have to go back and study the history of the war and the attitude of the people at that time. Everybody wanted the war to end. That’s what I wanted the most. I wanted the bomb to work and end the war.”147 Before retiring from the Air Force as a colonel in 1970, he flew as an observer on bombing missions in Vietnam. Out of the service, he moved to Orlando and sold real estate. He drew upon his wartime experience to insist that nuclear war could never be allowed to happen again. He told the Charlotte



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Observer in 1995, “Now we should look back and remember what just one bomb did, or two bombs. Then I think we should realize that this can’t happen again.”148 He retired to Windermere, Florida, where he grew tomatoes, cabbage, and beans, played golf, and fished.149 Ferebee’s parents, like Tibbets’s, were proud of what he had done, but his grandmother told him, “I hope the Lord will forgive you.”150 In 1995, he admitted to the Charlotte Observer that he felt more isolated after his Nagasaki counterpart bombardier Kermit Beahan died in 1989: “It was easier when Beahan was alive. Because there were two of us who had done it. Now I’m the only one in the world. It should stay that way.”151 Beahan was born in Joplin, Missouri but raised in Houston, where he attended Rice University on a football scholarship. Like Ferebee, he joined the Army Air Corps aspiring to be a pilot, but, failing that, became a bombardier. As a bombardier, he flew forty missions in Europe. In the years before his death, Beahan, a space technology consultant in Houston for Brown & Root who had turned twenty-seven on the day of the Nagasaki bombing, was somewhat conflicted about what he had done. In 1985, Houston psychotherapist Glenn Van Warrebey wrote to city officials in Nagasaki, informing them that Beahan, feeling great remorse, desired to return to Nagasaki and apologize in person. Nagasaki mayor Motoshima Hitoshi explained to Van Warrebey that that would not be possible because, though some hibakusha would be willing to meet with him, “there are those who say the agony of the hibakusha continues even today.” The mayor put himself in that category, adding, “I cannot find it in my heart to meet Mr. Beahan.”152 But when Japanese newspapers reported Nagasaki officials’ response, the government was flooded with protests from hibakusha and other citizens. Oobo Teruaki, who was in charge of relief for Nagasaki bomb victims, said they would be happy to welcome Beahan after the ceremony and would ask him to “join a campaign to abolish nuclear weapons from the earth.”153 Beahan felt that Warrebey misconstrued his remarks and conveyed a false impression. He told the Houston Chronicle, “I regret I had to drop an atomic bomb. For that matter, I regret the first 100-pound bomb I ever dropped. I regret the whole damn war ever started. Van Warrebey apparently didn’t understand the difference between ‘regret’ and ‘guilt’—I certainly feel no guilt for bringing World War II to an early conclusion.” In fact, he thought his actions saved many lives. “It was a terrible weapon to be used,” he added, “but it prevented a land invasion which would have resulted in many more, millions, of casualties. I call it a blessing in disguise.” He said he used the bags of letters he had accumulated from grateful veterans “to allay any dormant feelings of guilt that might crop up.”154 “Those are the things that I choose to remember and dwell on rather than the agony that I know must have occurred to the survivors of the two cities.”155

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By the time he retired from the Air Force in 1963 as a lieutenant colonel, Beahan had witnessed ten atomic explosions, which was enough to convince him to support the abolition of all nuclear weapons. “Any person would like to see the abolition of nuclear weapons,” he stated. In 1985, though rebuffed in his attempt to visit Nagasaki, he voiced his hope that he would be the last person to ever drop an atomic bomb on humans. When learning of Beahan’s death in 1989, Charles Sweeney said, “We named our airplane for him. We used to call him the Great Artiste. He was so good at his work. He was the sparkplug of our crew. We all loved him. We called him Honeybee because he was so likeable.”156 Abe Spitzer said it was not only Beahan’s popularity with the other crew members but his popularity with the women that inspired the nickname.157 The pilots of the two planes that accompanied the Enola Gay on that fateful mission, one of whom later piloted the plane that bombed Nagasaki, also defended the bombings, but showed greater sympathy for the victims. No. 91 commander Captain George Marquardt declared in 1995, “I have never for one moment regretted my participation in the dropping of the A-bomb. It ended a terrible war.”158 Marquardt did admit to a twinge of remorse. In November 1989, he, Sweeney, and other former members of the 509th returned to Hiroshima to film a BBC documentary and met a Japanese doctor, whose physician father had witnessed the bombing. Not knowing who the Americans were, the doctor said that his father told him, “he had never seen such cruelty and could not comprehend the inhumanity of those who had inflicted it.” Marquardt said in a telephone interview that when, at the end of their meeting, the doctor learned who the Americans were, “Tears came into his eyes. He said, ‘I wish my dad was here to meet you guys.’ He was bewildered, you could see it. His expressions changed. . . . He didn’t know what to say.’ Marquardt admitted, ‘That was the only time in all these years I’ve felt remorse.’ A few minutes later, Marquardt called back the interviewer. ‘There was a word I used that I want to change—remorse. I don’t like it. Change it to saddened.’”159 Marquardt had been slated to lead the next mission, if a third bomb was needed. Major Charles Sweeney, who piloted the Great Artiste during the Hiroshima attack and then piloted Bock’s Car, which dropped the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki three days later, published a memoir in 1997 titled War’s End: An Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission. Sweeney wrote, “I took no pride or pleasure then, nor do I take any now, in the brutality of war, whether suffered by my people or those of another nation. Every life is precious. But I felt no remorse or guilt that I had bombed the city where I stood . . . The true vessel of remorse and guilt belonged to the Japanese nation, which could and should call to account the warlords who so willingly offered up their own people to achieve their visions of greatness.”160



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In 1990, Sweeney emphasized the positive legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “As a military man, I think . . . maybe we stopped some world wars.” He had a formula to deal with budding feelings of guilt: “If I ever approach that feeling, I start thinking about the rape of Nanking, and the duplicity of them lying to our president while they were bombing Pearl Harbor. I think of all my classmates who were killed.”161 Sweeney opposed nuclear abolition. In 2001, he told the Boston Globe, “I hope we never use them again, but . . . we cannot afford to eliminate them and stay strong. The best defense, I think, is the strongest offense.”162 But, despite his belief that the bombings were justified, Sweeney quietly donated earnings from speaking engagements to an orphanage in Hiroshima.163 In 1995, Sweeney’s co-pilot Fred Olivi said he tells audiences, “It is my fervent hope that there won’t be any atomic bombs dropped anywhere on any civilization, and that the two we dropped will be the last. I hope that these governments get together and work things out so we don’t have any more wars, because the next war will be a nuclear war . . . and a lot of people will die.”164 Spitzer took comfort in his belief that “the A-bomb has made another war impossible.” He was convinced “That it would be suicide for man and his world.” “I was there,” he explained. “I ought to know.” A garment industry sales representative, Spitzer was killed in an auto accident in 1984 while returning to his Westchester home from work. Murray Spitzer described his brother as “a man of peace” who thought the bomb was “a horrific instrument of death.” His brother, he said, had thought the bomb would help end the war and save many lives. He had hoped “that it would be the last war mankind would face.”165 Among those most troubled about the bombings was Robert Lewis, who, after initial astonishment over the power of the bomb, wrote in his flight log, “My God. What have we done?” In 1955, Lewis appeared on Ralph Edwards’s television show “This Is Your Life” with Reverend Tanimoto Kiyoshi of Hiroshima and two of the twenty-five badly disfigured Hiroshima Maidens Tanimoto and Norman Cousins had brought to the United States for surgery. As Edwards was detailing what happened to Tanimoto on the day of the bombing, Lewis speaking from off-stage said, ‘And looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima, all I could think of was, My God, what have we done?’ Edwards brought Lewis on stage to meet Tanimoto and asked him to tell about his experience that day. Lewis began talking and then stopped to gather himself, appearing to fight back tears. After steadying himself, he explained that after they dropped the bomb “in front of our eyes the city of Hiroshima disappeared.” Edwards asked what he wrote in his log and Lewis repeated his words. At the end of the show, Edwards gave the audience an address to mail contributions to help those still suffering in Hiroshima.

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Lewis stepped forward with a $50 check that he said came from him and his fellow crew members.166 Among those who watched Lewis closely that day was ten-year-old Tanimoto Koko, who had grown up around the Maidens and other bomb victims, many of whom spent considerable time at her father’s church and felt like older sisters to her. She had always fantasized that when she got older she would find those responsible for her friends’ suffering and somehow take revenge. Now, confronted with Lewis and seeing the tears in his eyes as he told what happened, her anger evaporated.167 After the war, Lewis worked briefly as a pilot and then became a manager for a candy company. Though he, too, believed that the bombings hastened the end of the war and saved lives, he said, “I can’t get it out of my mind that there were women and children and old people in that mess.”168 He especially feared what would happen if nuclear bombs were ever used again. He warned, “If we were forced into a situation where nuclear weapons were used, there wouldn’t be much of a world left.” He understood, “There is no conscience to a bomb like that. It’s overkill, overkill, overkill.”169 In later life, Lewis took up sculpture. Among his prized creations was one of a mushroom cloud. He debated whether to call it “‘God’s Wind’ at Hiroshima’ or “‘The Devil’s Wind’ at Hiroshima.” The mushroom cloud has a stream flowing down from the stem of the cloud to its base. Lewis explained to psychotherapist Glenn Van Warrebey, who treated him for one year, that the stream “comes down and makes a flowing form like liquid. In my own mind this liquid is the blood of human beings flowing from the bomb.” Some interpreted it as a mushroom cloud and a tear.170 A more peripheral participant in the Hiroshima bombing, Major Claude “Buck” Eatherly broke even more sharply with the official story and was, at times, pilloried for it. Eatherly, a native of Van Alstyne, Texas, joined the Air Corps in 1939, one year shy of graduating from North Texas State University. He piloted the advance scouting weather plane Straight Flush that reported clear skies over Hiroshima, effectively giving the go-ahead signal to Tibbets to proceed to his primary target. Following the war, Eatherly re-enlisted and participated in the 1946 Bikini atomic bomb tests in the Marshall Islands. After the first test, he and his crew were ordered to fly into the radioactive cloud and take samples of the air with precipitrons. By the time they found their way out of the cloud, they had received a heavy dose of radiation.171 After that, Eatherly began to suffer serious emotional problems. He was discharged from the Air Force in 1947 on the grounds that he was suffering from a “neurosis with psychotic manifestations.”172 Eatherly always attributed his condition to “guilt” over his role in the destruction of Hiroshima. In



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1947, Eatherly had the first in a long series of run-ins with the law, mostly for robbery, burglary, and writing bad checks. His psychological problems also worsened. He attempted suicide in 1950 and was in and out of psychiatric wards for much of the next decade and a half.173 In 1954, doctors administered shock treatments to Eatherly, who had been expressing guilt about his role in the Hiroshima bombing.174 In March 1957, the Dallas Morning News reported on his impending trial for breaking into two Texas post offices, indicating that he had spent much of the past seven years being treated in mental hospitals for “extreme nervousness.” The paper noted that he didn’t blame his psychological problems on the war.175 In the ensuing April trial, however, a psychiatrist testified that Eatherly suffered from a guilt complex and felt responsible for 100,000 deaths in Hiroshima.176 His case gained international notoriety when an article about him appeared in Newsweek on April 1, 1957. After an attempted holdup of a Dallas 7-Eleven in April 1959, his attorney stated, “He’s got hallucinations that the Japanese are after him. He’s anxious to go back in the hospital.”177 While waiting in Dallas County jail before being remanded to the care of Veterans Administration psychiatrists who were to ascertain why his Hiroshima experience had led him to petty criminality, he told a reporter, “I do feel I killed those people. I wish I could die. I tried to commit suicide twice, but it didn’t work.”178 In July, Eatherly wrote directly to the hibakusha in Hiroshima, decrying all warfare and begging their forgiveness. He received a very warm reply from thirty “girls of Hiroshima,” many of whom were part of the original delegation of Hiroshima Maidens. Their sympathy for his suffering seemed to give him a measure of relief. In August, he wrote to philosopher Günther Anders, conveying his newfound sense of purpose: “My only desire is to lend influence toward peace, to end nuclear buildup, to safeguard the rights of all people regardless of race, color or creed.”179 Eatherly complained of recurring nightmares as a result of the bombing and in 1960 claimed, “I haven’t had any sleep in fifteen years.”180 He told Parade Magazine in the early 1960s, “Every night for 15 years, I have dreamed about it. I see great fires, boiling fires, crimson fires, closing in on me. Buildings fall, children run—living torches with their clothes aflame. “Why did you do it?” they scream. I wake up paralyzed with fear, screaming, sweating because I have no answer.”181 In August 1960, he wrote from the VA hospital to Senator Ralph Yarborough (D-TX), urging him to act forcefully to eliminate the nuclear threat. Having seen three of the first four atomic bombs exploded and recognizing the enormously heightened destructive capabilities that had subsequently been achieved, a nuclear war, he warned, “would be the end of this people’s earth.” Therefore, he concluded, “The prevention of war has become necessary if civilized life is to continue, or perhaps if any kind of life is to continue.”182

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He was judged insane and confined to the Waco Veterans Hospital by court order in 1961. At the trial, four psychiatrists testified that though intelligent and likable, he suffered from schizophrenia and had delusions of leading a great disarmament-oriented peace movement that stemmed from guilt over his Hiroshima role.183 Following release and re-arrest, a judge in Galveston committed him to Rusk State Hospital in 1964.184 Was Eatherly mad? By that point, he had spoken out repeatedly against the Hiroshima bombing and in favor of nuclear abolition. Eatherly had become an international symbol of the crime of Hiroshima and the danger of nuclear weapons, even more in Europe than in the United States. Books, plays, and poems were written about him on both continents. Renowned British philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell argued that his case was “symbolic of the suicidal madness of our time.” “The world,” Russell charged, “was prepared to honour him for his part in the massacre, but, when he repented, it turned against him, seeing in his act of repentance its own condemnation.”185 Günther Anders published a book of his correspondence with Eatherly, letters highlighting Eatherly’s views on the Hiroshima bombing and the nuclear threat. In 1962, on the seventeenth anniversary of the bombing, organizers of a New York City march led by A. J. Muste and Norman Thomas announced that they were giving Hiroshima Awards to four persons who had made “outstanding contributions to world peace.” The recipients included renowned cellist Pablo Casals and Eatherly.186 Eatherly died in 1978 of cancer at the age of fifty-seven, having been diagnosed three years earlier. Some speculated that his flying through radiation during the 1946 atomic bomb tests may have contributed to his condition. His brother Joe conjectured that he suffered radiation damage, noting, “For a moment he got lost in that cloud. He said it was the most horrible moment of his life. One of the navigators came down with radiation sickness. We didn’t know what it was then. I doubt we really know what it is now.” Despite his having become persona non grata with many veterans, a Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) color guard stood at attention at his funeral and a VFW bugler played taps during his burial at the federal military cemetery in Houston. Fellow VFW Post 490 member Paul Guidry told reporters that he did not know if his friend “ever came to peace with himself. But he was 100 percent for America, and if you print anything, print that he was the most loving human being I have ever known.” After the funeral, his brother James said, “I can remember him waking up night after night. He said his brain was on fire. He said he could feel those people burning. He never forgot the thousands of people dying in those flames.” Another relative added, “He never got over the bomb.”187 Because of Eatherly, rumors abounded that members of the Enola Gay crew suffered emotional anguish resulting in mental breakdowns. These ru-



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mors sometimes specifically targeted Tibbets, who, at times, expressed bitterness about Eatherly’s sullying his and others’ reputations.188 Tibbets resented reports that he was in prison or had committed suicide. He complained, “They said I was crazy, said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions.”189 During a visit to Atlanta in 1990, Tibbets dismissed the rumors as “Soviet-inspired propaganda.”190 One newspaper inaccurately reported that Ferebee had been institutionalized because of his profound remorse.191 In 1985, Ferebee bemoaned the fact that “There have been articles written about me being in a mental institution.”192 Although his wartime activities may not have caused Tibbets to feel remorse, they may, indirectly, have cost him his marriage. Tibbets served as a paid consultant to the 1952 MGM film Above and Beyond, which purported to depict his personal travail and the marital difficulties that resulted from the enormous pressure he was under in preparing for the atomic bombings. The film was suggested by a close associate of General Curtis LeMay when he was head of the Strategic Air Command. Robert Taylor played Tibbets and Eleanor Parker played his wife Lucy. In the film, Lucy was forced to endure the hardship of living with a distracted, driven, increasingly distant husband, who was forced to hide from her the true nature of his undertaking, while she raised two young children almost entirely on her own. Tibbets took special umbrage not at the unflattering depiction of his inattention as husband and father or of his heavy-handed efforts to maintain tight security, even if that meant turning in friends for seemingly minor breaches, but at one scene, which he insisted was not in the original script that he reviewed. In that scene, designed to show Tibbets’s and the other Americans’ basic decency and their appreciation of the gravity of what they had done, his character, having just witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima, radios the results back to headquarters. “Results good,” he says. Then he repeats the line with what Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell aptly describe as “grim irony.” When the movie was released, Tibbets criticized that scene insisting that he had no such reservations about what he had done.193 He apparently had no issue with another scene that some would consider more damning. In that scene, Paul, returning late one night as was often the case, carries his sleeping son into the bedroom and puts him in bed. He and Lucy look at their two sleeping children and tenderly agree how wonderful they are. But Lucy then expresses misgivings about the war, confessing, “They are wonderful, but you know every time I look at them sleep I get sad. Terribly sad.” Paul asks why and Lucy explains, “Oh I keep thinking of this war and how somewhere at this very moment bombs are being dropped and children like that are being killed.” Paul’s mood suddenly changes and he snaps, “Lucy, don’t ever say that again! Not to me.” Then he storms out of

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the room. Lucy follows him pleading for an explanation of what she said that was so wrong, at which point Paul lectures her angrily: “Look. Look. Let’s clear up one little piece of morality right now. It’s not bombs alone that are horrible. It’s war. War is what’s wrong not just its weapons. Sure we’re in a war and innocent people are dying and that’s horrible. But to lose this war to the gang we’re fighting would be the most immoral thing we could do to those kids in there. And don’t you ever forget it!”194 At the end of the film, when Lucy learns, along with the rest of the warweary nation, that her husband was a hero—not the joyless, self-centered, security-obsessed lout he had increasingly appeared to be—they passionately embrace and look forward to years of marital bliss. But, in reality, Paul and Lucy Tibbets divorced after the war. In 1965, Tibbets moved to India with his second wife to serve as deputy chief of the U.S. Military Supply Mission to that country. Tibbets may not have been the best choice for the position. In India, which under Nehru had been in the forefront of international anti-nuclear efforts, Tibbets was subjected to sharply hostile attacks by the press. The campaign was led by the tabloid weekly Blitz, which, according to New York Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas, “generally speaks for the pro-Soviet wing of the Indian Communist party.” For six weeks, the paper inveighed against the man it called “the world’s greatest killer” and demanded he be expelled from the country. It expressed surprise that the general who “represents the cult of the Western warmongers, the Pentagon, the atom bomb and mass destruction” should be allowed to “stride freely in India’s capital, enjoying free Indian air and desecrating India’s sacred soil.” It excoriated his “pretty trick” of naming the plane Enola Gay, thereby “drag[ging] his mother into the sordid history of the Second World War and the first bomb.” The paper charged that the United States tried to hide Tibbets’s identity from his Indian hosts, to which U.S. officials responded, “we didn’t go out of our way to point it out.” Tibbets told the Times, “I don’t go around advertising the role I played in Hiroshima. I’d rather forget it and let sleeping dogs lie. But that seems like wishful thinking. Wherever I go it always comes out sooner or later.”195 Because Tibbets was still in India, he missed the twentieth anniversary reunion of the 393rd Bomb Squadron. Twenty years later, Van Kirk would observe that he, Ferebee, and Tibbets rarely attended reunions of the 509th, of which the 393rd was a part, preferring to get together privately or at reunions with their European buddies.196 Jacob Beser of Baltimore, the reunion chairman, announced that he planned to tell his former comrades, “We do not gather in a spirit of rejoicing for what was done, but rather rejoicing in the significance of the events in which we participated.” “The mass destruction of cities and civil populations is alien to our American way of thinking.” Beser,



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the radar man who monitored the electronics equipment and sought to make sure that signals from the ground did not trigger the bomb’s fuse, was the only crew member to serve on both the Enola Gay and Bock’s Car. His observations about the atomic bombing of Japan and the world it created reveal both his deep humanity and the extent to which even the most well-meaning and thoughtful of the participants bore the detritus of decades of mythology about casualty figures, prospects for an invasion, motives for dropping the bombs, and effectiveness of deterrence. He explained, “We rejoice for the significance of our being the first to obtain a nuclear capability—for no other reason than this has helped make the past 20 years free of a third world war.” When asked about the morality of what they had done, Beser responded, “there was no moral issue involved in using the bomb. The moral issue is war itself. It’s academic how you get killed in a war . . . The question now is not are we going to use this again, but what are we going to do to insure that we never have to use it again.”197 Beser dropped out of Johns Hopkins to enlist the day after the United States entered the war. His hatred of Nazi Germany had been building for years. In 1939, he had visited Hamburg in a futile attempt to persuade relatives to leave. His mother, who directed the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society of Baltimore, brought home rescued foster children to live with the family. He regretted not having had the opportunity to drop atomic bombs on Germany, proclaiming, “I wish we’d had it earlier so we could have dropped it on Berlin.”198 Like almost all the others, he always defended the atomic bombings against Japan on the grounds that they saved more lives than they took: In November of 1945 there was an invasion of Japan planned. Three million men were gonna be thrown against Japan. There were about 3 million Japanese, digging in for the defense of their homeland, and there was a casualty potential of over a million people. That’s what was avoided. If you take the highest figures of casualties of both cities, say 300,000 combined casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, versus a million, I’m sorry to say, it’s a good tradeoff. It’s a very cold way to look at it, but it’s the only way to look at it.199

Beser often noted the frequency with which veterans thanked him for saving their lives. But he also confronted numerous face-to-face challenges and late-night phone calls from those who deplored what he had done. When accused of being a murderer, he would shoot back, “Don’t you read any history? Don’t you know about the lives that were saved, and not just the ones that were lost?”200 In 1985, Beser, having retired after working twenty-seven years as an engineer for Westinghouse, returned to Japan with an ABC film crew to attend commemorative events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was particularly

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moved by one woman who had been in Hiroshima forty years earlier when Beser and his crewmates dropped the bomb. She said simply, “You had a job to do, and you did it.” He reflected, “I don’t know if I could be so forgiving.”201 He described Hiroshima as “the place where we opened a new era of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.”202 Beser was annoyed by American peace activists who went to Hiroshima and criticized their own country. Like almost all his colleagues, he felt, “These people are of a later generation and do not comprehend what was going on in 1945.” He specifically cited “the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Sacking of Manila, and all of the other more sordid Japanese deeds.” As a result, his generation “thought in terms of total defeat of the enemy, and unconditional surrender.” They were not racists, he insisted, feeling the same way about Germany. He contended the Japanese, even the hibakusha he met, understood the situation better than many Americans. Japanese repeatedly told him that the Americans “did what you had to do to win the war”—a war that only the militarists in Tokyo wanted. But, “To hear American school children say they are ashamed of their country, without any understanding as to why these events took place is a bigger source of embarrassment to me than I can ever describe. We are teaching our children the wrong lesson. The moral of the story is “make war no more.” Find a way to settle our differences peacefully or surely we will all perish.”203 Beser urged the Japanese he met to petition their government to press the UN to hold a special nuclear disarmament conference in Hiroshima and let the world see up close what the citizens had suffered.204 After attending the ceremonies in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Beser summarized the answer he repeatedly gave to questioners: “I can sympathize with those who were made to suffer because of them and appreciate their desire to see that these weapons are never used again, but I have said over and over again that in view of the events that led up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki I have no sense of guilt nor do I feel any remorse.”205 Beser told another interviewer in 1985, “You can’t look at it through today’s eyes. We were out there to do a job. I don’t know anybody you could have gotten off that airplane with a team of mules. They told us from the beginning that if this thing worked it was going to bring the war to a hasty conclusion. Everybody wanted to be in on that.”206 Beser concluded his 1988 memoir Hiroshima and Nagaski Revisited with the following words: I repeat, being sorry is crazy. What we need to do is examine ourselves as human beings and look at how far we have come along the road to potential self destruction and how inhumane we are one to the other and analyze why we



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have allowed this to develop over the millennia. The solution to the problem is not being sorry for what has already happened, but individually and collectively dedicate ourselves to the eradication of the causes of wars and of war itself. Work together as human beings to achieve the kind of world that we all idealistically seek . . . Deterrence, up until now, has worked. It cannot continue forever. Let’s unite our hearts and minds with those people of the world who long for peace . . . This is what I learned in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in this fortieth year of the Atomic Era.207

Over the years, others also returned to the cities they had bombed. Bock’s Car co-pilot Don Albury, who became a pilot with Eastern Airlines, returned to Japan on two separate occasions. His first visit, in the 1970s, proved rather uneventful. “People were nice to us,” he recalled, adding, “Of course, they didn’t know who we were.” He returned with four other veterans of the 509th to film a BBC documentary in Tinian and Hiroshima. Walking out of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, he found it “too grotesque,” focusing “too much on the damage and suffering.” Their visit to the hospital for radiation victims brought out different emotions. At first they didn’t disclose their identities. Fred Bock, who got his Ph.D. in zoology after the war, remarked that when they finally did reveal who they were, the hibakusha “broke down in tears. It was pretty emotional for all of us.” Afterwards, he and Sweeney visited Nagasaki, touring the peace museum and having their picture taken in front of the hypocenter monument. They did not, however, let on who they were.208 Not all the visits went smoothly. In 2005, a Tokyo television station flew Harold Agnew, one of three scientific observers on board the accompanying Great Artiste, to Hiroshima. Agnew, a lifelong nuclear weapons developer who rose to head the Los Alamos National Laboratory, never expressed the slightest doubt about the justice of his actions. In 1985, he revealed, “Every August 6, I call a lot of my colleagues, and we tell each other, ‘They sure as hell deserved it.’”209 In Hiroshima, twenty years later, he spoke with survivors who demanded he apologize. Agnew stood up, shouted “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and walked out. He later said, “There is nothing to apologize for. This is exactly why the Chinese are still upset with them. Many Japanese still refuse to take responsibility for what they did, for starting that war. They can point at us. But believe me, they did some awful bad things. We saved Japanese lives with those bombs—an invasion would have been worse.”210 Beser offered an intriguing response to a protester who accosted him, asking, “Didn’t you have any feeling for all those Japanese youth?” Beser replied, “What do you think we were? We were children, too.”211 Readers might recall that Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five, his brilliant novel about the firebombing of Dresden, spoke of the entire war as the “children’s crusade” and in his powerful introduction to the novel recounts visiting his

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war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare, whose wife was very cold toward the author. Finally, she turned on Vonnegut and said angrily, “You were just babies then!” “What?” Vonnegut asked. She continued, “You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs!” Vonnegut writes, “I nodded that this was true. We had been foolish virgins in the war, right at the end of childhood.” She continued, “But you’re not going to write it that way, are you.” “This wasn’t a question,” Vonnegut realized. “It was an accusation.” “I—I don’t know,” Vonnegut replied. “Well, I know,” she said. “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.” Finally, Vonnegut understood: “It was war that made her so angry. She didn’t want her babies or anybody else’s babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.” Vonnegut promised her that there would be no part in his book for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne and that he would call it “The Children’s Crusade.” He went even further, dedicating the book to her.212 Molly Jeppson, whose husband Dick was only twenty-three in August 1945, said revealingly: They always write that they took this airplane and went over there and killed all these people. People just don’t seem to get it, or they don’t want to get it . . . [The military men aboard] were so young, they were just doing their job. They were told to do this. Of course [after the bombing Jeppson] heard what happened and he was horrified and that’s why he kind of withdrew because he’s kind of a shy guy anyway, and it hurt his feelings that he had to do this.

Like her husband, Molly took comfort in her belief that “it also saved a lot of lives.”213 Tibbets, who at twenty-nine was older than the overwhelming majority of troops under his command, also referred to the crew members’ youth. He said, “There was no way that I was going to get into an airplane without Ferebee and Van Kirk. They did exactly what they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it. We were all young kids . . . but they were as professional as anybody you could possibly find.”214 In 1966, Tibbets retired from the military as a brigadier general and went into business, later becoming president of Executive Jet Aviation, a Columbus-based international air taxi service. He could not, however, escape the controversy that continued to swirl around him. Tibbets’s insensitivity to the suffering he inflicted was perhaps most clearly manifest in his flying a B-29 in a reenactment of the bombing before a crowd of 40,000, each of whom paid $5 to attend a 1976 Harlingen, Texas



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air show sponsored by the Confederate Air Force (CAF), a “patriotic” organization that restored and flew WWII aircraft. As Tibbets flew over, U.S. Army demolition experts set off a smoke bomb that simulated a mushroomshaped cloud. Hiroshima Mayor Takeshi Araki, informed by a reporter of the event, called the show “grotesque.” He sent a letter of protest to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and charged that the show “trampled on the spirit of Hiroshima and was a blasphemy against the many people still suffering from the aftereffects of the blast.” He also sent one to Tibbets. Takeshi released a press statement declaring that he would tell the show’s organizers, “What you have done insults the Japanese people who suffered from the bomb. I feel real rage and we shall protest to the U.S. government and all concerned.” Japanese foreign minister Kosaka Zentaro lodged a protest, stating, “A bomb and a mushroom-shaped cloud is a real nightmare for the Japanese. Although it was a civilian air show, I cannot refrain from feeling badly. They lacked consideration for the feelings of others.” The Washington Post reported that ordinary Japanese shared this sense of outrage. The Asahi Shimbun called the incident “insensitive and callous” and wondered how Tibbets “could . . . do such a stupid thing.” The Washington Post reported that embassy officials were “appalled” by the episode, especially the involvement of the Army. One unnamed official commented, “It’s unbelievable.” A U.S. diplomat compared it to Japanese veterans reenacting the Bataan Death March. Tibbets insisted that the stunt “was not intended to insult anybody.” The U.S. government formally apologized for the tasteless incident. Air Force Major General Travis McNeil, director of the CAF, defended their actions in the name of accurately “portraying history,” arguing, “Bombing Hiroshima was a terrible thing but in the final outcome, it saved a lot of lives by bringing World War II to an end.” Almost a year after the incident, the CAF buckled under pressure from Congress and the Carter Administration and cancelled a planned follow-up reenactment. The CAF announced that Tibbets, though deprived of the opportunity to reenact his moment of glory, would again fly the B-29 in the show. Unlike government officials, Tibbets offered no apologies, telling reporters in Texas, “I was not emotionally involved in the dropping of the first atomic bomb. To me it was a military mission and I was relieved after it was over that it was a success.”215 But despite Tibbets’s callousness on this and other occasions, some measure of sympathy for the bombs’ victims occasionally slipped out. A few years ago in Hiroshima, Takahashi Akihiro, who, at age fourteen, had been badly injured by the bomb, told me of his 1980 meeting with Tibbets in Washington, D.C. The bomb disfigured Takahashi, a lifelong antinuclear activist who served as director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, burning much of his body and leaving shards of glass permanently

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embedded. When introduced, Tibbets asked Takahashi if the injury to his deformed right hand had occurred during the bombing and Takahashi told him it had. In their discussion, Takahashi told Tibbets of his initial hatred toward President Truman and the American war leaders responsible for the atomic bombings and how he had transcended such feelings in his quest for nuclear abolition. During the course of the conversation, Takahashi asked Tibbets what he would do if given the same orders again and Tibbets said that, as a soldier, he would have no choice but to act in the same way. He added that that was why it was so important to make sure that no more wars ever occurred. Takahashi was heartened by those words and deeply moved by the fact that, throughout their half-hour long conversation, Tibbets continued to hold Takahashi’s damaged hand.216 Takahashi later said, “There was no apology, but he seemed to be feeling pain.”217 At the time, Takahashi even believed he saw a tear in the corner of Tibbets’s eye. However, five years later, when Greg Mitchell asked Tibbets about the incident, Tibbets insisted that the story about tears was “bullshit.”218 Tibbets played a prominent role among critics of the ill-fated 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. When historians and curators at the museum attempted to present a balanced history of the atomic bombings on the fiftieth anniversary, the American Legion and the Air Force Association led a movement to pressure the museum to eliminate the human story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and instead offer an orthodox celebratory defense of the bombings. Republicans in Congress took up the fight. Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS) admonished, “This is a national museum and it shouldn’t be used by revisionist historians to try to change the facts of World War II.” Eighty-one members of Congress demanded museum director Martin Harwit’s resignation. Leading the charge was Rep. Peter Blute (R-MA) who accused the curators of planning “a politically correct diatribe on the nuclear age.”219 Tibbets added his voice to those of the critics. In June 1994, he publicly dismissed the original exhibit script as “a package of insults . . . [that] will engender the aura of evil in which the plane is being cast.” He called on historians to stop second-guessing President Truman and his advisors. And he deplored those who “have labeled the atomic missions as war crimes in an effort to force their politics and their opinions on the American public and to damn military history.”220 Undeterred, Harwit sought to secure Tibbets’s involvement and support, as the museum believed it had successfully done with Tibbets’s friends Ferebee and Van Kirk. Harwit was convinced that Tibbets had not actually read the script and offered to send him the latest draft, which had been revised following criticisms by military historians, veterans, and others who objected that



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the proposed exhibit was too sympathetic to the Japanese and too critical of the United States. Harwit wrote in June and then in July soliciting Tibbets’s input and explaining: The Museum has been keenly aware that the public has many questions about the use of the atomic bomb. These should not be ignored or swept under the rug. That would only give the appearance that the United States is unable to face the issues squarely. As a national museum I think we have both an opportunity and an obligation to show that the questions under debate can be discussed openly and without apology; but we also realize that this is only possible if we are willing to touch on all the issues that have been raised from time to time, and not just those that are unanimously accepted as uncontroversial.221

Tibbets never responded to Harwit. He later said that when he first read the script, “I got sick to my stomach.” He charged, “History has been denigrated, the Enola Gay has been miscast and a group of valiant Americans . . . [has] been denied a historically correct representation to the public.”222 In a November 1994 meeting, Tibbets urged Smithsonian secretary I. Michael Heyman to fire Harwit and two curators. Later, even though exhibit planners made the changes demanded by Tibbets and other critics, Tibbets still asserted, “I’d vote 100 percent to have the whole thing canceled.”223 After talking with Tibbets’s “people” and discovering how “mad” American Legion officials were, Ferebee also denounced the proposed Smithsonian exhibit. In August, curator Joanne Gernstein spoke with him and discovered that he viewed the exhibit as saying, in her paraphrase, “1) the bomb should not have been dropped and that 2) Americans were vindictive, cruel, and racist.”224 In an October interview, Ferebee went further. “It seemed like that exhibit was going to be an apology that we dropped the atomic bomb,” he said. He objected that the planned exhibit made American combatants “seem biased and racist, like we were being cruel and vindictive. What we did brought the war to an end and saved lives.”225 Van Kirk became equally dismissive, calling the original script “a bunch of rubbish.” He proposed a stripped down exhibit that avoided raising unsettling questions: “As far as I’m concerned, all they need to do is put the airplane on exhibit with a sign on it saying this is what it did.”226 A few months earlier, Van Kirk had assured an interviewer, “If [Harwit] wanted an exhibit on the horrors of nuclear war, I’d support it.” He cautioned, however, that such an exhibit “wouldn’t draw.”227 Charles Sweeney too weighed in, criticizing “overeducated armchair patriots.” He found the planned exhibit “abominable and un-American.”228 In his analysis of the final bare-bones, minimalist, exculpatory exhibit, New York Times correspondent David Sanger called it “the most diminished display in Smithsonian history.” Sanger described it as “a strikingly incomplete

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exhibition that leaves visitors totally in the dark about how a decision was reached to use the bomb, and the aftermath of the most militarily decisive and horrific mission in the history of the war.”229 In the exhibit that ensued, all visitors learned about the decision and its human costs was contained on a placard placed alongside the fuselage. It stated: Tibbets piloted the aircraft on its mission to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. That bomb and the one dropped on Nagasaki three days later destroyed much of the two cities and caused tens of thousands of deaths. However, the use of the bombs led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. Such an invasion, especially if undertaken for both main islands, would have led to very heavy casualties among American and Allied troops and Japanese civilians and military. It was thought highly unlikely that Japan, while in a weakened military condition, would have surrendered unconditionally without such an invasion.230

Tibbets received a private viewing the week before the exhibit officially opened on June 28, 1995. Unlike Sanger, Tibbets thought the exhibit got it just right. He wrote to Heyman, “I am pleased and proud of the exhibit. As for the exhibit content, I firmly believe that you have gotten to the basic facts. There is no attempt to persuade anyone about anything. Thank you for that . . . And through the video [that accompanied the exhibit] we have had an opportunity to say our little piece. Many of us will go to our graves much happier for that.”231 In October 1994, when Takahashi learned that Tibbets and other veterans had demanded the exhibit be changed to reflect their interpretation of events, he wrote Tibbets a letter in which he objected to their attempts to whitewash history. He instructed Tibbets that the United States could no more evade responsibility for dropping atomic bombs than Japan could for the atrocities it committed against other Asian peoples. He dismissed the argument that the bomb had actually saved U.S. and Japanese lives. “The exhibit,” he wrote, “must depict the reality of the war so that it will be able to teach visitors that nuclear weapons themselves are absolutely evil.”232 Takahashi welcomed inclusion of information about Japanese aggression but took particular umbrage at exhibit opponents’ effort to remove items showing Japanese suffering. “I totally accept the addition [of materials about Japan’s aggression],” he announced. “But why delete those items and try to shield the American people from the terrible realities of the atomic bombing?”233 Tibbets visited the fully restored Enola Gay when it was displayed at the Air and Space Museum annex in 2003, following another heated controversy about the Smithsonian’s refusal to look meaningfully at the most significant event in twentieth century American history. “I wanted to climb in and fly it,” he said.234



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Tibbets told the Palm Beach Post in 2001 that the Hiroshima controversy “got me roused up.” While stubbornly sticking to his story and refusing to consider the evidence that the bomb wasn’t necessary to end the war or to reflect on the deeper moral implications of killing hundreds of thousands of people and ushering in the nuclear age, he charged, “Our young people don’t know anything about what happened because nobody taught them and now their minds are being filled up with things that aren’t true.”235 Tibbets was correct in one respect. He and others, in their efforts to block public airing of this critical history, have allowed ignorance to run rampant. This was no more on display than when Soldier of Fortune magazine gave Tibbets its first Humanitarian Award in 1998. Publisher Robert Brown, who was presenting the award, exemplified how far the distortion of history had progressed. He told the Las Vegas Sun, “General Tibbets was responsible for saving at least a million American lives, as well as the lives of several scores of millions of Japanese, and preventing the total destruction of their country.”236 Tibbets often said he hoped nuclear weapons would never be used again. In 1978, he told listeners at a National Veterans Day Award dinner, “We must strive by every means to prevent warfare by these means.”237 In 1985, Tibbets appeared on the Charlie Rose show and stated, “Please understand. I’m not for nuclear war. I’m not even in favor of warfare, if you want to know the truth.”238 But he also had no fondness for those who protested the atomic bombings. On the eve of planned demonstrations around the thirty-seventh anniversary in August 1982, he told an interviewer, “I really think these people don’t know what they’re demonstrating for. They’re demonstrating just to be demonstrating. The exciting thing to do is join. I’ve talked to some demonstrators and they say they don’t know what they’re doing, only that they’re being paid to do it.” Tibbets consistently dismissed those who clung to utopian dreams about peace and disarmament. He stated in 1982, “Some would like to see an end to warfare and that I would support. But it’s not practical and it won’t be done.”239 In 1985, he told an interviewer that if asked to drop a nuclear weapon on Hanoi during the Vietnam War, “I would’ve without any question.”240 And he also said he would have done so against Muslim extremists. He told Studs Terkel in 2002 that he supported using nuclear weapons against current U.S. enemies: “Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice. I’d wipe ’em out. You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: ‘You’ve killed so many civilians.’ That’s their tough luck for being there.”241 Such insensitivity to the death and suffering of innocent victims permeated Tibbets’s comments over the years. Oliver Kamm argued that Tibbets

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was a humane man. However, in contrast to many others who participated in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he never reflected publicly and thoughtfully about the atomic bombings, the lives cost, or the deeper and more enduring legacy of the nuclear age he helped usher in. Perhaps he rejected the numerous opportunities provided to show his humanity because he felt so much guilt or perhaps, as he always claimed, it was because he felt none. Like most of the other participants, he stubbornly clung to a truncated, partial, and increasingly discredited version of events, refusing to even consider the mounting evidence that the atomic bombs neither ended the war nor were necessary to avoid an invasion. This helps explain why, with the exception of Eatherly, none were able to fully make the crucial leap from regret to remorse. Tibbets continued to defend the atomic bombings in his final years. In 2005, he said of the controversy, “It’s kind of getting old, but then so am I. The guys who appreciated that I saved their asses are mostly dead now.” He recognized that he would soon be joining them, a prospect he didn’t fear. “I don’t fear a goddamn thing,” he insisted. “I’m not afraid of dying. As soon as the death certificate is signed, I want to be cremated. I don’t want a funeral. I don’t want to be eulogized. I don’t want any monuments or plaques . . . I want my ashes scattered over where I loved to fly.”242 Paul Tibbets requested that his ashes be scattered over the English Channel, where he spent many hours flying during the war. His granddaughter Kia Tibbets explained, “He didn’t want a funeral because he didn’t want to take the chance of protesters or anyone defacing a headstone.”243 The Columbus Dispatch identified Tibbets’s grandson, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets IV, an Air Force B-2 mission command pilot whose nickname was “nuke,” as a likely candidate to do the job.244 Tibbets was survived by Andrea Quattrehomme Tibbets, the French woman he married in 1956, along with two sons from his first marriage, one from his second, and six grandchildren. He maintained his gruff, unyielding, and unapologetic exterior until the very end. But his granddaughter Kia, who grew up in his home, remembered him very differently. “He always told me that he loved me,” she said. “It’s not a side of him that other people saw.”245 NOTES 1.  An earlier version of this article appeared in The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, January 1, 2008, http://apjjf.org/-Peter-J.-Kuznick/2642/article.html. 2.  I would like to thank Gar Alperovitz, Hal Belodoff, Barton Bernstein, Daniel Ellsberg, Bill Geerhart, Simki Kuznick, Uday Mohan, Mark Selden, and Marty Sherwin for their thoughtful comments and astute editorial suggestions.



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  3.  “Oliver Kamm: Paul Tibbets and Enola Gay . . . About those Obits,” History News Network, February 11, 2007, http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/44318.html.   4.  “Oliver Kamm: Paul Tibbets and Enola Gay . . . About those Obits,” History News Network, February 11, 2007.   5.  In July 2007, the International People’s Tribunal on the Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki found Tibbets guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Charges were also brought against fourteen other Americans who bore responsibility for the atomic bombings. From: “International People’s Tribunal on the Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” n.d., http://www .k3.dion.ne.jp/~a-bomb/indexen.htm.   6.  Michael Killian, “Two Pilots Log Their Memoirs,” Chicago Tribune, November 5, 1978.   7.  Mike Harden, “Just ‘Doing His Job’ at Hiroshima,” Globe and Mail (Canada, online), August 6, 1985.   8.  Harden, “Just ‘Doing His Job’ at Hiroshima,” August 6, 1985.   9.  Mike Harden, “Still No Regrets for Frail Enola Gay Pilot,” Columbus Dispatch, August 6, 2005. 10.  Greg Mitchell, “On the Death of ‘Hiroshima Bomb’ Pilot Paul Tibbets,” Editor and Publisher, November 1, 2007. 11.  According to Tibbets, the incident occurred in early 1943. At a planning meeting for a bombing raid, Tibbets objected that, if his men followed Norstadt’s instructions to send the planes in at six thousand feet, “it would be pure suicide.” Norstadt responded that perhaps Tibbets had flown too many missions and was scared to do it. Tibbets recalled, “In front of the assembly I immediately glared right straight back at him and told him I wasn’t afraid to fly the mission—that I’d be glad to take and lead the whole mission if he’d fly as my co-pilot.” After that, Tibbets was quickly shipped out of the unit. From: “Tibbets, Top B-17 Pilot, Chosen to Get B-29s Started,” Chicago Tribune, March 13, 1968. 12.  Wayne Thomis, “Tibbets Keeps Busy with B-29s—But Biggest Surprise is Ahead,” Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1968. Other accounts indicate that the meeting in Colorado Springs occurred in September. 13.  Wayne Thomis, “U.S. Dropped A-Bomb Delivery on Target in My Lap: Tibbets,” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 1968. 14. Studs Terkel, Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (New York: The New Press, 2003), 49. 15.  Eric Malnic, “Paul Tibbets, Pilot Who Bombed Hiroshima, Dies at 92,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2007. 16.  Malnic, “Paul Tibbets, Pilot Who Bombed Hiroshima, Dies at 92,” November 2, 2007. 17.  Kay Bartlett, “The Man Who Dropped the Bomb: Thirty Years Later,” Dallas Morning Star, August 3, 1975. 18.  Bartlett, “The Man Who Dropped the Bomb: Thirty Years Later,” August 3, 1975. 19.  Andrea Stone, “For Air Crews, A-Bombings a Matter of Duty,” USA Today, April 17, 1995.

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20. Jacob Beser, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Revisited (Memphis: Global Press, 1988), 32. 21.  Stone, “For Air Crews, A-Bombings a Matter of Duty,” April 17, 1995. 22.  “The Outlook Interview: Jacob Beser Talks to Bruce Goldfarb,” Washington Post, May 19, 1985. 23. Daniel Yee, “Navigator Says ‘Easy Mission’ of Enola Gay Led to End of WWII,” Associated Press (online), August 6, 2005. 24. Beser, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Revisited, 38. 25.  Glen Martin, “Dropping the Bomb,” San Francisco Chronicle (online), August 6, 1995. Ten years later, Van Kirk told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “If you had any brains, you knew it was an atomic bomb. We weren’t a bunch of mushrooms flying in the dark.” Bill Torpy, “‘Our Objective Was to Shorten the War’: 60 Years Later, No Regrets over Hiroshima,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 6, 2005. 26.  Some accounts say Ferebee also learned that they would be carrying an atomic bomb. See, for example, “B-29 Reunion: Fliers Proud of Job but Regret Need,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1965. Ferebee said he was asleep when Tibbets announced what kind of bomb they were carrying and recalled, oddly, that he never heard the words “atom bomb” until he returned to Tinian where a brigadier general approached him and reported, “The President has announced that you just dropped the first atom bomb.” Brad Manning, “Enola Gay Bombardier Was Quite Cool; Man Slept on Way to Drop A-Bomb,” Charlotte Observer, August 5, 1990; Sharon Churcher and Bill Lowther, “I never lost a moment’s sleep after dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima . . . I saved millions of lives with a single press of a button on the Enola Gay”; “On the 50th Anniversary of the Nuclear Attack on Japan, the Airmen Who Released the Bomb Break their Silence,” Mail (London), July 16, 1995. In 1995, he explained that all Tibbets “was allowed to tell me was that I was to develop the ballistics for a bomb that would destroy everything for miles. I had no idea what was to cause the explosion.” Churcher and Lowther. Jeppson, who spent time in Los Alamos, may also have known. See Ferguson, “Enola Gay Crew Member Jeppson Remembers Famed Flight,” Las Vegas Sun (online edition), May 25, 2000. 27.  Thomas Turner, “Only Texas Crew Member Recalls Hiroshima Bombing,” Dallas Morning News, August 6, 1956. 28.  Merle Miller and Abe Spitzer, We Dropped the A-Bomb (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, Company, 1946), v. 29.  He told an interviewer, “wanted to do everything that I could to subdue Japan. I wanted to kill the bastards.” It is not clear whether his change of heart about civilian casualties reflected a hatred for the Japanese, fueled by pervasive stories of their wartime atrocities that were shared by many Americans, or whether it was simply a reflection of the devaluation of life that often occurs in wartime. He did claim to have “classmates who were beheaded by some Japanese practicing their swordsmanship.” Richard Goldstein, “Paul W. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92,” New York Times, November 2, 2007; Kay Bartlett, “Pilot of 1st A-Bomb Plane: Quiet Man with No Regrets,” Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1975. 30.  Co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis was furious when he saw Tibbets’s mother’s name on the plane. Already unhappy that Tibbets would be flying Lewis’s plane with



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Lewis’s crew, he reportedly yelled, ‘What the hell is that doing on my plane?’ when he saw the name Tibbets had chosen. Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, Enola Gay (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), 233. Tibbets’s mother at least initially got a kick out of having the plane named after her. When asked how she felt about it, Tibbets responded, “Well, I can only tell you what my dad said. My mother never changed her expression very much about anything, whether it was serious or light, but when she’d get tickled, her stomach would jiggle. My dad said to me that when the telephone in Miami rang, my mother was quiet first. Then, when it was announced on the radio, he said, ‘You should have seen the old gal’s belly jiggle on that one.’” Terkel, Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times, 54–55. 31.  Miller and Spitzer, We Dropped the A-Bomb, 11, 15. 32.  Miller and Spitzer, 26. Other accounts attribute that information to Parsons. 33. Beser, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Revisited, 102. 34. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986) 701. Bombardier Tom Ferebee reacted more skeptically: “They did say it was the mission that should end the war, but they’d said that about every mission I’d ever flown.” Churcher and Lowther. 35.  Gustav Niebuhr, “Enola Gay’s Crew Recalls the Flight into a New Era,” New York Times, August 6, 1995. 36.  Turner, “Only Texas Crew Member Recalls Hiroshima Bombing,” August 6, 1995. 37.  Beser, 96. 38.  Tom Infield, “Hiroshima: As Felt from Air Ground August 6, 1945, Was a Day that Shook the World,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 6, 1945. 39. Lisa Ferguson, “Enola Gay Crew Member Jeppson Remembers Famed Flight,” Las Vegas Sun (online edition), May 25, 2000. 40. Ferguson, “Enola Gay Crew Member Jeppson Remembers Famed Flight,” May 25, 2000. 41.  David Remnick, “Hiroshima, With No Regrets,” Washington Post, July 31, 1985; Gordon Thomas, “The Man Who Gazed into Hell . . . , Review,” Sunday Express, July 31, 2005. Tension ran high between Tibbets and Lewis at this point. Lewis objected to the fact that not only was Tibbets flying Lewis’s plane with Lewis’s crew on this flight but Tibbets had named the plane after his own mother. 42.  Wayne Thomis, “Fateful Moment Arrives; Atom Bomb Dropped,” Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1968; Douglas Martin, “Thomas Ferebee Dies at 81; Dropped First Atomic Bomb,” New York Times, March 18, 2000; “B-29 Reunion: Fliers Proud of Job but Regret Need,” 1; Richard Goldstein, “G.W. Marquardt, War Pilot, Dies at 84,” New York Times, August 25, 2003; Mullener, “Pearl Attack Led to Mushroom Cloud for Paul Tibbets,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, online edition), December 6, 2000; Manning. The Little Boy bomb was also occasionally referred to as “Lean Boy” or “Thin Man.” While some still measure the bomb’s force at fifteen kilotons, experts with the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima told me they had raised the official estimate to sixteen kilotons. Some estimates place the bomb’s weight at 9,700 pounds. See, for example, http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/ hiroshima.htm.

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43.  Mullener, “Pearl Attack Led to Mushroom Cloud for Paul Tibbets,” TimesPicayune (New Orleans, online edition), December 6, 2000. 44.  Stephen Walker, Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (New York: Harper Collins, 2005) 260; Van Kirk later downplayed the impact of the shock wave, recalling, it “wasn’t bad—about six Gs. But of course, it gets bigger and bigger with the passing of the years, like all war stories.” Martin, “Dropping the Bomb,” San Francisco Chronicle (online), August 6, 1995. 45.  Sam Heys, “A Fateful Dozen 40 Years Later,” Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution, August 5, 1985. 46.  Torpy, “‘Our Objective Was to Shorten the War’: 60 Years Later, No Regrets over Hiroshima,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 6, 2005. 47.  W. H. Lawrence, “5 Plants Vanished,” New York Times, August 8, 1945. 48.  Lawrence, “5 Plants Vanished,” August 8, 1945. 49.  Richard Goldstein, “Paul W. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92,” New York Times, November 2, 2007; Malnic, “Paul Tibbets, Pilot Who Bombed Hiroshima, Dies at 92,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 2007. 50.  Goldstein, “Paul W. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92,”; Malnic, “Paul Tibbets, Pilot Who Bombed Hiroshima, Dies at 92.” 51. Adam Bernstein, “Paul Tibbets Jr.; Piloted Plane that Dropped First Atom Bomb,” Washington Post, November 2, 2007. 52.  In declining an interview in 2005, Tibbets explained, ‘I haven’t got anything else to add. I’ve only got one story to tell.” Christina Almeida, “Navigator Says ‘Easy Mission’ of Enola Gay Led to End of WWII,” Associated Press (online), August 6, 2005. 53.  Malnic, “Paul Tibbets, Pilot Who Bombed Hiroshima, Dies at 92,” November 2, 2007. 54.  Rodney Chester, “Result Excellent: Mission Over,” Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), August 6, 2005; Jacquin Sanders, “The Day the Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima,” St. Petersburg Times, August 6, 1995; Beser, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Revisited 111. 55.  John Platero, “Retired Colonel Looks Back at Dropping of A-Bomb on Hiroshima,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1982. 56. Manning, “Enola Gay Bombardier Was Quite Cool; Man Slept on Way to Drop A-Bomb,” August 5, 1990. 57.  Churcher and Lowther. 58. Burt A. Folkart, “Co-Pilot on First Atomic Bomb Run Dies,” Los Angeles Times, June 21, 1983. 59.  Niebuhr, “Enola Gay’s Crew Recalls the Flight into a New Era,” August 6, 1995. 60. Walker, Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, 262. 61.  Goldstein, “G.W. Marquardt, War Pilot, Dies at 84.” 62.  Miller and Spitzer, 42–45. 63.  Nigel Fountain, “Obituary: Richard Nelson: The Man Who Told the President about Hiroshima,” Guardian, February 7, 2003.



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64. Paula Kerr, “08:15, Aug 6, 1945: Hiroshima 60 Years On: I Dropped the Bomb; We Vaporised 50,000 People in 43 Seconds Enola Gay Navigator’s Ist,” Sunday Mirror, July 31, 2005. 65.  For the higher estimate, see Walker, 272; Van Kirk wrote “Cloud Gone” in his navigator’s log when they were more than 250 miles away. Jesse Hamlin, “Frozen in Time: Enola Gay’s Navigator Takes Atomic Artifacts to Auction Block,” San Francisco Chronicle (online), May 27, 2002. 66.  Turner, “Only Texas Crew Member Recalls Hiroshima Bombing,” August 6, 1956. 67.  Miller and Spitzer, We Dropped the A-Bomb, 47. 68.  Miller and Spitzer, 48. 69.  Kerr, “08:15, Aug 6, 1945: Hiroshima 60 Years On,” July 31, 2005; Sanders, “The Day the Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima,” August 6, 1995. 70.  Hamlin, “Frozen in Time: Enola Gay’s Navigator Takes Atomic Artifacts to Auction Block,” San Francisco Chronicle (online), May 27, 2002. 71.  Miller and Spitzer, 50. 72.  Henry Allen, “Reunion of the Enola Gay,” Washington Post, August 11, 1980; Michael Olesker, “Jacob Beser Remembered Lives Lost—and Saved,” Baltimore Sun (online edition), June 28, 1992. 73.  Miller and Spitzer, 50. 74.  Thomis, “Fateful Moment Arrives; Atom Bomb Dropped.” 75.  Miller and Spitzer, 57–59. 76.  The best source on this is Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Harvard, 2005). 77.  Robert H. Ferrell, ed. Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1980), 53. 78.  Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 124. 79. Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, 124. 80. Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan, 237. 81.  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 177. The seventh was Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. 82. Beser, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Revisited, 98, note 7. 83.  “Copilot: God Forgive Us,” Dallas Morning News, August 10, 1975. 84.  Cindy Horswell, “Regrets? Yes—But No Guilt,” Houston Chronicle, August 10, 1985. 85.  Frederick Olivi, “Pilot on Plane Which Bombed Nagasaki Recalls Necessity for Using A-Weapon,” Dallas Morning News, August 8, 1960. 86.  John Powers, “A Rain of Ruin,” (Part 2), Boston Globe Magazine, August 6, 1995, 16; Peter Goldman, “Forty Years On,” Newsweek, July 29, 1985. 87. Bartlett. 88. Heys. 89.  Terkel, 53.

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  90.  Mira Oberman, “Pilot of Hiroshima Bomber Dies,” Agence France Press, November 1, 2007.  91. Chester.   92.  “Oliver Kamm: Paul Tibbets and Enola Gay . . . About those Obits,” History News Network.   93.  Bartlett, “Pilot of 1st A-Bomb Plane: Quiet Man with No Regrets.”  94. Niebuhr.  95. Bernstein.  96. Infield.   97.  Eugene L. Meyer, “Target: Smithsonian; The Man Who Dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima Wants Exhibit Scuttled,” Washington Post, January 30, 1995.   98.  “Nazis, Japan both A-Bomb Targets: Pilot,” Japan Times (on line), August 8, 2002.  99. Chester. 100.  Bartlett, “Pilot of 1st A-Bomb Plane: Quiet Man with No Regrets.” 101.  Robert S. McNamara, “We Need Rules for War,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2003. 102.  William Lowther, “It Was the Only Choice,” Herald (Glasgow), August 3, 1995. 103.  Mitchell, “On the Death of ‘Hiroshima Bomb’ Pilot Paul Tibbets,” Editor and Publisher, November 1, 2007. 104.  Mitchell, “On the Death of ‘Hiroshima Bomb’ Pilot Paul Tibbets.” 105.  Vernon Scott, “‘Scott’s World’ A-Bomb Pilot: ‘I’d Do It Again,’” United Press International, November 24, 1980. 106.  Scott Winokur, “Why Dutch Dropped the A-Bomb,” San Francisco Chronicle (online), 4 April, 1995. 107.  Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 230–31. 108.  Bartlett, “The Man Who Dropped the Bomb: Thirty Years Later.” 109. Lee Leonard, “A-Bomb Pilot Recalls Hiroshima 40 Years Later,” United Press International, August 3, 1985. 110.  Bartlett, “Pilot of 1st A-Bomb Plane: Quiet Man with No Regrets.” 111. Mitchell. 112. Meyer. 113.  Terkel, 53. 114.  Lifton and Mitchell, 176. 115.  Scott, “‘Scott’s World’ A-Bomb Pilot: ‘I’d Do It Again,’” United Press International, November 24, 1980. 116.  For a discussion of the deeper consequences of the atomic bombings, see Peter J. Kuznick, “The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative,” Japan Focus, July 23, 2007, http://www.japanfocus. org/products/details/2479. 117.  “Children of Hiroshma,” Irish Times, July 30, 2005. 118.  Martin, “Dropping the Bomb,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 1995.



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119.  Kerr, 40. 120.  Duncan Mansfield, “Enola Gay Navigator Confident in Bomb’s Use,” Associated Press, June 9, 2000 (online). 121.  Martin, “Dropping the Bomb,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 1995. 122. Mansfield, “Enola Gay Navigator Confident in Bomb’s Use,” Associated Press, June 9, 2000 (online). 123.  Martin, “Dropping the Bomb,” San Francisco Chronicle (online), August 6, 1995. When asked, in 2005, by NBC news anchor Brian Williams whether he felt any “remorse,” Van Kirk replied without hesitation, “No, I do not have remorse! I pity the people who were there. I always think of it, Brian, as being the dropping of the atom bomb was an act of war to end a war.” John McCaslin, “Inside the Beltway,” Washington Times, March 30, 2006. Twenty years earlier he had assured a questioner that he had not lost a night’s sleep over the bomb in forty years. Goldman, “Forty Years On,” Newsweek, July 29, 1985, 40. 124.  Eugene L. Meyer, “Comrades in Controversy; Hiroshima, Nagasaki. They Were Just Two Missions,” Washington Post, September 3, 1994. When asked, as he often was, if he would again participate in the atomic incineration of Hiroshima, he responded in 1995, “Under the same circumstances—and the key words are ‘the same circumstances’—yes I would do it again. We were in a war for five years. We were fighting an enemy that had a reputation for never surrendering, never accepting defeat.” “It’s really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence. In a war, there are so many questionable things done.” Niebuhr. 125.  Yee, “Navigator Says ‘Easy Mission’ of Enola Gay Led to End of WWII,” Associated Press (online), August 6, 2005. Nor, apparently, was he ready to disavow the military. At the time of that anniversary, he was trying to convince a grandson to attend the Air Force Academy, but the boy’s parents didn’t want him to join the military in wartime. Torpy. 126.  Kerr, 40. 127. Mansfield, “Enola Gay Navigator Confident in Bomb’s Use,” Associated Press, June 9, 2000 (online). 128.  Martin, “Dropping the Bomb,” San Francisco Chronicle (online), August 6, 1995. 129. Winokur, “Why Dutch Dropped the A-Bomb,” San Francisco Chronicle (online), April 4, 1995. 130. “Richard Nelson, 77, Crewman on Hiroshima Mission in ’45,” New York Times; Fountain. 131.  Sam Heys, “Enola Gay’s Flight Engineer Leads Lonely Life,” Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution, August 5, 1985; Tom Bennett, “Wyatt E. Duzenbury, 79, Flight Engineer on A-Bomb Mission,” Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution, September 2, 1992. 132. Turner, 7; “Radar Operator on Plane that Dropped Hiroshima Bomb Is Dead,” Associated Press (online), July 3, 1984. 133.  “Hiroshima Blast Had ‘Fiery Red Core,’” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1978. 134.  Walker, 318–19.

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135.  “Atomic Bomb Crewman Dies of Leukemia at 46,” Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1967, 2; “Robert Shumard Dead; A-Bomber at Hiroshima,” Washington Post, April 26, 1967. 136.  Beser, 114. 137.  Julie Carr Smyth, “Pilot of Plane that Dropped A-Bomb Dies,” Associated Press, November 1, 2007. 138.  Ferguson, “Enola Gay Crew Member Jeppson Remembers Famed Flight,” Las Vegas Sun (online edition), May 25, 2000. 139.  Walker, 318. 140.  Sam Heys, “An Event that Linked a Crew for Life,” Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution, August 5, 1985. 141. Almeida, “Navigator Says ‘Easy Mission’ of Enola Gay Led to End of WWII,” Associated Press (online), August 6, 2005. 142. Almeida, “Navigator Says ‘Easy Mission’ of Enola Gay Led to End of WWII,” August 6, 2005. 143.  Manning, 1; David Perlmutt, “Enola Gay Bombardier Tom Ferebee Dead at 81,” Charlotte Observer, March 18, 2003. 144.  Bartlett, “Pilot of 1st A-Bomb Plane: Quiet Man with No Regrets.” “Thomas Wilson Ferebee,” San Francisco Chronicle (online), March 17, 2000. 145.  Churcher and Lowther. 146. Platero. 147. Manning. 148. Perlmutt. 149.  Manning; Perlmutt. 150.  Bartlett, “Pilot of 1st A-Bomb Plane: Quiet Man with No Regrets.” 151. Perlmutt. 152.  Clyde Haberman, “Japanese Recall Attack that Wasn’t,” New York Times, August 9, 1985. 153.  “American Bombardier Said Seeking to Visit Nagasaki to Apologize,” Associated Press, July 17, 1985. 154. Horswell. 155.  Lifton and Mitchell, 232. 156.  “Atomic Bomber Dies,” United Press International, March 10, 1989; Horswell. 157.  Miller and Spitzer, 5. 158.  Goldstein, “G.W. Marquardt, War Pilot, Dies at 84.” 159.  Mike Carter, “Survivors of Nuclear Bomber Group to Dedicate Peace Monument,” Associated Press, July 30, 1990. 160.  Goldstein, “G.W. Marquardt, War Pilot, Dies at 84.” 161.  Carter, “Survivors of Nuclear Bomber Group to Dedicate Peace Monument,” Associated Press, July 30, 1990. 162.  Emma R. Stickgold, “Charles Sweeney: Pilot Dropped Nagasaki A-Bomb,” Boston Globe, July 18, 2004. 163.  Powers, 16. 164.  Sue Major Holmes, “Atomic Warfare Unit Reuniting 50 Years after Bomb with US-Enola Gay,” Associated Press, August 3, 1995.



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165.  “Abe Spitzer, B-29 Crewman,” New York Times, May 29, 1984. His brother Murray captured the irony when he said Abe “was killed only two minutes from his home after he survived two of the most dangerous missions in the world.” 166.  Rodney Barker, Hiroshima Maidens: A Story of Courage, Compassion, and Survival (New York: Penguin, 1985), 8–12. During the show, the two hibakusha were displayed from behind a screen and Tanimoto’s wife and four children were brought on stage to surprise him. 167.  I’d like to thank Kondo Koko for sharing this story with me and scores of my students on our trips every summer to Kyoto, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki and for providing me a copy of the This Is Your Life show on which she and Lewis appeared. For her account, see Kondo Koko, Hiroshima: The Memory of 60 Years After the Day (Tokyo: Riyonsha Publisher, 2005), 113–19. 168.  Walker, 318. 169.  Walker, 318. 170.  “The ‘Shroom’: The Odyssey of Robert Lewis’s Atomic Sculpture,” October 11, 2010, http://conelrad.blogspot.com/2010/10/shroom-odyssey-of-robert-lewiss -atomic.html; Folkart. 171.  Ronnie Dugger, Dark Star: Hiroshima Reconsidered in the Life of Claude Eatherly of Lincoln Park, Texas (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1967), 88–89. 172. “Pilot at Hiroshima Finds Guilt Easing,” New York Times, December 20, 1960. 173.  “Raiders Seize Huge Pile of War Supplies,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 2, 1947. 174.  Dugger, 129. 175.  “AF Hero Awaiting his Trial,” Dallas Morning News, March 21, 1957. 176.  James Ewell, “Dallas Store Holdup Denied by Atomic Attack Pilot,” Dallas Morning News, March 15, 1959. Most who met him during these years found him to be sincere and likable. Los Angeles Times news stories reporting his mental problems described him as “pleasant” and “affable.” “Atom Bombers’ Guide Sent to Mental Clinic,” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1959; “Hiroshima Scout Flier Sent Back to Hospital,” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1961. The Dallas Morning News added “amiable.” “VA Hospital Won’t Press for Return of Eatherly,” Dallas Morning News, December 6, 1960. 177.  John Mashek, “War Hero Given Lunacy Hearing,” Dallas Morning News, April 11, 1959. 178.  “Psychiatrists’ Tests Planned for Eatherly,” Dallas Morning News, April 13, 1959. 179.  Hideko Sumimura et al. to Claude Eatherly, 24 July 1959; Claude Eatherly to Günther Anders, August 22, 1959, copies in Burning Conscience: The Case of the Hiroshima Pilot, Claude Eatherly, Told in his Letters to Günther Anders, with a Postscript for American Readers by Anders (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1961), 25–26, 30–32. 180. “Pilot at Hiroshima Finds Guilt Easing,” New York Times, December 20, 1960.

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181.  J. Y. Smith, “C. R. Eatherly, Had Role in Bombing of Hiroshima,” Washington Post, July 7, 1978. 182.  Claude R. Eatherly to Ralph Yarborough, August 10, 1960, copy in Burning Conscience, 84–85. 183.  “Hiroshima Scout Flier Sent Back to Hospital,” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1961; Thomas Turner, “Eatherly Still Mentally Ill, Not Incompetent, Court Says,” Dallas Morning News, 13 January, 1961. 184.  “Hiroshima Pilot Is Under Arrest,” Washington Post, September 27, 1964; “Maj. Eatherly, A-bomb Figure, Judged Insane,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1964. 185.  Bertrand Russell, “Preface,” Burning Conscience. 186.  Foster Hailey, “2,000 March to U.N. to Recall Hiroshima Bombing,” New York Times, August 7, 1962. 187.  Smith, D6; Joseph B. Treaster, “Claude Eatherly, Hiroshima Spotter,” New York Times, July 7, 1978. For a good brief assessment of the Eatherly case, see Lifton and Mitchell, 234–36. For a fuller assessment, see Dugger. 188.  Harden, “Just ‘Doing His Job’ at Hiroshima,” Globe and Mail (Canada, online), August 6, 1985. 189.  “Pilot of Plane that Dropped Hiroshima Bomb Dies,” USA Today (online), November 1, 2007. 190.  Chuck Bell, “Pilot of Enola Gay Denies Remorse Over Bombing of Hiroshima,” Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution, May 20, 1990. 191.  Bartlett, “The Man Who Dropped the Bomb: Thirty Years Later,” 1. 192.  Heys, “A Fateful Dozen 40 Years Later.” 193.  Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, “Hiroshima Films: Always a Political Fallout,” New York Times, July 30, 1995, H9; Lifton and Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, 366. 194.  Above and Beyond (1952, MGM). In 1980, Tibbets discussed the movie with an interviewer, explaining, “That movie was written and produced for the simple reason that the Strategic Air Command was having a high divorce rate because of the demands placed on its people. Gen. Curtis LeMay said we had to make a propaganda film to show that even though it’s tough, people do stay married.” Jerry Buck, “TV Talk: Paul Tibbets and ‘Enola Gay’ on NBC,” Associated Press, May 20, 1980. 195.  J. Anthony Lukas, “Reds in India Assail Hiroshima Pilot,” New York Times, May 17, 1965; “Reports from Abroad,” New York Times, May 23, 1965. The paper described his calm demeanor when he dropped the bomb, observing, “Had he any element of humanity or qualms of conscience, his face did not betray it as he coldbloodedly, brutally released the bomb.” 196.  Goldman, “Forty Years On,” Newsweek, July 29, 1985. 197.  “B-29 Reunion: Fliers Proud of Job but Regret Need.” 198.  Michael Olesker, “A-Bomb Vets Anxious for Sign of Appreciation,” Baltimore Sun (online edition), August 19, 1999; Allen. 199.  “The Outlook Interview: Jacob Beser Talks to Bruce Goldfarb.” 200.  Olesker, “Jacob Beser Remembered Lives Lost—and Saved,” Baltimore Sun (online edition), June 28, 1992.



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201.  Olesker, “Jacob Beser Remembered Lives Lost—and Saved,.” 202.  Beser, 102. 203.  Beser, 102 204.  Beser, 57–59. 205.  Beser, 157. 206.  Heys, “A Fateful Dozen 40 Years Later.” 207.  Beser, 178. 208. Meyer, “Comrades in Controversy; Hiroshima, Nagasaki. They Were Just Two Missions.” 209.  Rudy Abramson and David Smollar, “Inside the Manhattan Project: Bomb Builders Recall Tense Race with Nazis,” Los Angeles Times, August 5,1985. 210. Anthony Fabiola, “60 Years After A-Bomb, Old Foes Meet Over a Deep Divide,” Washington Post, August 7, 2005. 211.  Michael Olesker, “Bomb Dropped Pikesville Man into History,” Baltimore Sun (online edition), August 9, 2005. 212.  Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse Five (New York: Dell, 1968), 14–15. 213.  Ferguson, “Enola Gay Crew Member Jeppson Remembers Famed Flight,” Las Vegas Sun (online edition), May 25, 2000. 214. Manning. 215.  “‘Enola Gay’ Pilot Drops Fake A-Bomb for Show,” Dallas Morning Star, October 11, 1976; John Saar, “Hiroshima Rerun an ‘Insult,’” Washington Post, October 14, 1976; “Hiroshima Protests Show on Atom Attack,” New York Times, October 13, 1976; “U.S. Apologizes to Japan in Reenactment of A-Blast,” Los Angeles Times, October 14, 1976; “Japan Receives Apology for Texas ‘Bomb’ Show,” Dallas Morning News, October 15, 1976. “Repeat Performance Scheduled for ‘Bomb,’” “Dallas Morning News, August 28, 1977; “A-Bomb Reenactment Dropped from Show,” Dallas Morning News, September 29, 1977. The Dallas Morning Star reported a smaller crowd number over 18,000. In Tokyo, twenty-eight-year-old secretary Tanaka Hisako exclaimed, “I’m really angry. It’s ridiculous, racists [sic] and discriminatory. I’m really surprised that people like that still exist in the States.” Saar. 216.  Takahashi Akihiro interview with the author, August 5, 2005 in Hiroshima, Japan. For other accounts see Tanaka Yuki’s introduction to Takahashi’s testimony, which was posted at Visualizing Cultures of MIT: “Introduction to the Testimony of Atomic Bomb Survivor Akihiro Takahashi” in Ground Zero 1945: A School Boy’s Story, https://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/groundzero_2/gz2_essay01.html. 217.  “Postwar 60: Large Gap Between Japanese, Americans on A-Bomb Attacks,” Japan Economic Newswire, July 26, 2005. Akiba Tadatoshi, who went on to become mayor of Hiroshima, served as translator for that meeting and had a less generous view of Tibbets’s response. 218.  Greg Mitchell, “On the Death of ‘Hiroshima Bomb’ Pilot Paul Tibbets,” Editor and Publisher, November 1, 2007. (on line) 219.  Andrea Stone, “A-Bomb Exhibit Cut/ On View: Fuselage of B-29/ Hiroshima Display Ends in Rancor,” USA Today, January 31, 1995. 220.  Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996, 289.

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221.  Harwit, 295. 222.  Thomas B. Allen, “Atomic Bomb Five Decades Later, the Enola Gay Ignites a Dispute in the Ashes of Hiroshima,” Globe and Mail (Canada) (online edition), August 6, 1994. 223.  Meyer, “Target: Smithsonian; The Man Who Dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima Wants Exhibit Scuttled.” 224.  Harwit, 325. 225.  C. J. Clemmons, “WWII Vets Needn’t Apologize, Says Hiroshima Bombardier,” Charlotte Observer, October 16, 1994. 226.  Stone, “A-Bomb Exhibit Cut/ On View: Fuselage of B-29/ Hiroshima Display Ends in Rancor.” 227. Meyer, “Comrades in Controversy; Hiroshima, Nagasaki. They Were Just Two Missions.” 228.  Stone, “A-Bomb Exhibit Cut/ On View: Fuselage of B-29/ Hiroshima Display Ends in Rancor.” 229.  David E. Sanger, “Enola Gay and Little Boy, Exactly 50 Years Later,” New York Times, August 6, 1995. 230. Sanger. 231. Rowan Scarborough, “Smithsonian Opens Enola Gay Exhibit; Veterans Elated with New Show,” Washington Times, June 28, 1995. 232.  “Review of A-Bomb Controversy Sought,” Daily Yomiuri, October 21, 1994. 233.  Isaka Satoshi, “Atomic Bombing Perspectives Roil Emotions, Debate,” Nikkei Weekly, December 12, 1994. 234.  “Enola Gay Pilot Wants Ashes Scattered Over English Channel,” Associated Press, August 8, 2005. For an informed discussion of the controversy surrounding the new exhibit, see, Lawrence S. Wittner, “The Enola Gay Exhibits, the Hiroshima Bombing, and American Nationalism,” Social Alternatives 24(2005), 38–42. 235. Malnic. 236.  “Magazine to Honor Hiroshima Bomber,” Las Vegas Sun (online edition), September 23, 1998. 237.  “Prevent Nuclear War, Hiroshima Pilot Urges,” New York Times, November 12, 1978. 238. Remnick. 239.  Terkel, 54. 240.  Harden, “Just ‘Doing His Job’ at Hiroshima,” Globe and Mail (Canada, online), August 6, 1985. 241.  Bernstein; Terkel. 242. Mike Harden, “Paul W. Tibbets, Jr./ 1915–2007; Pilot Didn’t Regret ABomb,” Columbus Dispatch, November 2, 2007. 243.  Goldstein, “Paul W. Tibbets Jr., Pilot of Enola Gay, Dies at 92.” 244.  Harden, “Paul W. Tibbets, Jr./ 1915–2007; Pilot Didn’t Regret A-Bomb.” 245.  Harden, “Paul W. Tibbets, Jr./ 1915–2007; Pilot Didn’t Regret A-Bomb.”

Chapter Two

Article 9 as Memorial Carolyn S. Stevens

People make sense of their lives through the construction of narrative. We see this in family traditions of telling and re-telling fond stories about children growing up, comic episodes or touching moments in the past which demonstrate an individual’s path from immaturity to full-fledged adulthood. Similarly, citizens might also tell themselves stories of their nation’s transitions, which chart out their collective pathway to a feeling of national belonging. Collective groups tell stories about other nations as well, those that might buttress their ideas about their particular story, versus that of an “other.” These narratives are important on many levels, because they give shape to random events which accrue meaning, both in the moment, over time, and in retrospect. The telling and re-telling stories is the first step in making history, which is both personal and political, and highly contested in many cultures. With regard to national history-making stories, one of the most powerful texts would be a nation’s constitution. A constitution makes its debut as a record of the birth (or, in some cases, the rebirth) of a nation and provides the foundations upon which all other laws of the land rest. The first Japanese constitution, technically entitled the Dai-Nippon Teikoku Kenpō (The Japanese Imperial Constitution) was the first “chapter” in modern Japan’s nation building story. Today it is commonly called the “Meiji Constitution,” named after the emperor’s reign during which it was promulgated in 1889. It told a story of a nation that was focused on the Emperor System (tennō sei), a spiritual-political system that was, in the words of Meiji historian Irokawa Daikichi, “not only the constitutional framework but also the entire constellation of political, economic and educational policies by which the government undertook to rule the people . . . until the end of the Pacific War.”1 51

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At the heart of these policies was the enshrined concept of Japan’s kokutai, which Ishii defines as “the spiritual force behind the activities of the state” and “the principle of national unity.”2 The Meiji Constitution relied on traditional mythological ideas that placed the kokutai in elevated place in the Asia Pacific region, and it was this notion that certainly guided the history of the nation into war, and ultimately to defeat. After their surrender to Allies, Japan’s second and current constitution became Japan’s national story’s second “chapter”; in fact, it was presented to the Japanese Diet as an “amendment . . . by the Emperor’s Order,”3 rather than a complete replacement. The transition from the pre-war to the post-war constitution encompasses both departures and continuities of national identity, with various shades of interpretation providing fine difference in some area. This chapter focuses on the post-war constitution, and on how one particular part of its story serves to memorialize victims of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as remembering those who died overseas. A discussion of the Japanese Constitution in this collection may seem unusual, but there is a significant group of literary and legal scholars who put law and literature together, considering it a nexus “where language, story and human experience meet.”4 The post-war constitution can be viewed as an idealized story, written in lofty language meant to inspire, despite resulting in often impenetrable meaning. When thinking about victims and survivors of the Second World War, the post-war Japanese constitution contains juxtapositions of important ideas with very human experiences. Case in point for this approach is the text for Article 9 of Chapter II of the Constitution of Japan, which is arguably its most famous passage. Like some of the more famous amendments in the U.S. Constitution (such as the First Amendment which guarantees free speech), Article 9 is widely known amongst Japanese citizens merely as daikyūjō (or just kyūjō), its abbreviated numbered title.5 Yet, in high contrast to another famously numbered U.S. law, the Second Amendment (which guarantees an individual American’s right to arms), Article 9 makes Japan the only nation in the contemporary world to “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.”6 Article 9’s endurance, despite opposition from certain Japanese politicians as well as external pressure, arises in part from its function as memorial to both those who suffered and died in Japan and overseas. The renunciation of war is not merely a pledge not to wage war on people in other countries; it is also a vow to never again bring suffering to the Japanese people which would result as retaliation for Japanese military action. This support of Article 9 in Japan stems from the belief that the 2.7 million enlisted and civilian Japanese deaths during World War II7 were related to the Imperial Army’s and Navy’s



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belligerence overseas. By promising never again to wage war outside the nation’s borders, the country is not only protecting its citizens from future harm but it is also recognizing the consequences of engaging in international conflicts which directly resulted in the deaths of millions of its citizens. This memorial and vow, however, is now jeopardized by those who wish to re-write the nation’s story going forward. This can only happen if they also re-write the nation’s past, a highly contested act that must be considered seriously by policy makers, scholars, and lay citizens alike. THE CONSTITUTION AS A NATION’S STORY Undertaking this consideration, however, is not an easy task. The lofty and at times opaque language in Article 9 allows various interpretations of its legal reach. Debates around the interpretation of this article have come up time and time again over the years, particularly during times of security crises: discussions of its limitations were had during the Cold War, the Korean War, the First Gulf War, and the Iraq War.8 Prime Minister Shinzō Abe proposed a bill in 2015 entitled the “The Legislation for Peace and Security” which in fact widened scope for authorities to interpret Article 9.9 Approved some months later, it took effect on March 29, 2016.10 While utilitarians might argue that a re-interpretation of Article 9 is necessary in the contemporary security landscape—after all, Japan is no longer a defeated country under occupation, and times and the balance of power in the Asia Pacific have changed—this view disregards the article’s other meanings. Changes to Article 9 would hamper its function as an apology and a memorial to the war dead, and erase its potential to protect citizens in the future. The passage in itself is rather brief, but before introducing Article 9 as a text it is prudent to embed its meaning within the Preamble. Preambles are often written in lofty terms, and therefore seldom considered to be “legally binding,”11 but they set the stage for what comes below, and help to draw the various chapters and articles that ensue with some thematic unity. In the preceding second paragraph of the Preamble of the Constitution of Japan, we read: 日本国民は、恒久の平和を念願し、人間相互の関係を支配する崇高な 理想を深く自覚するのであつて、平和を愛する諸国民の公正と信義に 信頼して、われらの安全と生存を保持しようと決意した。われらは、 平和を維持し、専制と隷従、圧迫と偏狭を地上から永遠に除去しよう と努めてゐる国際社会において、名誉ある地位を占めたいと思ふ。わ れらは、全世界の国民が、ひとしく恐怖と欠乏から免かれ、平和のう ちに生存する権利を有することを確認する。

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We, the Japanese people, desire peace for all time and are deeply conscious of the high ideals controlling human relationships, and we have determined to preserve our security and existence, trusting in the justice and faith of the peace-loving peoples of the world. We desire to occupy an honored place in an international society striving for the preservation of peace, and the banishment of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance for all time from the earth. We recognize that all peoples of the world have the right to live in peace, free from fear and want.12

The second paragraph of the Preamble clearly states that the Japanese “desire peace for all time,” recognizing this not only for themselves but for ‘all peoples of the world.” This statement gives legitimacy to the following text: 第二章　戦争の放棄 第九条 　日本国民は、正義と秩序を基調とする国際平和を誠実に希 求し、国権の発動たる戦争と、武力による威嚇又は武力の行使は、国 際紛争を解決する手段としては、永久にこれを放棄する。 (2) 前項の目的を達するため、陸海空軍その他の戦力は、これを保持 しない。国の交戦権は、これを認めない。 CHAPTER II RENUNCIATION OF WAR Article 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.13

Despite the stiff and formal language used in both the Japanese and English versions (as in other legal documents), there is always a human side to legal writing; Falcón y Tella writes that “in reality law arises from stories.”14 In the case of constitutions, the creation of the ideal nation must be rooted in a collective experience that resonates with the individual to be effective in representing the nation’s shared story. The language used and the narrative presented in these documents is overtly ideological, but we understand the constitution to be prioritized in the overall legal system, for all new laws (or changing interpretations of existing ones) must not contravene the basic principles of the constitution. Another interesting aspect of constitutional documents is that they work not only to protect the individual rights of the citizens, but they also work to limit the powers of elected leaders and other civil servants. The Constitution of Japan sets out a range of “rights and obligations” for its citizens, but it also outlines processes for its government,



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spelling out what the government can and cannot do,15 preventing individuals from abusing governmental power. Article 9 is such an interesting example of protecting the individual from the state, as the renunciation of war prevents a prime minister and the Diet from unilaterally declaring war on another nation while protecting the citizenry’s right to live in peace. A JAPANESE OR AN AMERICAN STORY? Compared to other nations, there is one major historical irregularity with the current Japanese Constitution: the ongoing debate as to whether or not the current constitution is a truly “Japanese” document, or a watered-down, Americanized description of the ideals of the Japanese nation. Chalmers Johnson, a political scientist and noted critic of U.S. foreign policy, wrote in the most direct terms in 2000: “Japan does not have a history of pacifism, and article nine was actually written for Japan by General Douglas MacArthur’s staff.”16 This statement arises from one of the more controversial questions regarding this piece of writing: who wrote it? After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, both the army and the naval ministries were dissolved, as “demilitarization” was a key directive of the U.S. led occupation.17 The Allies posed three foundational concepts for the new system: “the people are sovereign, the state is pacifist, and respect for the individual’s freedom and . . . human rights.”18 These three concepts were distinct from those found in the Meiji Constitution, which focused on the Emperor System, the ideology that governed both the domestic polity as well as dictated its international policy. The Meiji Constitution expressed only limited expressions of individualism by law, while the emperor exercised divine rule with the “aid of public consultation”;19 this kind of structure was clearly out of line with the liberal democracy that the Allies were eager to establish in Japan. General MacArthur’s office, General Headquarters of Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (hereafter, GHQ), was tasked with “amend[ing]” in September of 1945.20 As noted above, the post-war constitution of Japan is said by many to be a “top down,” American-authored document. Archivists at Tokyo’s National Diet Library state that the early “origins of Article 9” are recorded in the “MacArthur Notes” dated February 3, 1946, which read: War as a sovereign right of the nation is abolished. Japan renounces it as an instrumentality for settling its disputes and even for preserving its own security. It relies upon the higher ideals which are now stirring the world for its defense and its protection.

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No Japanese Army, Navy, or Air Force will ever be authorized and no rights of belligerency will ever be conferred upon any Japanese force.21

But there are other contributors to the story of Article 9 to be recognized. Historian Klaus Schlictmann has called the then prime minister, Shidehara Kijurō, the “originator” of Article 9.22 A career diplomat, he proposed the constitutional renunciation of war (as well as forgoing the Emperor System). Shidehara met with MacArthur for the first time on October 11, 1945,23 a date which amply precedes the “MacArthur Notes,” acknowledging Shidehara’s influence on this document.24 His efficacy as an early Japanese pacifist, however, was muted in subsequent accounts, and this is because his cabinet held a generally “negative view of constitutional reform.”25 Furthermore, it has been said that even some of the GHQ staff thought that the renunciation of war was also “unrealistic.”26 These various accounts cloud the issue of whether or not the renunciation of war as a constitutional article was initially Shidehara’s idea, MacArthur’s idea, or a combination of the two. The ongoing debate over the initial authorship is particularly important here because it has strongly colored interpretation of the text, and the potential for constitutional amendment, as we will see below. After these initial meetings, Shidehara appointed Matsumoto Jōji to chair the “Constitution Research Committee” in October 1945, and at first the group worked on their drafts separately from the GHQ.27 Matsumoto’s committee presented a draft to MacArthur which was read as more of a series of amendments of the Meiji Constitution than as a truly new document. This version was dismissed by the GHQ and MacArthur, who then instructed his office to draft a new version, and it was this version that clearly incorporated Prime Minister Shidehara’s proposal for the renunciation of war. Subsequently, further drafts were passed between the GHQ and Matsumoto’s office throughout February and March 1946, as Japanese bureaucrats and GHQ staff debated aspects of the language used. In the end, the approved version was closer to the original GHQ draft than it was to any of the Matsumoto drafts,28 which is why some claim it is not a truly Japanese legal document. Critics of the final version have pointed to the fact that some of Matsumoto committee’s input was overruled by the GHQ in the middle and latter stages of the drafting, but given the date of the first meeting of Shidehara and MacArthur, it is possible that the renunciation of war aspect of the final constitution was not an “American” inclusion. In fact, with regard to Article 9, it is possible to conclude that aspects of the prototype created by GHQ were in response to the regressive draft from the Matsumoto’s “Constitution Research Committee,” which demonstrates that ideological divisions within the Japanese cabinet constitute another factor in the authorship controversy.



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ARTICLE 9’S STORY OVER TIME Johnson’s claim that there is nothing inherently pacifistic about the Japanese should be tempered with historical evidence. In the long view, Japanese history has seen much conflict, but it is important to remember that Article 9 was not written during Japan’s medieval period, or even in early modernity; at the time it was written, it was fully embedded in the Japanese people’s contemporary experience. As Beer writes, “Japan’s pacifism grew . . . less from ideas than as a reaction to historic national tragedy.”29 While the Japanese people’s experience of the war included multiple groups of people with various experiences—ranging from deployment to a violent battlefield, to conventional bombing and serious illness and death arising from scarce resources—there is no more dramatic victimhood than those of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the occasion of the atomic bombings in August 1945. The singularity of this group of Japanese people’s experience arguably gave rise to a singular constitution. Johnson sees Article 9 as having an important restorative function in Japan’s international relations, acting as apology to the international victims of Japan’s military: Japan’s peace constitution was a different way of apologizing from Germany’s, reflecting the fact that Japan did not have immediate borders with the nations it had victimized; but official pacifism was widely accepted within and outside Japan as a fundamental precept of Japanese foreign policy.30

However, I believe it is equally important to view Article 9 as an apology to the Japanese people, for the decisions of the military and civil governments which harmed both overseas people and the Japanese citizenry. As per Johnson’s phrase, one of the reasons Japan’s “official pacifism” took hold so deeply is connected to the Japanese experience of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Given this interpretation, it is possible to view Article 9 as not only a Japanese document in terms of authorship but also in terms of intent. Article 9 protects the Japanese people from revisiting their years as a militaristic society. This interpretation allows us to view the “peace constitution” less as an externally enforced one and more a promise from the Japanese government to the Japanese people to protect them from the horrors visited upon them in the 1940s, and nurture them in the future. Just as the interpretation of authorship and intent can be debated, there were further questions about the article’s boundaries. How far does the language reach in real-life situations? Many have pointed out the nebulous line that can be drawn between belligerent aggression towards another sovereign state and self-defense. These kinds of questions arose early in the constitution’s

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formation. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, who succeeded Shidehara in 1946, responded to questions from Diet that same year on this, and defended Article 9 in this way: Regarding the article of the draft constitution concerning renunciation of war, it looks as though you think war based on the self-defense right is justifiable, but I think it is harmful to admit such a thing . . . To acknowledge and justify war in self-defense would only serve to invite another war and would be harmful and unprofitable.31

As a document, the Japanese Constitution has shown some durability; the current constitution has never been formally amended (disregarding the gesture that the current constitution was an “amendment” to the pre-war one). This is because the Americans wrote it in such a way that it would be extremely difficult to do so,32 embedding certain safeguards against the potential that the Japanese government would overturn reforms soon after the occupation ended in 1952. Specifically, the difficulty in amending the constitution comes from the high bar set for agreement: one needs two-thirds’ majority in both houses, as well as a majority voting in a special referendum.33 Therefore, to amend Article 9, the Japanese cabinet needs a high level of direct agreement from politicians (as well as the expected approval of their constituencies). Another important aspect of Article 9 is its perceived connection to another legal document, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (often referred to as Anpo as a contraction of the first syllables of the terms anzen and hoshō in the Japanese title Nippon-koku to Amerika-gasshūkoku to no Aida no Sōgo Kyōryoku oyobi Anzen Hoshō Jōyaku). First signed in 1952 and revised and extended in 1960, the Treaty ended the occupation but made provisions for long-term stationing of American military forces in Japan. This meant that, in most cases, the defense of Japan’s sovereignty would be in the first instance unilaterally defended by the United States.34 In some interpretations, the Treaty bolsters the “peace constitution” of Japan because it puts in place a practical defense for Japan (and for U.S. national interests in the region); this allows a state of “demilitarization” to continue whatever regional instability might come. As noted in the introduction, 2.7 million Japanese died due to World War II, but the most dramatic events of the war for the Japanese (and the rest of the world) were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While other chapters in this collection focus on the atomic bomb survivors’ witness of death, destruction and survival in more detail, here I include hibakusha views in support of the Japanese Constitution, reminding us that Article 9 remains important to those surviving the atomic bombings, and to their descendants,



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in the fervent wish that that nuclear war would never be revisited upon Japan—or anywhere else—again. The subcommittee of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations (Nihongensuibakuhigaishadantaikyōgikai, or more briefly, the Nihon Hidankyō) published a number of views from hibakusha on the meaning of Article 9 in 2008. While the language used in these testimonials is not as flowery and grand as the language in Article 9, their stories give the abstract notions presented in the constitution flesh and blood meaning. A recurring theme in these testimonials is the phrase “never again” (sensō wa nido to shinaide).35 One of the hibakusha contributors notes that the bomb was dropped after an act of “aggression by the Japanese,” and he understands that 80 percent of East Asians are “glad” that Japan was bombed. This lingering resentment serves as a reminder to him that “both invasions [of other countries] and atomic bombings are both unforgivable.”36 Other themes include “let us be the last [generation] to suffer” (watashitachi no kurushimi wa watashitachi o saigo ni); “reflecting on / being remorseful about war” (sensō no hansei ni tatte); and most clearly, “only through Article 9 is our peace protected” (kyūjō de koso heiwa wa mamoreru).37 One important point in this collection is brought up by an elderly woman, who now resides in Fukuoka, who says that she believes America is behind the push to change Article 9, and the so-called “Constitutionalists” are being swayed by their words.38 This link has some history: as early as August 1950, with the Korean conflict underway, the United States noted that as Japanese sovereignty was returned, “Japanese security forces should be gradually increased and appropriately armed.”39 (Recent American leaders have not been very outspoken on this issue, but this could be a future policy shift as Donald Trump made comments during his campaign calling for increasing Japanese contributions to security in the region.)40 At that time, the right in Japan were uncomfortable with the lingering occupation-like status limiting their national sovereignty, while leftist activists also bristled at the constitutional and treaty requirements that Japan necessarily align its interests with that of the United States.41 But Miller notes that the majority of Japanese citizens did not align themselves simply with a politically left or right position; instead “many Japanese hoped the occupation had opened the doors to a very different kind of future,”42 where war was a thing of the past. To most, Article 9 was not a story about political affiliation, but about a “sincere” desire for “an international peace based on justice and order,” as per the article’s wording. This depoliticized view was more philosophical than strategic. Inamori Kazuo, noted philanthropist and founder of Kyocera (as well as serving as the chairman of Japan Airlines), has written on the ethical implications of Article 9, questioning the idea of “defending national interest” as an often “arrogant” enterprise

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that does not take into account the interests and well-being of others.43 In this sense, the story of Article 9 is not only a memorial to the past suffering of the Japanese and overseas peoples, but a reminder for future decision making to consider humanitarian principles in interpreting the law. CONCLUSION44 Whose story is at the “heart” of the post-war Japanese constitution? In the post-war period, Japanese people have consistently supported Article 9; their “sincere aspiration for international peace” is motivated surely by a hatred of war given their hardships during and immediately after World War II. But how pacifist is this story? Beer believes the Japanese Constitution is only “quasi-pacifis[t]” as the article is only applicable to international conflict, disregarding domestic affairs where the state might act in violence against residents.45 Furthermore, despite its self-proclaimed title as a “peace constitution,” there is some irony in the fact that Japan has one of the largest militaries in the world.46 Recent developments in the region—such as the rise of Chinese influence and the increasing isolation of North Korea—as well as increasing fears of global terrorism related to the “Islamic State” and the Russian “consolidation” of the Crimean peninsula have caused many to actively entertain change.47 It is possible to think of these developments as pressuring Japan to change its story in the future, through changing the constitution. Just as the Meiji Constitution had created a narrative focused on the kokutai motif, the current constitution’s defining characteristic—peace—is seen by some as no longer relevant to the current global environment. The new normalization narrative directly challenges our interpretation of the story of Article 9 as memorial, but some say this is a “basic trend” in “Japan’s defense posture” that has been gathering momentum over many years.48 In recent years, politicians, avoiding the nomenclature of “amendment,” instead call for new “interpretations,” such as those that allowed Japanese Self-Defense Forces troops to go to Cambodia as part of a UN peacekeeping mission in 1991, and to be deployed in Iraq in 2004–2006 for “non-combat” tasks. These challenges were based on the argument that Japan should revise its constitution to pull it into line with other “normal” nations, which are defined by their large military forces. Proponents of constitutional change claim that Japan will never be treated as an equal on the international stage (or free from U.S. influence, for good or for bad) until it abandons this provision. Certainly, the instability regarding the Trump administration fuels this argument. In 2015, the Abe government used its majority in the Japanese parliament’s lower house to expand Japan’s capacity in military action overseas,



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despite the fact that 90 percent of legal scholars polled in 2016 said that the new law is unconstitutional.49 The bill, ironically called “The Legislation for Peace and Security,” was passed by the lower house in July 2015 and the upper house two months later. While Abe calls for “collective defence”— attacks on allies would be considered the same as an attack on Japanese soil—as its main purpose, its most powerful effect would be to wind back Article 9. But the law is vaguely worded—a common pitfall of legal writing, especially in the case of constitutions—so it is unclear how it might be practically implemented, making it easier for the Abe government (or future administrations) to make its own interpretation of the law. Language is important here: Abe’s policy materials constantly refer to Japan as “a Peaceloving Nation” (presumably to appease his critics),50 but he also argues that changes in the global environment—including technological advances that make borders more unstable—mean that Japan’s policy must change. These policy papers go on to state that the U.S.—Japan military alliance will not only continue, but will be strengthened; interestingly, these policy documents refer to the U.S. forces in Japan (USJF) as necessary for “maintaining . . . deterrence,” which opens up an interpretation that Abe’s expanded interpretation of Article 9 is not just to bolster the USJF but to create a new line of Japan’s military influence in the region. The Abe government’s re-writing of the narrative of post-war Japan can also interpreted as a simple reflection of a new nationalism in Japanese society. To mark the national holiday Constitution Day on May 3, 2017, Mainichi Shimbun published results of a survey stating that 48 percent of the Japanese now approve of constitutional reform, but it is important to clarify that specifically, support for a change to Article 9 sits at 30 percent while 46 percent oppose a change to Article 9.51 Tsuneoka Setsuko, who teaches at a women’s college in Japan, has noted that some of her students are questioning the constitution as “too optimistic,” while others say it is an important “symbol that shows how Japan became a peaceful country after the war, and thus Japanese people should support it.”52 The latter view here provides contemporary evidence of the memorializing function of this aspect of the constitution. If Abe’s “normalisation” becomes Japan’s new national narrative, it will undermine the hopeful story that has been told in classrooms and at rallies and memorial services since 1945. “Normalisation” strengthens the rightwing narrative that claims self-protection as a justification for expansion. All too easily, overseas military ventures could be justified as essential for deterrence and self-defense. But normalization proponents also appeal to the public’s sense of national pride in terms of authorship, rather than military prowess: it is not really a “Japanese” document, they say, but an American authored one. But this argument stating that the constitution (and Article 9) is

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not really Japanese is not valid, however, if we consider the initial discussions by Shidehara and MacArthur. Disagreements within Shidehara’s cabinet do not necessarily make Article 9 an American, “imperialist” law, but instead reflect the diversity of opinions in a collective, which is an entirely “normal” state of affairs. Many of us charged with writing and teaching narratives of post-war Japan have recognized the power and logic of the peace narrative, and sought to refine and deepen it in our understandings of not only military history, but of wider values in Japanese society, past, present and future. The emerging narrative undermines core understandings, not just of the Japanese, but also of the Asia-Pacific and indeed of human history. NOTES  1. Daikichi Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period, trans. by Marius B. Jansen, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 245.   2.  Ishii cited in Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period, 247.   3.  Sayuri Umeda, “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution,” 5.   4.  Lenora Ledwon, “Preface,” in Law and Literature: Text and Theory, ed. Lenora Ledwon (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2015), ix.   5.  This article is also sometimes referred to as kempōkyujō (Constitutional Article 9) as per Yoshinobu Kanda, “Kokusai heiwa to yūtoku” [International peace and virtue], Kagoshima Daigaku Inamori Akademi Kenkyū kiyō. 7 (2016), 36.  6. e-Gov, Nipponkokukempō; Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, “The Constitution of Japan” (online sources). Legal scholars have called this aspect of the constitution “unique” compared to other nations; Umeda, “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution,” 1.   7.  Umeda, “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution,” 12.   8.  Jennifer M. Miller, “The Struggle to Rearm Japan: Negotiating the Cold War State in US-Japan Relations,” Journal of Contemporary History 46.1 (2011): 87ff; Umeda, “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution,” 10, 20ff.   9.  For more on this, see Carolyn Stevens and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Reclaiming Japan’s Peace Narrative,” Inside Story, August 13, 2015. 10. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Japan’s Legislation for Peace and Security,” March 2016. 11.  Umeda, “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution,” 2. 12. e-Gov, Nipponkokukempō; Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, “The Constitution of Japan.” 13. e-Gov, Nipponkokukempō; Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, “The Constitution of Japan.” 14.  María José Falcón y Tella, Law and Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 38. 15.  Carolyn S. Stevens, Disability in Japan (London: Routledge, 2013), 67. 16. Chalmers Johnson, “Dysfunctional Japan: Perspective of the JPRI,” Asian Perspective 24.4 (2000):10. This interpretation needs to be carefully considered,



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however, as it is at the heart of right wing groups’ argument for rewriting the constitution. 17. John Dower, “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems: External Policy and Internal Conflict,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 7. 18.  Lawrence W. Beer, “Peace in Theory and Practice Under Article 9 of Japan’s Peace Constitution,” Marquette Law Review 81.5 (1997–1998): 818, emphasis added. 19. Irokawa, The Culture of the Meiji Period, 253. 20.  Umeda, 4. “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution.” 21.  National Diet Library, Japan, “MacArthur Notes.” 22.  Klaus Schlichtmann, Japan in the World, 62 n203. 23.  “1–20 Conference Between Prime Minister Shidehara and General MacArthur.” 24.  Umeda, “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution,” 6–7. 25.  National Diet Library, Japan, “Outline.” 26.  Umeda, “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution,” 7. 27.  Umeda, 4–5. 28.  Umeda, 5. 29.  Beer, “Peace in Theory and Practice Under Article 9 of Japan’s Peace Constitution,” 818. 30.  Johnson, “Dysfunctional Japan: Perspective of the JPRI,” 10. 31.  Umeda, “Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution,” 9. 32.  Umeda, x. 33.  Beer, “Peace in Theory and Practice Under Article 9 of Japan’s Peace Constitution,” 820. 34.  Miller, “The Struggle to Rearm Japan,” 88–89. 35.  Nōmoa Hibakusha Kyūjō no kai (eds.), “Watashi ga Kempōkyūjō o taisetsu ni omou wake,” 2. 36.  Nōmoa Hibakusha Kyūjō no kai (eds.), 2. 37.  Nōmoa Hibakusha Kyūjō no kai (eds.), 2, 5, 6. 38.  Nōmoa Hibakusha Kyūjō no kai (eds.), 5. 39.  This phrase comes from a memorandum by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Omar Bradley, cited in Miller, “The Struggle to Rearm Japan,” 87. 40.  Shunji Taoka, “Trump’s Threat to Charge Japan More for U.S. Forces: Taoka Shunji says ‘Let them leave.’” The Asia Pacific Journal 15.1.5 (2017). 41.  Shunji, “Trump’s Threat to Charge Japan More for U.S. Forces: Taoka Shunji says ‘Let them leave,’” 89. 42.  Shunji, 94. 43.  Inamori cited in Kanda, “Kokusai heiwa to yūtoku” [International peace and virtue], 36. 44.  Some ideas in this section arise from my co-authored essay with Tessa MorrisSuzuki (2015). I thank her for her inspiration. 45.  Beer, “Peace in Theory and Practice Under Article 9 of Japan’s Peace Constitution,” 815. 46.  Kenneth L. Port, “Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution and the Rule of Law.” Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law 13 (2005):129.

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47.  Masahiko, Sasajima, Anzen hoshō kanren hōsei saikō [Reconsidering Security Related Legislation], Atomigakuen Joshidaigaku Jinbungaku Fōramu 16 (2016): 6. 48.  Adam P. Liff, “Japan’s Defense Policy: Abe the Evolutionary,” The Washington Quarterly 38.2 (2015): 81. 49.  C. M. Rubin, “Japanese Scholars Say No to War,” Huffington Post, July 2015. 50.  Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Japan’s Security Policy,” April 6, 2016. 51. “Kenpō ni sansei 48% kyūjō kaisei hantai 46%,” Mainichi Shimbun. 52.  Cited in Tsuneoka, Takahara, and Sun, “Heiwakempō o kangaeru,” 64.

Chapter Three

Atomic Bomb Literature for Children Kodama Tatsuharu’s The Lunch Box and Shin’s Tricycle Alyson Miller The child occupies a complex space in the memorialization of the A-bomb and its continuing effects. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Memorial Museum are filled with children, both in memoriam and in person. Tributes to figures such as Sadako, whose presence in the park is marked by a monument surrounded by tens of thousands of bright origami cranes, are offset by a more haunting series of artifacts within the museum itself, which displays objects owned by children killed by the nuclear bomb: charred and bloodstained school uniforms, many of which are hand-stitched; a blackened bentō, its contents carbonized but intact; a rusted metal tricycle; a tin filled with the burnt and blistered fingertips of a son who did not return home. The visceral horror of such exhibits is uncannily juxtaposed against the noise and chatter of schoolchildren within the memorial grounds, their class groups denoted by primary-colored caps as they wander the area, armed with clipboards, on educational trips. Their appearance is a stark if not unsettling reminder of the number of children killed by the atomic bomb, many of whom were completing war work in central Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or attending school. That the trauma of their experiences and deaths is represented is a crucial aspect of A-bomb memorialization, and critical to contemporary efforts to ensure such violence does not recur. As this chapter contends, it is often through the narratives both about and for children that the horrors of the atomic bomb are made devastatingly real. In this context, the emergence of atomic bomb children’s literature in Japan in the decades after the Second World War plays an important cultural and historical role. It functions as a caution against the devastation of nuclear warfare, but also as an opportunity to express the extreme violence of atomic destruction, often through the unflinching representation of brutal scenes of annihilation. This chapter explores two examples of such literature 65

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in translation: Kodama Tatsuharu’s storybooks The Lunch Box,1 illustrated by Nagasawa Yasushi, and Shin’s Tricycle,2 illustrated by Obo Makoto. Interestingly, despite the relatively widespread audiences of these narratives, and their translation into English soon after publication, these works have attracted very little scholarship or critical attention. Initially published in Japanese, the stories are based on the deaths of thirteen-year-old Orimen Shigeru, who was killed by the Hiroshima A-bomb whilst completing war work, and three-yearold Tetsutani Shinichi, who was crushed by debris whilst riding his tricycle. As a hibakusha concerned that the realities of atomic war might be forgotten— particularly because of post-war censorship, and anxieties about nuclear warfare being an inappropriate topic for children’s literature—Kodama’s storybooks are graphic and haunting reminders of the need to learn from the past via narratives that confront lived historical realities. Arguably, much atomic bomb literature has been targeted at Japanese audiences, and for a long time, largely ignored in the West due to the dominance of Euro-centric perspectives of the war.3 However, whilst Kodama’s books were initially aimed at educating Japanese children about the horrors of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the A-bomb, the display of Shigeru’s charred bentō and Shin’s rusted tricycle among the artifacts of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum captured the attention and imagination of audiences worldwide.4 Yet unlike the popularity of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes among international readers—a story problematically appropriated by the nonhibakusha writer Eleanor Coerr—Kodama’s narratives have attracted uncertainty and criticism, largely due to the graphic content, and an unwillingness to frame suffering as heroic or romantic.5 This chapter will argue that it is actually due to such an approach that The Lunch Box and Shin’s Tricycle are effective and transformative examples of atomic bomb literature for children. Focusing on the difficulties faced by hibakusha in representing the ineffable, and ideas about the importance of “telling,” this chapter contends that through vivid and abject depictions of trauma, Kodama’s texts offer a vision of the nightmares of war that makes real the devastations of violence, and provide impetus towards a nuclear-free future. NO MORE WORDS: ON REPRESENTING TRAUMA Before examining Kodama’s storybooks, it is important to explore the anxieties associated with atomic bomb literature per se, both for children and more broadly, particularly in terms of complex debates concerning representational silences and narrative co-option. The terror of wartime is arguably always made more poignant by the reality of child victims, who are positioned as



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innocent subjects within the turmoil of adult politics and violence. Hamida Bosmajian notes in relation to historical trauma that “the nightmare of history is de-creation by adults, a nightmare that always includes children” and so affects not just an individual or small group but “the entire social order, its past, present, and future.”6 As a symbol of a denied future, the child in atomic bomb literature is thus often a figure of caution—a provocative “ethical challenge” to remember what will be lost if such destruction were to ever happen again.7 In this context, the issue of the appropriation of Sasaki Sadako’s story by Eleanor Coerr is considerable. As Yurita Makito and Reade Dornan note, because Coerr chose to focalize the narrative through “the eyes of a dying child” in an effort to mitigate the “highly charged” story of Hiroshima’s destruction, it “neither interrogates nor critiques how the necessity for the atomic bomb could have been avoided.”8 This is a crucial absence, given the urgency with which hibakusha narratives reiterate the need for peace, and for “the world to remember.”9 It is also significant that in gaining such a widespread readership, Coerr contributes to the negation of Japanese experiences of the A-bomb, due to the popularity of the text at a time when hibakusha struggled to be heard, and its silencing of Sadako’s family. Further, as Laura Apol et al. contend, the positioning of Sadako as a Japanese child heroine is a “romanticized and westernized” construction10 used to appease non-Japanese audiences by offering a sanitized vision of nuclear destruction, giving “the impression that the effects of war were something that happened in the past rather than an ongoing tragedy that continues to affect people in Japan.”11 The focus on Sadako as a heroine of “beauty and hope”12 has thus proven painful to Japanese writers, whose own works “portray the horrors of the A-bomb in more graphic terms for young readers” in order to emphasize that “a repeat of such massive destruction is unthinkable.”13 Alternatively, the horrific realities that surround Sadako Sasaki’s memorialization have been idealized to suit the sensibilities of non-Japanese (child) audiences. As Apol et al. conclude: Rather than portraying the Sasaki’s post-war life as one of struggle and poverty (which sources indicate was the case), Coerr’s story . . . opts instead for a depiction of recovery, healing and—especially through the death of Sadako—beauty and hope . . . [D]ying beautifully is one of the happiest things in Japanese culture, and Sadako’s is a beautiful and romanticized death, a portrait of love and warmth and peace.14

The sanitization of Sadako’s horrific death might suggest one of the reasons why there is such a limited distribution of atomic bomb literature outside of Japan, as it reveals a Western reticence to grapple with the actual effects of the nuclear bombing. Unlike the Holocaust, the dropping of the A-bomb

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implicated those who might otherwise have decried its occurrence and devastation. Such silence persists: in 1995, for example, there was a controversy in the United States concerning a Smithsonian exhibition designed to celebrate the fiftieth year of Japan’s surrender. Historians and museum staff, wanting to acknowledge the human cost of the A-bomb, included an image of Orimen Shigeru’s carbonized lunch box. In its suggestion of American responsibility for deaths of children, the image caused a furor which went viral before a Senate resolution condemned the exhibition in its entirety. As Mark Selden argues, “the lunchbox had the symbolic capacity to undermine the national narrative of patriotism, power and honor by calling to mind the bomb’s victims,” and thus it was removed.15 The effect of these representational silences outside of Japan, John Dower contends in Children of the Atomic Bomb, is that “half a century later, Nagasaki is barely remembered outside of Japan as the target of the ‘other’ bomb. Hiroshima itself exists in memory, if at all, as little more than a towering, symmetrical, even aesthetically pleasing, mushroom cloud.”16 Yet as the exhibition and the success of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes suggest, such a loss of memory is arguably less a case of Japanese silence than one of selective Western deafness. Nonetheless, such a conceptual transformation—from horror to “aesthetically pleasing”— has resulted, like the sites and artifacts associated with the Holocaust, in what John Lennon and Malcom Foley term “dark tourism,”17 or what Anne Rothe describes as “trauma-and-recovery-kitsch.”18 This is signaled, for example, by Hiroshima’s range of Hello Kitty atomic bomb memorial merchandise, which is adorned with images of the Genbaku Dome, paper cranes, and the Peace Park cenotaph. Violence and trauma undoubtedly present precarious spaces when it comes to representation; as John Whittier Treat notes in Writing Ground Zero, the “perennial quandary is not that reality is an illusion of words, but that words can do no more than make reality illusionary,” and thus, it follows, not real.19 In this context, it makes sense that so much of atomic bomb literature is focused on the testimonial or on non-fiction forms, even in genres such as poetry and manga. While these modes rely on a complex layering of the fictional and the non-fictional, and often involve political content, they remain strongly connected to the experiences of survivors. The hibakusha manga artist Nakazawa Keiji, for example, published both fictional and non-fictional narratives concerned with his survival of the Hiroshima A-bomb—Ore wa Mita/I Saw It 20 is explicitly biographical whereas the enormously successful Hadashi no Gen/Barefoot Gen21 series involves a fictionalized account of the same experiences, yet arguably more harrowing than Nakazawa’s own and with the addition of a scathing critique of Japanese militarization. In both instances, Nakazawa Fumizawa is viewed as possessing the right to speak; as



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Hiroshima author Takaichi argues, the nuclear bombing “was a primal event that denies all but other hibakusha its vicarious experience.”22 As a result, the narratives aimed at children are often pared-back versions of hibakusha experiences or testimony that speak of the horrors of nuclear war and the need to ensure such violence is never repeated. The earliest published children’s book on the atomic bomb is Minami no Kaze no Monogatari (A Tale of South Wind, author unknown), published in 1961, whilst others include Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), Hiroshima no Pika (The Flash of Hiroshima),23 Hiroshima no Uta (A Song of Hiroshima),24 My Hiroshima,25 Shin’s Tricycle, The Lunch Box, and Hiroshima: A Tragedy Never to be Repeated.26 Each of these works were initially published in Japanese, and were largely intended for Japanese audiences. While some critics have suggested that “in Japan, the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometimes is evoked in a manner that portrays the Japanese in WWII are mere victims,” used as a way of “forgetting or cancelling out the great suffering the Japanese caused others,” it is important to note that Japan’s atomic bomb children’s literature rarely does so.27 Alternatively, in its attention to the immediacy of devastation, its tendency towards short, fragmented narratives, and the focus on ideas about the futility of extreme violence, it is a genre invested in “cries for sanity and peace.”28 Moreover, each of the works cited is graphic or visual in nature, a key strategy in combating the ineffability of trauma. Importantly, these narratives also draw upon the experiences of specific individuals in order to express ideas about a nuclear-free future, often relying upon micro-narratives rather than meta-discourses about conflict and the ethics of war. In doing so, atomic bomb literature for children is arguably able to “transcend nationalistic history” by focusing “not on the mushroom cloud but on the human agony beneath it.”29 The result is a literature both about and for children that speaks to the horror of nuclear devastation in ways that are transformative, visceral, yet insistently cautionary. “WE HAVE TO MAKE THE WORLD PEACEFUL”:30 SHIN’S TRICYCLE AND THE LUNCH BOX It took over a decade after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first children’s book about the atomic bomb to appear, partly due to censorship by the American occupation forces, but also because nuclear devastation was not seen as appropriate content for young readers.31 As noted, the first children’s book about the A-bomb was Minami no Kaze no Monogatari (1961) whilst other stories started to appear more frequently in the early 1980s, sug-

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gesting not only pragmatic issues about censorship and taboo, but the time needed for hibakusha to be able to process, and later write about, their experiences. As with many survivor stories that emerge from the extremities of war, behind the adaptation of hibakusha experiences into narratives for children is the notion that literature is transformative, and so a medium through which the need for a nuclear- and conflict-free future might be effected. Indeed, Kodama Tatsuharu, the author of Shin’s Tricycle and The Lunch Box, notes that writing the stories of Tetsutani Shinichi and Orimen Shigeru was in the belief that “books can change the world,” yet also in recognition of the reality of time that confronts hibakusha: “teachers today don’t have an experience of war, so books . . . play an important role in getting across the reality of war to children.”32 As a survivor, Kodama’s writing is unusual in that while he directly experienced the devastation of Hiroshima, his narratives tend to the experiences of others from an appropriated point of view, such as Shin’s father in Shin’s Tricycle, for example, and Shigeru’s mother in The Lunch Box. Both John Whittier Treat and Daniela Tan group atomic bomb writers into “generations,” the first of which is represented by “authors who were directly affected, who witnessed the dropping of the bomb themselves”33 and whose work “is to convey the unconveyable, and thus . . . focus on the problems of mimesis and imagination.”34 While the stories of Shin and Shigeru do not “belong” to Kodama, as hibakusha, his imaginative reconstruction (or a re-telling of a telling) enables mimetic texts which are nuanced and sensitive, yet grounded in the horrors of an historical reality. In this way, Kodama’s writing complies with Hiroyoshi Nagaoka’s definition of atomic bomb literature as that which expresses “both the evil of the bomb and the survival of human dignity,” yet it also, perhaps, achieves a way around the difficulties of articulating trauma.35 That is, in choosing the narratives of others before the story of his own experience, Kodama is able to fill an “unspeakable space,” yet maintain a critical—albeit tenuous—distance.36 The Lunch Box describes the death of Shigeru, who was killed by the Abomb in Hiroshima whilst completing war work in the city center. His body was vaporized, and his mother, called by the ghost of her son to the site of his death, finds nothing but “a small round skull . . . bones and ashes.”37 Beside Shigeru’s remains, however, is his tin bentō, the carbonized contents of his lunch still inside. As with other books by Kodama, the story of Shigeru is framed as a flashback from the perspective of a family member—in this case, Shigeru’s mother, Shigeko—but also as a “secret” about the past, the realities of which could not be revealed until the present moment of the telling.38 Despite the claims that atomic bomb literature for children often fails to contain an historical context, Kodama’s narratives often do so self-consciously, albeit succinctly—in The Lunch Box, it is made clear that the death of Shigeru oc-



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curred because “at that time, Japan had started a war,” but it also highlights the futility of such conflict through reference to the propaganda that compelled the Japanese to prepare for conflict, neatly connected to unsettling (but not original) ideas about national responsibility and patriotism.39 As Shigeko explains, “[we] were told that if we lost we would all be killed, and so we only thought about winning. Though it looked like we were going to lose, we were practicing to kill American troops with bamboo spears . . . We were preparing . . . because we were taught that the most, noble, elegant thing is to die for one’s country.”40 The notion of a “noble death” is part of the romanticism associated with figures such as Sadako, however for Kodama, the context is one about the senselessness of war: “It was very pitiful, don’t you think?”41 The accompanying illustration by Nagasawa Yasushi subtly underlines such a questioning, even criticism, of Japan’s patriotic rhetoric. Depicting a crowd of cheering adults gathered before a single solider, the intensity of their energy—arms in the air, national flags and banners held high—is contrasted against the presence of a single child, barefoot and confused, whose Japanese flag is not held skywards, but drops towards the ground. Whilst the historical framing of the narrative is brief—and does not contain detail that might be expected in genres aimed at non-child audiences—it does go further to acknowledge Japan’s participation in the war than has been suggested. In this context, the representation of the deprivations suffered by the Japanese is carefully handled, represented less as a sign of victimhood than as an acknowledgment of the consequences of war. As Shigeko narrates, “the shops did not have anything like fish or meat for sale,”42 and “there was hardly any food . . . the only thing we could do was to plant potatoes in the fields.”43 The scarcity of food functions to reflect the sweetness of Shigeru’s character, which is almost entirely portrayed as helpful, compliant and enduringly cheerful, even whilst exhausted by the demands of wartime labor. As he leaves home on the morning of August 6, for instance, he carries “his lunch box away happily” despite its disappointing contents: “soy bean, barley, and rice mix. There was only a little boiled rice in it and there were no side dishes at all. But even still, he was very happy.”44 Nagasawa’s imagery complements such a depiction, yet with nightmarish overtones: Shigeru is consistently framed in intense white light, and as connected to the natural environment, particularly the earth, a shocking forewarning of his vaporization by the pika-don that leaves only his ashes and bones scattered in the dirt. While it might be argued that such a representation is a strategy to emphasize the Japanese as victims—the cruelty of Shigeru’s death made all the more tragic by his stoicism—such content is underpinned by a more persistent sense of pragmatism. This is made apparent through the contrast of generations in the narrative: the childhood innocence of Shigeko’s present-

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day grandchildren—who initially “giggle”45 and play while she speaks—is juxtaposed against the realities of wartime Japan, in which children such as Shigeru were conscripted into army work: When Shigeru entered Junior High, he was full of enthusiasm, but then there was no time to study. They had to go and knock down houses. Day after day the enemy planes would come and drop bombs, and since the whole city was going to burn, they had to knock down houses to keep the fire from spreading.46

It is also important to note that Shigeko’s grandchildren are secondgeneration hibakusha, yet are ignorant about the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima. Interestingly, as mentioned, the destruction caused by the A-bomb, particularly on a personal or familial level, is represented as a “secret,” something “private,” and a history that has been purposively withheld.47 Such a silencing speaks to the pervasive effects of censorship, but more importantly, to the reluctance of hibakusha in the decades after the bomb to reveal themselves as survivors, largely due to stigmatization and the notion that their bodies carried a “death taint.”48 Junko Morimoto observes how hibakusha internalized such prejudice, noting how “we victims of the bomb never stop feeling we have a sort of poison in us.”49 The ignorance of the children, however, works effectively in terms of signaling the difficulties of representing trauma, especially one that has been repressed or denied. In recognizing their grandmother’s grief, for example, the children are repentant for compelling her to re-live such horrors: “Oh, Grandma, that’s so sad. We’re sorry we bothered you about it.”50 Moreover, their lack of knowledge functions as a catalyst for learning, offering a clear message about the relationship between history and the future, especially in relation to the young. Indeed, the final page of The Lunch Box aligns with notions of hope; before the children leave Shigeko to play, they promise to attend to the lessons of the past: “you know, I still don’t understand many things. I’m really going to study about it, Grandma.”51 In this way, Karin Westman argues, “the child’s position, however fragile and reduced, becomes a metaphor for productive alterity—a way to live in opposition to, rather than in concert with, the ideologies of ‘injustice,’” emphasizing above all the possibilities of hope.52 Hope also functions as a trope in Nagasawa’s illustrations, which mimic Kodama’s narrative framing via the recollections of Shigeko. Set at the beginning of summer, Kodama describes “the white blossoms of hydrangeas” which shine “brightly in the sun,” images of which bookend the narrative.53 Indeed, Nagasawa adopts a clearly oppositional approach to color in which only the immediate aftermath of the A-bomb is depicted in dark and visceral



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tones, redolent of death and violence, of broken and bleeding bodies, as noted below. Elsewhere, even in the moment of Shigeru’s burial, there is an insistence on brightness that suggests the cyclical, in line with the seasonal framing of the narrative and an understanding of eventual rehabilitation and growth. Yet there is also an underlying, and dark, ambiguity at play: the striking reds, yellows, and oranges of the sky whilst Shigeko buries her son, for example, evoke the beauty of what could either be sunrise or sunset, or the literal radiance of Hiroshima as it burns. Similarly, the hydrangea motif appears to work obviously in its connection with Shigeru’s grave, as a marker for his burial, a symbol of innocence (the flowers are “pure white”),54 and a tribute to notions of new life emerging from loss and death. The perfectly round, stark white flowers which bloom so boldly are also doubled or ambiguous in their meaning, suggesting a tender memorial, but also an eerie reminder of the white flash explosion of the atomic bomb, emphasized in the final textual and visual reminders of the book: Shigeko’s grandchildren “run around the hydrangeas” after promising to understand the trauma and devastation of nuclear warfare.55 Criticism of Kodama’s work often focuses on the violence of the narratives, and their graphic illustration—both visually and textually—of the aftermath of the A-bomb. Such gruesome images, however, are arguably a necessity in the representation of atrocity. As Florence Vatan and Marc Silberman argue in Memory and Postwar Memorials, “unlike heroic struggles, military triumphs, and revolutionary victories—privileged hallmarks of national celebrations and grandiose commemorations—traumatic or infamous pasts do not lend themselves to smooth or self-aggrandizing narratives.”56 The Lunch Box does not flinch from such descriptions, detailing how “there were bodies of young girls and Junior High students everywhere. They were burned beyond recognition and they were swollen.”57 Passages concerned with physical trauma are accompanied by paintings that portray the obliteration of Hiroshima, including a badly burnt young woman who grasps onto Shigeko’s foot as she searches for Shigeru.58 The moment in which Shigeko discovers the ashes of her son’s body is depicted literally as Shigeko kneels on the ground above a collection of scattered bones and scorched earth.59 The “flash boom” of the pika-don is dedicated a double-spread that blooms from the center of the book, from which point the colors of the images are decidedly dark; the dominance of red, brown, black, and grey denoting the burnt-out physical space of the city, as well as the charred and broken bodies left in the wake of the bomb’s explosion. In the context of ideas about the ineffability of the atomic bomb, such images offer a mode through which to mitigate the “unconveyable.”

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Kodama is similarly confrontational in Shin’s Tricycle, a narrative which has been described by critics as “grim,” “gruesome” and “disturbing”;60 indeed, Hazel Rochman notes that it is “not a book for small children” while Publisher’s Weekly observes that “because the author doesn’t cushion the horror in his tale” it makes for “harsh fare for young readers.”61 Shin’s Tricycle describes the death of Shinichi, a three-year-old boy who is crushed beneath a pillar after his house collapses in the bomb blast. The narrative is made all the more devastating by its simplicity, with the majority of the story focused on Shin’s desire for a tricycle, even in the immediate aftermath of his injuries: “I lifted the pillar while Grandma pulled on Shin’s legs. Shin was still holding on to the handle grip of his tricycle. His face had blown up like a balloon, and it was bleeding.”62 Shin is buried in the backyard holding hands with his best friend, Kimi, and grasping onto his tricycle, to which he clung until he died. As with The Lunch Box, Shin’s Tricycle depicts a nightmarish vision of Hiroshima in the immediate period after the dropping of the bomb, especially in relation to the rampaging fires and the rush of people toward the river, seeking relief: “Everyone had been burnt and everywhere people were crying, moaning, screaming for water.”63 The evocative description of burning bodies pervades the narrative, underscored by Obo Makoto’s hellish illustrations, in which the yellows and oranges of the burning city are juxtaposed against a haunting frame of blackened, zombie-like bodies moving toward the water. Rochman notes that “although there’s no exploitation, nothing is softened. Shin did not die immediately; he was one of the burning civilians, pleading for water.”64 As Shin’s father, Grandpa Nobuo, realizes, however, the water is irradiated, and so he must deny Shin’s thirst: “I had seen many people die as soon as they had drunk the water, so didn’t give any to Shin.”65 Arguably, such abject representations are a critical part of making real the impact of such violence. While the writing of Kodama and other hibakusha is undoubtedly confronting, not including such descriptions would be to deny the realities of atomic warfare, as well as its generational effects. Defined by Kristeva as that which “disturbs identity, system, order . . . the in-between, the ambiguous,” abjection is a key representational strategy through which hibakusha are able to deny silence in order to bear witness, but also emphasize the power of the atomic threat as the greatest to humanity.66 Abjection in Kristeva’s terms enables a shifting of perspectives, a subversion of established literary and cultural norms to reveal the politics—and the revulsion—of the inside. The small, burnt body of Shin trapped under the rubble is a tiny moment in the midst of a widespread tragedy, and yet it nonetheless encapsulates the destruction of innocence, symbolic of humanity per se as well as the specific loss of a child. The hibakusha poet Kurihara Sadako notes the importance of “returning to the human scale” because the “atomic bombings resulted from



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a dehumanising logic: mankind . . . completely became a machine.”67 And attention to the corpse, the “utmost of abjection,” thus functions as part of the process of “returning to the human,” enabling hibakusha to explicitly reveal the horror of the damage done to the body, which acts as a synecdoche for the nightmare of war.68 Unlike The Lunch Box, which focuses more on the need for the young to learn the lessons of history, Shin’s Tricycle explores the lingering effects of the war, and the trauma carried by hibakusha. Nobuo comments, for instance, that while “the greenery has returned, buildings have risen, and many people want to come here,” Hiroshima remains a place marked by death, its memories haunting those who survived.69 Nobuo can never forget “that Shinichi was buried in the backyard,” still feels “dizzy and sick from the disease caused by the atomic bomb blast,” and when “the weather is fine, [he] remembers the blue sky on that terrible day.”70 While Obo’s accompanying illustration might initially appear cliché—beams of sunlight emerging from dense black clouds, birds soaring towards the newly rebuilt city in the horizon—it is also reversible, understood, too, as a haunting evocation of August 6, 1945, in which a black atomic mushroom cloud broke against perfectly clear blue sky. While dark, ominous colors are dominant throughout each of Obo’s images, such ambiguity is in line with Nagasawa’s aesthetic approach, suggesting an insistence on the complexities of representing the dynamics of extreme trauma. Indeed, the capacity for image and text to be “read” either in terms of recovery and optimism or the persistent nightmare of history is a neat reflection of the connection between the past, present, and future. But it is also indicative of the ways in which Hiroshima becomes split in its signification, a space associated both with total annihilation, and enduring hope for the future. Kodama’s reflections on violence in this moment again adopt a universalizing approach, in which conflict is represented as senseless regardless of its context. Such a perspective is in line with Dower’s comments about the Japanese tendency when speaking about the atomic bomb to attend to the human agony beneath the mushroom cloud, a point of view that relies on the particular in order to appeal to broader concerns.71 This is different, however, to suggesting that the experience of the A-bomb itself is one that can be universally understood, which is an event that will always remain specifically located with hibakusha. Indeed, while Rochman argues that the story utilizes a humanizing approach “to make us imagine what it would be like for people like us,”72 Kodama in fact achieves the delicate representational balance described by Treat—educating and transforming readers about the horrors of atomic warfare, whilst making clear that its experiences remain incomprehensible to those on the outside.73 Nobuo notes, for example, that “wars are

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brutal. I don’t know how many people have died in Asia and throughout the world in the wars started by Japan. No, they didn’t die, they were slaughtered, even children like Shinichi.”74 In this way, Kodama captures a broad anti-war sentiment in the same instance as he identifies the specificity of the atrocities inflicted on Hiroshima. This balance of the particular and the general is articulated most powerfully in the unsettling final pages of the book. Nearly forty years after the devastation of the A-bomb, Nobuo’s house is to be rebuilt, and so he decides to “move Shin to a proper grave.”75 In exhuming the bodies of Kimi and Shin, “a rusty metal pipe [begins] to show,” and the tricycle is unearthed alongside the tiny white bones of the children’s bodies: “Everyone’s eyes were glued to the little white hands of the two children. They were still holding hands.”76 The devastating beauty of the scene is made all the more evocative by the ghostly presence of Shin’s voice: “‘Papa! You’ve gotten so old!’ I felt as if Shin has spoken.”77 The return to the bodies of the children and the tragic symbolism of the tricycle are a reminder of the persistence of trauma. In Kodama’s use of the present day as a framing narrative for the articulation of the aftermath of the bomb, both Shin’s Tricycle and The Lunch Box offer “splinters of reality”78 as well as an insistence on the discontinuity and continuity of history.79 In this context, it is significant that both Nobuo and Shigeko are led to the bodies of Shin and Shigeru via ghostly whispers, the voices of their children a recognition of painful physical and existential realities: their bodies buried in the garden, and the inescapable memory of loss. Yet as with the poignant end of The Lunch Box, in which hope and education prevail, Shin’s death functions as a thread between the closed-off space of the past, and a promise for the future: Nobuo dropped his eyes to his own wrinkled hands. “This should never happen again.” Takuya and Yoshie both nodded. “We have to make the world peaceful so that children can always ride their tricycles and have fun.” The two children stared at the photo of Shinichi, determined to keep that promise.80

Importantly, both of Kodama’s storybooks focus on grandparents providing witness testimony to their grandchildren. The framework of these narratives within a familial setting has echoes of the oral tradition, and the documenting of history via inter-generational storytelling. Both Shin’s Tricycle and The Lunch Box conclude reassuringly, with a commitment to a nuclearand conflict-free future identified as a responsibility of hibakusha as well as those who hear of their experiences. In the context of the difficulties faced by hibakusha in working against the limits of representation and the trauma of re-living the unspeakable, Kodama’s narratives are a gentle reminder of the obligation to tell. As discussed, the challenges of telling are not insignificant. In addition to issues of representation, the post-war treatment of hibakusha



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meant “they were often confronted with a conspiracy of silence; people were not only unwilling to listen to their stories, but often refused to believe the veracity of what they were being told.”81 Resulting in feelings of alienation and betrayal, it took many survivors nearly forty years before they were able to recount their stories publicly.82 In this context, it is thus important that in each text, there is an initial unwillingness to share; indeed, even a refusal to do so decades after the atomic attack. Yet in doing so, the children within the text—and, it is assumed, extra-textually, too—are able to take on some of the burden of the past. As Kodama notes of the schoolchildren who read the story of Shigeru, “some students stare at their lunchboxes afterwards,” the object newly connected with a violent, unshakeable past.83 In Kodama’s texts, while such a weight is treated as substantial, the accompanying images of smiling, happy children, and relieved, tearful hibakusha84 suggests that exposure to a traumatic history is not “too harsh for young readers” but a necessary, even productive, reality.85

ON LINGERING DEATHS: EMBRACING CONFRONTATION Yurita and Dornan have argued that much of atomic bomb children’s literature has “failed” due to its inability to “tell the whole story.”86 The problem, they suggest, concerns both a lack of multiple perspectives and the absence of narratives which offer a “metanarrative that constructs a link among Japanese and American stories, situates them, and creates a more open discussion about the bomb and its causes.”87 Whilst audiences are pushed to “pray for peace,” there has as yet been no literature for children and young adults that provides an “understanding [of] why and how the prayer for . . . peace was broken in the past.”88 Yet as Treat contends, the demands on atomic bomb literature are not inconsiderable, as it functions with the expectation to educate and affect the reader, even “to do so by inflicting a kind of damage,” whilst preventing the reader from taking on that history as their own, or “even fully comprehending it.”89 There can be, of course, no totalizing text, a symptom of the ineffability of nuclear catastrophe, but also of the divisive nature of trauma. In this context, while Yurita and Dornan urge for a more complete and complex atomic bomb literature for children, it is in fact the fragmentary and succinct nature of these narratives that offers such power, and the potential for transformation. Westman notes that “by placing . . . emphasis on the child’s experience within the modern landscapes of war, we can make explicit the transformative, often didactic, ideologies that shape modern life. We are granted license to explore emotional realities, from trauma to renewal, from fear

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to hope—even if that hope is slim.”90 Kodama’s work is attentive to such a trajectory, using nuanced signifiers and careful narrative framing to depict the abject darkness of atomic destruction, and the possibilities of the future. The destruction of innocence is central to such a balance, thus the child—as both focalized and implied reader—becomes a potent symbol of loss, but also reconstruction. In doing so, Kodama insists on the realities of the past both to prevent forgetting, yet also to locate atomic bomb children’s literature within the experiences—and voices—of hibakusha. Unlike Coerr’s Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, which instrumentalized the aftermath of the A-bomb to construct a palatable heroine for overseas audiences, the stories of Shin and Shigeru are haunting and disturbing; comprised of “nightmare scenes” that are visceral and unshakeable.91 Readers of Kodama’s work are thus rarely buoyed by the experience, despite the reassuring narrative endings, which arguably perform as a function of genre rather than an attempt to console. Coerr’s Sadako may die beautifully, but it is the brutality of Shin and Shigeru’s awful, violent deaths that linger. Indeed, Shigeru’s charred lunchbox and Shin’s rusted tricycle occupy an unsettling space in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, functioning as unpalatable reminders of the devastating effects of A-bomb. As fragments of a catastrophe, their narratives speak to the ways in which conflict always involves a loss of innocence, yet through which the horrors of atomic warfare might be grasped—if not ever with full comprehension. In its focus on “the idea that war is the terminal disease of society,”92 atomic bomb children’s literature embraces the confrontational in order to maintain its presence in public memory, representing a refusal to flinch at one of history’s most “unthinkable acts.”93 In doing so, such texts, as Selden argues, constitute “some of the most important contributions to peace thought through the arts in human history.”94 NOTES 1.  Tatsuharu Kodama, The Lunch Box, trans. Andrew Jones & Kazuko HokumenJones (Hiroshima: Chart Institute, 1995). 2. Tatsuharu Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, trans. Kazuko Hokumen-Jones & Jacky Copson (Hiroshima: Chart Institute, 1992). 3.  Makito Yurita and Reade Dornan, “Hiroshima: Whose Story Is It?,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 34.3 (2009): 230. 4.  Hazel Rochman, “Shin’s Tricycle,” Booklist 92.1 (1995): 74. 5.  Eleanor Coerr, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (New York: Puffin, 1977).



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  6.  Hamida Bosmajian, “Nightmares of History: The Outer Limits of Children’s Literature,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 8.4 (1983): 20.   7.  Bosmajian, “Nightmares of History,” 20.   8.  Yurita and Dornan, “Hiroshima: Whose Story Is It?,” 230.   9.  Yurita and Dornan, 230. 10. Laura Apol et al., “‘When Can We Make Paper Cranes?’: Examining PreService Teachers’ Resistance to Critical Readings of Historical Fiction,” Journal of Literacy Research 34.4 (2003): 440. 11.  Apol et al., “‘When Can We Make Paper Cranes?,’” 441. 12.  Apol et al., 441. 13.  Yurita and Dornan, “Hiroshima: Whose Story Is It?,” 230. 14.  Apol et al., “‘When Can We Make Paper Cranes?,’” 442. 15.  Mark Selden, “Bombs Bursting in the Air: The US Firebombing and Atomic Bombing of Japan,” Japan Focus 12.3.4 (2014): 18. 16.  John Dower, Children of the Atomic Bomb (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), viii. 17.  Malcolm Foley and J. John Lennon, “JFK and Dark Tourism: A Fascination with Assassination,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2.4 (1996): 198. 18.  Anne Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 3. 19. John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31. 20.  Keiji Nakazawa, “I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor’s True Story,” Monthly Shōnen Jump, September 20, 1972. 21.  Keiji Nakazawa, “Barefoot Gen,” Monthly Shōnen Jump, June 4, 1973–1985. 22.  Quoted in Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 27. 23.  Toshi Maruki, Hiroshima No Pika (Lothrop: Lee and Shepard, 1982). 24.  Sukeyuki Imanishi, A Song of Hiroshima (Tokyo: Iwasaki Shoten, 1982). 25.  Junko Morimoto, My Hiroshima (New York: Viking, 1987). 26.  Masamoto Nasu, Hiroshima: A Tragedy Never to be Repeated (Tokyo: Fukuinkan Shoten, 1995). 27. Dower, Children of the Atomic Bomb, ix. 28.  Dower, ix. 29.  Dower, ix. 30. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 36. 31.  Yurita and Dornan, “Hiroshima: Whose Story Is It?,” 239. 32.  Quoted in Rie Nii, “The Lunchbox by Toshiharu Kodama,” Peace Seeds 72 (2007), accessed 2 May, 2017, http://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/hiroshima-koku/ en/handingdown/index_20100614.html. 33.  Daniela Tan, “Literature and the Trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Japan Focus 12.40.3 (2014): 2. 34. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 21. 35.  Quoted in Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 20. 36. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 30.

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37. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 23–24. 38. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 6. 39. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 6. 40. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 10. 41. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 8. 42. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 6. 43. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 11. 44. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 12. 45. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 8. 46. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 8. 47. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 4. 48.  Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 111. 49.  “Junko’s Story: Surviving Hiroshima’s Atomic Bomb,” SBS, 2017, accessed April 10, 2017, http://www.sbs.com.au/hiroshima/. 50. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 26. 51. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 28. 52.  Karin E. Westman, “‘Forsaken Spots’: At the Intersection of Children’s Literature and Modern War,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 34.3 (2009): 215. 53. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 3. 54. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 28. 55. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 28. 56. Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan, “Introduction—After the Violence: Memory,” in Memory and Postwar Memorials: Confronting the Violence of the Past, ed. Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 2. 57. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 20. 58. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 20. 59. Kodama, The Lunch Box, 24. 60.  Rochman, “Shin’s Tricycle,” 74. 61. “Shin’s Tricycle,” Publishers Weekly, 230. 62. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 20. 63. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 24. 64.  Rochman, “Shin’s Tricycle,” 74. 65. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 26. 66.  Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. LS Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 67.  Quoted in Edward. A. Dougherty, “Memories of the Future: The Poetry of Sadako Kurihara and Hiromu Morishita,” War, Literature & The Arts 21.1 (2011). 68. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 4. 69. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 32. 70. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 32. 71. Dower, Children of the Atomic Bomb, ix. 72.  Rochman, “Shin’s Tricycle,” 74. 73. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 33. 74. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 30.



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75. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 32. 76. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 34. 77. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 34. 78.  Tan, “Literature and the Trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” 3. 79. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 19. 80. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 36. 81.  Aiko Sawada, Julia Chastin, and Dan Bar-On, “Surviving Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Experiences and Psychosocial Meanings,” Psychiatry 67.1 (2004): 48. 82.  Sawada, Chastin, and Bar-On, “Surviving Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Experiences and Psychosocial Meanings,” 48. 83.  Quoted in Nii, “The Lunchbox by Toshiharu Kodama.” 84. Kodama, Shin’s Tricycle, 36; Kodama, The Lunch Box, 28. 85. “Shin’s Tricycle,” Publishers Weekly, 230. 86.  Yurita and Dornan, “Hiroshima: Whose Story Is It?,” 235. 87.  Yurita and Dornan, 238. 88.  Yurita and Dornan, 235. 89. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 33. 90.  Westman, “‘Forsaken Spots’: At the Intersection of Children’s Literature and Modern War,” 215. 91.  Rochman, “Shin’s Tricycle,” 74. 92.  Yurita and Dornan, “Hiroshima: Whose Story Is It?,” 233. 93.  Yurita and Dornan, 220. 94.  Selden, “Bombs Bursting in the Air: The US Firebombing and Atomic Bombing of Japan,” 11.

Chapter Four

Fading Lights Digital Visualization and the Legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Mick Broderick Such is the power of the atomic bombings that, more than seven decades after their use at the conclusion of the Pacific War in August 1945, those who contemplate a visit to either Hiroshima or Nagasaki are often met with curious questions concerning lingering radiation and personal safety. For tourists who do manage to visit either city their sense of bewilderment or estrangement can be striking.1 The historical accumulation of imagery of atomic holocaust, erasure, and dread is commonly juxtaposed against encountering energetic and bustling urban locales comprising over a million people, with residents going about their daily business as with any other Japanese or international city.2 For post-war generations, especially those born during the cold war, “Hiroshima” and “Nagasaki” have stood metonymically for a potential fate awaiting us all—either incomprehensible and instantaneous annihilation or the slow, painful death from mass physical and psychological trauma and/or radiation effects. Less understood in this nuclear episteme has been the intergenerational impacts and legacy of survival, paradoxically including guilt and shame, where children and grandchildren inherit the stigma of hibakusha status with fears and uncertainty over ongoing genetic damage. Pre-disposed towards a cultural imaginary of catastrophe and annihilation drawn from countless press accounts, television documentaries, books, and feature films, it is little wonder that naïve expectations collide with the urbane banalities of metropolitan life in these cities. Much of this phoenix-like reconstruction occurred under the occupation years as a policy of Cold War expediency, wherein the disarmed imperial war-fighting machine could be pressed into commerce and trade. It also meant defeated and disarmed Japan provided a compliant and strategic land mass for American and UN military interventions in Korea and Southeast Asia, while enabling nuclear strike delivery 83

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into Russia and China. Mostly forgotten in the principal victor’s geopolitical maneuvering was a key raison d’être of the other Allied troops’ involvement, the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF) stationed throughout Japan from 1946–1952. Comprised chiefly of forty-five thousand Australian, British, New Zealand, and Indian troops, BCOF not only helped Japan disarm but it assisted with the physical rebuilding of the nation.3 POPULAR CULTURE (MIS)REMEMBERING In recent years mainstream cinema has touched on this wartime history in brief character vignettes and disparate scenes ranging from the fictitious reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes and a second generation Japanese scientist, through to imaginary and “real” American POWs. Perhaps the most startling example—both for its spectacle as well as its “Hollywoodized” factual inaccuracies and improbable action—is the depiction of the Marvel franchise anti-hero, The Wolverine (2013),4 held prisoner during World War II at a camp across from Nagasaki harbor. During an air raid alert where two low-flying bombers pass over the city a junior Japanese officer, Ichirō Yashida (Hiroyuki Sanada), attempts to free Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) from a deep pit where he has been kept in solitary confinement. As the planes circle, the remaining Japanese officers kneel inexplicably and commit seppuku. However, the now freed mutant Wolverine prevents Yashida from similarly committing hara-kiri and shelters the officer from the atomic heat and blast effects inside the same prison pit. The scene vaguely alludes to the Fukuoka No. 2 POW Camp at Koyagi Island approximately 10.5 kilometers from the

Figure 4.1.  Nagasaki in flames, as seen from nearby POW camp in The Wolverine (2013).



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Nagasaki hypocenter, a facility that serviced the Kawanami Brothers Shipbuilding Company during the war. In reality, the Allied prisoners (Dutch, American, Australian and British) were housed on the opposite (southern) side of the island with no view of Nagasaki harbour, though they were connected by a large tunnel to the shipworks. At the time of the bombing most prisoners had been transferred north of Nagasaki and forced to work in the treacherous coal mines. A lengthier treatment of POWs and (tangentially) the news of the atomic bombs is presented at the conclusion of the wartime drama Unbroken (2014).5 The film heralds the punishing treatment and brutalization of American and Allied POWs in Japanese camps in the Pacific and later on mainland Japan, where emaciated troops are forced underground to dig coal inside perilously constructed mines. Suffering years of maltreatment at the hands of their captors, the eventual surrender of Japan is relayed to the remaining prisoners after American planes overfly the compound and airdrop goods, including newspapers and magazines. In one sequence, relieved Australian diggers and other prisoners are shown blissfully smoking, eating, and peering at a large photo of the atomic mushroom cloud in magazines resembling the popular Life pictorial of the era. Filmed principally in Australia, director Angelina Jolie goes to considerable length to include incidental images of Australian military presence amongst the POWs by them wearing iconic slouch hats. Although largely based directly on the biography of American Olympic athlete, bombadier, and POW Louis Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), the film recreates scenes of humiliation and dehumanization in the prison camps. The exceptionalism of Zamperini’s athleticism and his will to survive is starkly contrasted with the militarism and jingoism of Japan’s Imperial war. In the American remake of Godzilla (2014),6 the atom bombing of Japan receives only the briefest of references. Following a meeting aboard a nuclear

Figure 4.2.  POWs read news about the atom bombs in Unbroken (2014).

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Figure 4.3.  Australian POWs are frequently visible throughout Unbroken (2014).

aircraft carrier a second Japanese scientist, Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), extracts and opens up his old pocket watch and shows it to U.S. Admiral William Stenz (David Strathairn), who has just ordered nuclear weapons be prepared for a coastal attack on the giant, irradiated monsters threatening San Francisco. The admiral acknowledges Dr. Serizawa’s dismay at his nuclear directive while observing that the scientist’s watch has stopped. Serizawa pushes the opened watch towards the admiral, stating: “Yes. 8:15 in the morning, August 6, 1945.” The naval commander pauses and knowingly replies: “Hiroshima.” Serizawa looks at his watch and comments: “It was my father’s” before hurriedly exiting the admiral’s stateroom. Serizawa’s brief and ponderous intervention ends with this fading non sequitur. It goes nowhere; the admiral merely stares off into space as the scientist leaves. In Mr. Holmes (2015),7 Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen) is shown in flashback recalling his travels to Japan in the immediate post-war period (circa 1947) in search of “prickly ash,” an elusive cure for his degenerative amnesia. Met by his Japanese colleague, Mr. Umezaki (Hiroyuki Sanada), the elderly Holmes disembarks at a train station in a bustling Japanese city, presumably Tokyo, and the pair first walk and then drive through the city, which is conspicuously patrolled by American troops. In order to find the rare, medicinal plant Umezaki takes Holmes to a city “near the sea” two days’ journey by train. Upon arrival the men disembark along a raised wooden pier alongside other travellers as omnipresent, armed American troops with green helmets and the distinctive insignia of the First Cavalry on their army dress uniform, patrol the location. An extended reverse-tracking shot grants viewers the inquisitive perspective and point of view of the world-famous detective. He briefly passes a young Japanese woman who turns her head to reveal disfiguring facial scars and keloids from the top of her scalp and along her neck. Holmes is shocked and rendered speechless, mouth agape, as his Japanese companion lowers his gaze in silence. Moments later the camera



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lingers on a large bilingual sign displaying in English: “Hiroshima Station.” However, it is a city shown—erroneously—under American military control, as opposed to Australian authority under BCOF. In the charred, still smoldering (!) ruins of the town Mr. Umezaki and Holmes find the highly valued prickly ash growing amidst the scorched rubble at the base of a blackened tree stump. With a flurry of non-diegetic Japanese music, the Englishman is shown aghast when he sights the ominous skeletal remains of the iconic Genbaku Dome in the background. Apart from the production design evoking a surreal and scorched apocalyptic terrain, with multiple views of American GIs as Hiroshima Prefecture Occupation troops, and glimpses of hibakusha, little more is made of the post-atomic encounter. Nothing is conveyed about residual radiation or the potential effects on cherished plant life, medicinal or otherwise. There is

Figure 4.4.  Facially scarred hibakusha seen amongst American troops in Mr. Holmes (2015).

Figure 4.5.  Holmes and Mr. Umezaki react to the sight of the disfigured hibakusha woman in Mr. Holmes (2015).

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Figure 4.6.  Fires still smoulder in the ruins of Hiroshima, circa 1947, in Mr. Holmes (2015).

Figure 4.7.  Sherlock Holmes is appalled at the destruction of Hiroshima, circa 1947, in Mr. Holmes (2015).

some irony in a film that foregrounds the erasure of memory as so central to the senescence of its primary character (“I don’t remember,” Holmes laments) that its “forced visual poetry”8 renders these Hiroshima sequences with such careless historical inaccuracy. EXHIBITING FADING LIGHTS As a counterpoint to this recent commercial screen representation of the atom bombings, Allied POWs, and occupation forces in Japan, a multi-screen hyper-visualization exhibition was undertaken in Perth, Western Australia to reveal largely forgotten histories of Australian military experiences in Japan during and after World War II. Fading Lights: Australian POWs and BCOF



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Troops in Japan 1945–52 was designed to coincide with the centenary of the ANZAC commemorations (1914–1918) and also the seventeith anniversary of the atom bombings in August 2015. The immersive, multi-screen exhibition showcased places where Australian troops witnessed and survived the atom bombing of Nagasaki, and the tens of thousands of Australian soldiers that formed the largest component of BCOF, based in Kure twenty kilometers south of Hiroshima, and who arrived less than four months after the Japanese surrender. Co-producers Stuart Bender and Mick Broderick recorded landscapes at key locations in Japan, including two former POW camps in Nagasaki where Australian and other Allied prisoners worked as slave laborers in nearby war industries (Mitsubishi and Kawanami Bros.) before and after the atom bombing. One site at Koyagi, ten kilometers south of the Nagasaki, is now a junior high school that occupies the former camp grounds. Over the years it has become of increasing interest to locals who recently erected a monument to all deceased POWs, including six Australians who, though non A-bomb affected, died in captivity. It took many years of concerted lobbying and persistence by a handful of Nagasaki hibakusha and nearby residents, most of whom previously knew little, if anything, about the presence of POW camps in their community. One such champion of this cause was Nagasaki City Councillor Ihara Toyoichi (himself a childhood hibakusha). Mr. Ihara related to us that it was taxi driver Komatsu Akira who first explored the matter after conveying former Allied servicemen and their relatives around the area in search of POW locations.9 Collectively, theirs was a difficult journey of selfdiscovery since virtually all reference to such activity and history had been removed more than half a century earlier. As historian David Palmer has remarked in relation to Japanese PM Shinzō Abe’s seventeith anniversary remarks, which focused on the singularity of the Japanese experience of atomic weapons: “To make the atomic bombings into solely a national tragedy without reference to non-Japanese who also suffered is a grave error. The bombings were an international tragedy, and the victims included Koreans and Allied POWs.”10 These considerations informed our approach to the creation of the Fading Lights exhibition in August 2015 at Curtin University’s visualization laboratory, the HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch), located within the large John Curtin Gallery. We adapted our research agenda to fit the exhibition potential of the HIVE’s four existing digital screens: (1) a four-meter high concave diaphragm (Dome); (2) a 180-degree cylindrical wrap-around screen (Cylinder); (3) a 90-degree, right angle digital diptych (Wedge); and

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(4) a multi-panel display comprising twelve (4x3) individual HD screens (Matrix). Understanding the possibilities and limitations of each mode of presenting the digital content informed the research design and the advanced locational research, both online and with Australian and Japanese informants. The content selection for specific screens was to provide an impressionistic engagement to complement the immersive gallery environment, providing an opportunity for contemplation of place and space, where testimony could interact with archival and contemporary images and sound. A key design concept was to evoke the fragility of cultural and civic memory and the related spatial evolution, or erasure, of place over decades. This involved searching for and selecting key archival images from scores of photos in the Australian War Memorial and contrasting these with imagery of Japanese prison camps along with the effects of the atom bombing on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Due to the lack of readily accessible sources it took considerable effort to establish definitively the precise locations of many key sites in order to match and replicate the camera set-ups, and to

Figure 4.8.  The monument to Allied POWs including Australians, who died as slave laborers at Fukuoka No. 2 POW camp on Koyagi Island 10 km south of Nagasaki.



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create a credible “then and now” effect by contrasting contemporary views with archival imagery. In addition to these existing HIVE laboratory display formats, two additional visualization modes were introduced to enhance the capacity for digital immersion and the experience of place: (5) a large, free-standing 3-D high definition screen featuring an interview with a third generation hibakusha from inside the Genbaku Dome;11 and (6) six iPads preloaded with augmented reality (AR) content showing panoramas of the Genbaku Dome. The exhibition and associated website12 featured downloadable panoramas of Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome, the principal building nearest the hypocenter to remain relatively untouched, apart from periodic preservation measures and the introduction of site security systems.13 As we were granted rare access to film inside this UN World Heritage protected space we made the resultant 360-degree panoramas freely available to the public. From the outset it was important for us to try to reach a new (digitally native) audience to encounter afresh some little understood aspects of the hibakusha experience. 1. The Dome This four-meter diameter, concave display was partly enclosed by large black curtains (to avoid light pollution) from the other installation screens. In its circular 180-degree, fully immersive vertical hemisphere, viewers encountered a series of overlapping and slowly rotating 360-degree panoramic images recorded from inside the Genbaku Dome. The photographs deployed the same in-situ perspectives as the 3-D video (Inside the Dome) accompanying the exhibition in the entrance foyer (see number 5, above). Due to the restricted access to the Genbaku Dome from the 1960s onwards, and with the 1995 World Heritage listing of the site, visitors to and residents of Hiroshima have long been denied entry. Hence, our digital capture and installation provided a rare perspective from within the Dome. Although projected in 2-D, standing before the Dome cognitively “tricked” the eye and brain into perceiving depth, provoking a sensation of three-dimensionality. To maximize this ocular deception, viewers must stand centered to best experience the (barely perceptible) pan from left to right which refreshed the diaphragm’s image every thirty seconds or so. Given the slowness of the large Dome image rotation, iPads were provided with the same collection of 360-degree panoramas. These portable devices

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Figure 4.9.  Fading Lights producers Stuart Bender (left) and Mick Broderick (right) in front of the HIVE’s Dome screen which presented slowly rotating 360 degree views from inside the UNESCO protected Genbaku Dome next to the Hiroshima hypocenter. Photo: Sam Proctor, Curtin University.

enabled up to six users at a time to individually orient their on-screen view by swiping or rotating the device, triggering the iPad’s gyro, allowing the viewer to rotate, tilt and pan their desired perspective inside the Genbaku Dome. Hence visitors could experience the Dome display either passively as it unfolded before them, or interactively and haptically by moving the iPads to engender a mobile Augmented Reality experience of being inside the Genbaku Dome. 2. The Cylinder This large curved screen (eight meters wide by three meters high) presented a series of slowly overlapping panoramic images recorded in 2015 on location using the same precise set-ups as four iconic, black and white historic photographs, stitched to form panoramic bomb effects collages only a few months after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.14 Apart from similarly large



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though static Hiroshima and Nagasaki museum photographic displays, it is rare to encounter these historic images in such a grand scale.15 When immediately contrasted with contemporary aspects of the same location, the bleak and barren post-atomic topography attains a heightened visual impact, as the digital renditions gradually overlap to reveal current perspectives with the “live” hum of contemporaneous audio. Due to the size of this enormous digital “canvas,” each image remained projected for between 90 and 120 seconds to enable viewers the ability to walk around the screen and notice details that would be impossible to perceive when seen in print at lower resolution and several scales of magnitude smaller. The sound design utilized a combination of silence and “wild” atmospheric recordings (via multi-directional overhead speakers), captured in situ at Hiroshima and Nagasaki locations, with several recordings taken from elevated positions above the cityscape. Apart from the sheer size of the screen, another feature of the Cylinder that prompted viewer “immersion” was the 180-degree curvature of the projected image. This enabled an ocular field of vision that incorporated a maximum periphery of vision when standing more or less directly in front, even while tilting the head up and down or left and right. 3. The Wedge The digital material deployed for the Wedge diptych was likely the most conventional of our video installations. The twin screens looped over ten minutes of archival material, juxtaposed against contemporary video taken at identical locations some sixty-five to seventy years later. An interview with historian Robin Gerster, author of Travels in Atomic Sunshine,16 was interlaced with the re-voiced eyewitness account from Australian POW, BCOF soldier, and Korean War veteran Private Allan Chick. The overlay of mid-1940s to early 1950s photographs and film alongside high-resolution panoramas of their modern counterparts evoked considerable cognitive estrangement since, while these physical spaces remain, the depicted places do not—most having been erased, renamed, and/or otherwise repurposed. The Wedge specifically foregrounded the sites of Fukuoka POW Camp No. 14 in central Nagasaki and the BCOF headquarters and parade ground, “Anzac Park,” in the town of Kure. Fukuoka Camp No. 14 was less than two kilometers from the Nagasaki hypocenter and reconstructed during the occupation. It continues operation today as part of a modern Mitsubishi complex. The former Anzac Park is now a multi-purpose sports ground, and at the time of the location shooting, not even the Kure tourism office knew of its former BCOF role.

Figure 4.10.  The large, immersive Cylinder screen featured a series of historical panoramic views of Hiroshima and Nagasaki two months after the atomic bombings, with dissolving overlays of the precise locations re-photographed in 2015. Photo: Sam Proctor, Curtin University.

Figure 4.11.  Among the imagery displayed on the Wedge digital diptych was exNagasaki POW Private Allan Chick, in BCOF uniform (crouching in the foreground) with Mitsubishi foundry workers on the grounds of the former prison camp in 1947. The right panel displays contemporary video of the rebuilt factory in central Nagasaki, recorded by the Fading Lights producers in 2015. Photo: Sam Proctor, Curtin University.



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The Wedge also concentrated on both BCOF experiences and the testimony of former POW Private Allan Chick. Incredibly, Chick survived being captured by the Japanese in 1942, then torpedoed by Americans off Java, imprisonment and hard labor at Fukuoka Camp No. 14, and living through the catastrophic Nagasaki A-bombing. At that particular moment Chick was working on a raised platform inside the Camp, undertaking roofing repairs, when he saw the atomic flash and was momentarily blinded and knocked unconscious to the ground. When he regained his sight and composure he joined other dazed Australian POWs who were all trying to make sense of what happened. After the Japanese surrender and his liberation, Chick returned to Japan within a few months as part of BCOF troops being stationed near Hiroshima. During that deployment he traveled to Nagasaki in 1948 to visit his former (now destroyed) POW Camp on the grounds of the rebuilt Mitsubishi Foundry and met some fellow workers. In the early 1950s Chick then served with UN troops during the Korean War and returned to Australia with a Japanese “war bride.”17 At the end of his long life Chick was officially recognized by the Japanese government as hibakusha and granted medical entitlements, but only shortly before the former serviceman died at age ninety-three in 2013. Like many of his peers, including fellow POWs who witnessed the atomic attack, Chick stated in his 1995 video testimony at the Nagasaki museum, that he was “in favor” of the atom bombs. To the end, Chick maintained nuclear weapons had preserved world peace because they acted as a deterrent to global war: “I consider it to have been a good thing, actually.” While the video testimony of five Australian POWs, including Chick, is on display at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, it came as a complete surprise to the director of the Nagasaki Peace Museum in April 2015, when he revealed he was unaware of these publicly accessible recordings. This further confirmed for us the importance of preserving and distributing these forgotten eyewitness accounts. Despite this museum’s commendable efforts to include hibakusha voices additional to Japanese nationals—including Korean workers and POWs—we were not permitted to use the recordings of Australian hibakusha/prisoners for our exhibition. Furthermore, locating the small monument in the nearby Nagasaki Peace Park dedicated to foreigner soldiers who died in the atomic attack (or from illness or maltreatment), proved quite difficult. Eventually we discovered it next to a public toilet with one side facing (and only visible and legible from) a window space in the men’s urinal. Nevertheless, the Peace Park has subsequently collaborated with an indigenous Australian nuclear arts initiative to erect a sculpture in recognition of, and in solidarity with, Aboriginal peoples who were affected by the British nuclear tests (1952–1962) on Australian territory.18

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Figure 4.12.  The 12 panel Matrix, a tiled, ultra high-definition video array showing an animated montage of POW documentation and historical photographs overlaying a contemporary panoramic view of Koyagi island. Photo: Sam Proctor, Curtin University.

4. The Matrix The Matrix is comprised of an 8K resolution, tiled high-definition LED display. Rather than projected imagery, the challenge for us was how to utilize such a powerful mesh of synchronized HD monitors and not overpower viewers. We decided to use this huge Matrix to visualize historical documentation, both Japanese and Allied, of the POW experience on Koyagi Island alongside overlays of emaciated prisoners, and war crimes files in contrast with stunning contemporary views of the island and the junior high school that replaced the POW camp. Having identified the exact location of a photograph taken in 1983 by former Australian POW Hugh V. Clarke, who revisited the Camp No. 2 site to meet former prison guards, the Matrix was ideal for recasting this image as a digital overlay, contrasting the lower resolution black and white picture with the rich color view of the contemporary (2015) school grounds. The mosaic grid pattern of this multi-screen display presented interviews intercut with other footage in a checkerboard style to illustrate specific points being addressed. For example, during an interview with the Koyagi Junior High School vice-principal, Mr Hirano Tetsuya, who described his annual peace studies projects, the Matix panel tiles filled with images of student posters recalling the history of the camp and the POWs.



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The Matrix also presented the recollections of two other Australian POWs who witnessed the Nagasaki explosion. That experience is rendered experimentally across the twelve HD panels using animation and sound effects. By mid-1945 most of the Australian prisoners on Koyagi Island (including the aforementioned Hugh Clarke) were ordered to work at the Nakama coal mine north of Nagasaki. However, Australian soldiers Bob Watkins and Joe Flynn remained in the camp due to sickness. Both men saw the “great flash,” felt the heat and heard the “huge noise of explosion.” This was soon followed by a “great rush of air,” where the shock of atomic concussion being “transmitted through the ground” caused dust to rise to rise knee height.19 Watkins remembered looking towards the mouth of Nagasaki harbor ten kilometers away. He saw a “huge column of smoke and flame rising skywards” to form “a distinct mushroom shape” as it rose upwards.20 These accounts and the larger Nagasaki POW history remain little appreciated or recognized today. Similarly, the seven-year Australian BCOF presence (chiefly in the Hiroshima Prefecture) where more than sixteen thousand Australian troops rotated through Japan after the war, some bringing their wives and families, is vastly under-represented in military history, especially given the recent ANZAC centenary commemorations wherein an explicit aim was to broaden the national narrative to be inclusive of peacekeeping operations.21 MISSING IN ACTION Regrettably, other important history and testimony could not be incorporated into the Fading Lights exhibition due to the constraints of time or the inaccessibility of archival material. These include Allan Chick’s fellow Fukuoka Camp No. 14 compatriot, Sergeant Peter McGrath-Kerr. On the morning of the A-bombing McGrath-Kerr and a few other POWs had been repairing a nearby bridge. Sent back to the compound for a mid-morning break, McGrath-Kerr was on his bunk reading a book when an air raid siren sent everyone scurrying towards the shelters. But he was too slow, and he didn’t know what hit him. McGrath-Kerr awoke five days later with amnesia, broken ribs, and radiation burns to one hand. At the same time another Australian sergeant at Camp No. 14, Jack Johnson, was caught between two buildings and injured when the bomb exploded. Searching for survivors amongst the rubble he rescued the unconscious McGrath-Kerr. Incredibly, Johnston had previously saved McGrath-Kerr’s life a few years earlier when he was near-drowned after the sinking of the Tamahoko Maru. In 1980 McGrath-Kerr returned to Japan as a guest of the City of Nagasaki

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and was officially recognized as an atom bomb victim and awarded free medical treatment. McGrath-Kerr, like Allan Chick and Jack Johnson, was one of twentyfour Australian POWs at Camp No. 14 only 1.7 kms away at the time of the nuclear detonation. Somehow, all survived. Other POWs were not so lucky— at least four were killed and approximately thirty seriously injured, most of whom were Dutch. In the weeks following many others died as a result of their exposure to the bomb. IMPERMANENCE The original audiovisual material we produced for Fading Lights has subsequently been made available to both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki peace museums, and the Australian War Memorial, in order to help preserve the sitespecific data and historical context of these sometimes contested locations. For generations Hiroshima residents, Japanese citizens, and international visitors have been denied access to the Genbaku Dome and its surrounding grassed area. We hope the Fading Lights Augmented Reality panoramas may contribute to some form of public/private engagement and site demystification in the years to come. As the first-hand knowledge of these neglected hibakusha experiences disappears inevitably into the future, along with all “living” memory and embodied hibakusha testimony, perhaps even more importance and urgency should be devoted to the comprehension, recording, and debate over evolving political and cultural actors that privilege and protect some knowledge and sites for commemoration at the expense of others. NOTES 1.  Maria Tumarkin, Traumascapes:The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005). 2.  John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000). 3.  James Wood, “The Australian Military Contribution to the Occupation of Japan 1945–1952,” Australian War Memorial, 1998, accessed June 14, 2017, https://www .awm.gov.au/sites/default/files/BCOF_history.pdf. 4.  The Wolverine, dir. James Mangold (20th Century Fox, 2013). 5.  Unbroken, dir. Angelina Jolie (Universal Pictures, 2014). 6.  Godzilla, dir. Gareth Evans (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2014). 7.  Mr. Holmes, dir. Bill Condon (Miramax, 2015).



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  8.  Michael Sragow, “Deep Focus: Mr, Holmes,” Film Comment, July 16, 2015, accessed June 14, 2017, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/deep-focus-mr-holmes/.  9. Matthew M. Burke, “Near Nagasaki School, Memorials Honor POWs and Supply Mission,” Stars and Stripes, October 6, 2016, accessed June 14, 2017, https:// www.stripes.com/lifestyle/near-nagasaki-school-memorials-honor-pows-and-supply -mission-1.432752#.WUC-qjOB3ow. 10. Mick Broderick and David Palmer, “Australian, British, Dutch and U.S. Pows: Living under the Shadow of the Nagasaki Bomb.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 13.32 (2015), accessed June 14, 2017, http://apjjf.org/2015/13/32/Mick -Broderick/4358.html. 11.  Stuart Marshall Bender and Mick Broderick, Inside the Dome (2-D Version), YouTube, July 20, 2015, accessed June 14, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =OsGdn0s5mYg&feature=youtu.be. 12. Stuart Bender and Mick Broderick, “Fading Lights: Australian POWs and BCOF Troops in Japan, 1945–1952,” last modified 2015, accessed June 14, 2017, http://www.fadinglights.com.au. 13.  UNESCO, “Hiroshima Peace Memorial: Genbaku Dome,” accessed July 18, 1995, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/775/. 14. Fay Huang, Reinhard Klette, and Karsten Scheibe, Panoramic Imaging: Sensor-line Cameras and Laser Range-finders (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2008). 15.  360 Cities, “Shigeo Hayashi,” accessed June 14, 2017, https://www.360cities .net/profile/shigeo-hayashi. 16.  Robin Gerster, Travels in Atomic Sunshine (Melbourne: Scribe, 2008). 17. Craig Collie, Nagasaki: The Massacre of the Innocent and the Unknowing (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011). 18.  Nuclear Futures: Exposing the Legacy of the Atomic Age Through Creative Arts, “Sculpture Gift- Nagasaki Peace Park,” last modified 2016, accessed June 14, 2017, http://nuclearfutures.org/sculpture-gifting-nagasaki-peace-park/. 19.  Hugh V. Clarke, Last Stop Nagasaki (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984). 20. Clarke, Last Stop Nagasaki. 21. James Brown, Anzacs Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession (Collingwood: Redback, 2014).

Chapter Five

Two-Way Mirror The Significance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the U.S.–North Korea Nuclear Crisis Adam Broinowski Looking back at the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the U.S.–North Korea nuclear crisis of 2016–2017 could well be a study in despair. It is now fairly well established, although not yet officially recognized, that the U.S. use of atomic weapons on the two cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War was in breach of moral and legal norms that existed at the time. Nevertheless, it remains a remarkable fact that for over seventy years the massive destruction visited upon these cities has been widely understood to have been a humanitarian act, a view with bipartisan consensus in successive U.S. administrations. The failure of the U.S. government to come to terms with the wrongfulness of this action and to recognize, express contrition, and directly compensate the victims has had many consequences, including the normalization of indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force from a distance in U.S. military strategy in successive wars over subsequent decades. Ritualized public commemorations of “Hiroshima,” on the other hand, have tended to sanctify the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park along with hibakusha as intangible national treasures. Given the significant suffering caused from the use of these horrific weapons on the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectful commemoration is absolutely essential. In an engraving effect through repetition, however, the inscription of a dominant narrative can discourage the learning process at local and international levels. Just as it is important to give space to and explore the personal testimonies of hibakusha that have been written out or neglected, it is also important to consider existing contradictions and their significant implications. While unorthodox perspectives for their own sake may not be desirable either, it is precisely this work that is needed if we are to continue to learn from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to avoid the recurrence of such actions. 101

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Clearly the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki signify more than blast factors and radiological impacts. As hibakusha experiences and memories demonstrate, this event is not static and fixed but continues and changes long after its temporal delimitation. Yet, testimony does not only provide evidence based on first-hand experience or support to a wider effort to bring public awareness to an event. It is also an active process of making horizontal associations with other related events produced under similar conditions or in a set of relations within an overarching system. In this sense, in this chapter I intend to make the case that at this stage it is important to dilate the tight focus that has been comparatively lavished upon the atomic bombs and hibakusha experiences and perspectives in Japan, so as to include them within a regional context and within a historical continuum. I begin with an outline of a series of events in an early stage of the still unfolding U.S.–North Korea nuclear crisis in 2016–2017 followed by some salient aspects of the Manhattan Project and the U.S. strategic area (including atomic) bombing campaign on Japan in 1944–1945. I then seek to demonstrate how, from the perspective of those exposed on the ground, these methods of U.S. (and Imperial Japanese) state violence did not end with the bombs and Japan’s surrender but continued on the Korean peninsula in the lead up to and during the Korean War. Like a reversible mirror, in perceiving the dynamics in 1944–1945 in Japan and 1945–1953 in Korea in inextricable relation to the U.S.–North Korea nuclear crisis, it is possible to sustain a more holistic understanding and to recover conspicuously neglected connections between victims of U.S. area bombing, including hibakusha in Japan and on the Korean peninsula. Through this broader approach it is possible to correct some omissions in the general understanding of international law and contribute to the larger movement to seek justice for victims of all types of area and remote bombing that go beyond the legal requirement of self-defense.1 U.S.–NORTH KOREA NUCLEAR CRISIS To provide some counterweight to the dominant bias regarding the “North Korean problem,” a review of the remarkable series of events in the nuclear standoff between the United States and North Korea in early 2017 may prove useful. U.S. President Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Vice President Mike Pence issued a series of curt warnings and ominous ultimatums to North Korea to the effect that “all options are on the table” for the United States to do “whatever it takes” to force that country to desist from developing a nuclearcapable Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) and to solve this “problem.”2



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In the context of six sets of UN Security Council (UNSC) sanctions imposed on North Korea over eleven years, in March–April 2017 the U.S.–ROK also conducted the “largest ever” Operation Foal Eagle and Key Resolve exercises involving all forces and 350,000 troops on the Korean peninsula,3 and accelerated deployment to Seongju of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system ahead of the May 9 elections in South Korea. At the time of publication, this number has been increased to six THAAD launchers. Mirroring the interruption of a February 11 U.S.–Japan state dinner by a North Korean declaration of its solid-fuel rocket launch from a mobile platform, on April 6 President Trump informed Chinese President Xi Jinping as dessert was being served at the end of a Chinese state visit, “We’re bombing Syria tonight.” Trump referred to the U.S. Tomahawk cruise-missile attack on the Ash Sha’irat (Shayrat) Syrian Airbase, putatively in retaliation for a Syrian chemical weapons attack on April 4 from that airbase on a village of Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib province.4 Xi was “played” for the cameras as Trump declared a unilateral act of war.5 In apparent preparation for North Korea’s April 15 “Day of the Sun” anniversary, rumored to be the day it would conduct its sixth nuclear test at the Punggye-re underground complex, on April 10 the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) carrier strike group was dispatched to the Korean peninsula. On April 13, U.S. forces in Afghanistan dropped a GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB, or “Mother of All Bombs”) on ISIS tunnel redoubts in east Afghanistan, the largest used in combat since Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and coincided with a Russian peace talks initiative with India, Iran, and Afghanistan).6 On April 14, the U.S. Nuclear Security Administration (NSA) declared its B61–12 gravity thermonuclear bomb test as part of a USD 1.5 trillion nuclear modernization program.7 Despite a fairly ordinary North Korean parade and “failed” medium-range ballistic missile test the next morning,8 Vice President Pence began a ten-day AsiaPacific tour which included the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) and the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) in Yokosuka which, accompanied by Japanese MSDF destroyers and later the USS Nimitz carrier group, then deployed to the Sea of Japan. On April 24, Secretary Tillerson warned UN Security Council members of “catastrophic consequences” if North Korea was not forced to the negotiating table. While Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also expressed his concern for the unstable situation he called for multi-party negotiations and indicated his discomfort with the THAAD deployment.9 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called for U.S.–Russia détente, and requested that the U.S. desist from “unilateral actions like those we saw recently in Syria.” In contrast, Prime Minister Abe rejected “meaningless dialogue,”

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demanded pressure from China and Russia, and warned of a North Korean pre-emptive sarin-tipped missile attack. Abe and other cabinet ministers had already considered procurement of an independent pre-emptive strike option at considerable expense.10 On April 25, North Korea celebrated the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) founded on the Manchukuo foundation day of April 25, 1932. Predictably, Pyongyang declared its intentions to continue “weekly” tests and expand its nuclear strike capability (forty to fifty kg of weapons-grade plutonium or four to eight nuclear warheads stored in mountain tunnels) as long as the United States conducted hostile activities and rejected a peace accord with North Korea. On May 14, North Korea tested a Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) (lofted two thousand km high) which could target the U.S. Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. As international opprobrium boiled, on May 22, China and Russia, with thirteen other UNSC members, condemned North Korean missile tests and urged North Korea’s “denuclearisation through concrete action” while welcoming dialogue. During this time, on February 10, April 26 and May 3, 2017, it is important to note that the U.S. conducted three unarmed ICBM Minuteman III missile tests from Vandenberg Air Base to Kwajalein atoll, and ICBM interception on May 30. Further, it is salient that Pyongyang only benefits from nuclear missile development through diplomatic leverage to minimize an already existing threat to its survival. The North Korean leadership would not conduct a pre-emptive strike unless it was convinced of imminent annihilation as it would condemn its nation to destruction. North Korea is a garrison state that is distorted by the costs of maintaining a 1.3 million person army comprising most of the adult Korean population from a total population of twenty-five million,11 a situation aggravated by relentless sanctions. After its nuclear development from years of Soviet and other assistance, North Korea agreed to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in December 1985, coming into force in May 1992, and which included IAEA inspections. From the 1986 Reykjavik Summit between President Reagan and President Gorbachev to the IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1988 and nuclear stockpile reduction, it appeared that North Korea was less under threat. At Reagan’s insistence, however, the United States continued its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). With the loss of a Soviet security guarantee in 1989 and U.S. aggression in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, North Korea limited the IAEA to partial inspections and conducted missile tests. The United States had withdrawn its tactical missiles from South Korea by 1991 but President Clinton had also considered military intervention prior to direct negotiations and the signing of the “Agreed Framework” in October 1994. Clinton was persuaded that the costs in military and civilian lives and to the South Korean economy would



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be unacceptable.12, 13 In return, the North committed to an eight-year freeze (1994–2002) on all plutonium facilities and stalled its missile development for economic aid and two light water nuclear reactors (provided by Japan). With Republican control of Congress in November 1994, the George W. Bush administration declared North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” (as per the Wolfowitz doctrine), sabotaged South Korea’s “Sunshine Policy” (promoting greater exchanges between South and North Korea), stalled the Agreed Framework, withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and deployed joint-operated U.S.–Japan (Aegis and Patriot) missile defense systems derived from SDI. North Korea resumed its nuclear program and missile tests. In January–February 2003 the Bush administration also threatened President Jiang Zemin with unleashing a nuclear-armed Japan together with U.S. intervention unless China brokered North Korean denuclearization.14 The pattern then repeated in the September 2005 “Six Party talks” (China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, the United States). In 2006, with the Obama administration’s “strategic patience” policy of proliferating missile defense and diplomatic and economic embargo, North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test. Pyongyang had witnessed in Iraq (2003–2006), Libya (2011), and Syria (2011–present) what could happen when targeted governments relinquished WMD programs (whether they had them or not) without a security guarantee. It would not forget Hillary Clinton’s public comment regarding the U.S.–NATO mission in Libya: “We came, we saw, he died.” Nor would the public vilifications of Kim Jong-un, as consistent with those of Hussein, Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and Nicolas Maduro, be lost on North Korean leadership. As this series of events indicate, the insecurity on the peninsula has not been aided by demonstrations of U.S. hyper-capability, invasion, and overthrow exercies, and the ahistorical framing and intimidation of North Korea and other nations including Russia, China, and Iran (Russia has 7,000 and China has less than 300 nuclear weapons and all three have underground facilities). Rather, a joint U.S.–China security guarantee towards North Korea paired with North–South Korean dialogue and trade and infrastructure negotiations would seem more productive. In seeking to understand why such seemingly rational steps have not been taken to avoid the sort of crisis that has emerged in the present, I will turn to the post-1944 period in Northeast Asia. SIGNIFICANCE OF U.S. AREA AND ATOMIC BOMBING FOR THE U.S.–NORTH KOREA NUCLEAR CRISIS Rarely is the relevance of the Korean peninsula acknowledged in the commemorations and public discourse surrounding the atomic bombs and hibakusha in

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Japan or elsewhere. To extrapolate this connection, I will explore some salient aspects of the Manhattan Project and U.S. strategic area bombing in Japan and on the Korean peninsula over a ten-year period. Scientists in the U.S. were concerned about German advances in nuclear fission in 1938, as expressed in the Einstein-Szilárd letter in August that year. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was committed to the USD 2.2 billion Manhattan Project from 1939, ostensibly so as to expedite Enrico Fermi and his team beating the Nazis in the race to develop a powerful new bomb using uranium ore from the Congo and the United States. In May 1943, the U.S. Military Policy Committee had tentatively designated the Harbour of Truk (north of New Guinea) and Tokyo as atomic targets using long-range modified B-29s. In October, they considered dispersing uranium products via an environmental weapon over German potato fields and industrial complexes.15 Project scientists already understood that ingesting “fission products” (i.e., caesium 137, strontium 89) was harmful to living tissue and to embryos, and the deaths from exposure to contaminated environs was estimated at “half a million men.”16 This was conceived as part of a U.S. Army Air Force strategy for total “victory from the air.” Even though capitulation of Germany and Japan was certain by September 1944, British Prime Minister Churchill simply adjusted from “beating Hitler to the bomb” to recommending atomic weapons use on Japan “repeatedly until they surrender.” Japan was already choked by a U.S. naval blockade, and lacking air defense and the German front to distract the Soviet Army. Yet the population of Japan was transformed into “a military target,” as it was thought in line with First World War terror bombing theory that demoralized populations would turn against their leadership.17 In September, as part of the U.S. strategic area bombing campaign, the 509th Composite Group commenced “practice” with “Fat Man”-type (plutonium implosion) conventional bombs (MK-219 fuzes). Forty-nine were dropped on fourteen Japanese cities near Hiroshima and Nagasaki mixed with a few “duds” to avoid detection. Fresh from the Allied firebombing of Dresden on February 13–14, 1945, General Curtis LeMay and his Twentieth Air Force unleashed a “seek-and-destroy mission of the greatest possible numbers in the shortest possible time” (sixty-six targeted cities of which roughly 80 percent were civilian). The most infamous of these sorties was “Operation Meetinghouse” on the night of March 9–10, 1945, which saw 279 B-29s beseige Tokyo with incendiary cluster bombs at altitude. The delayed explosions held firefighters at bay while allowing the fires to build into an inferno that boiled canals, melted metal, and consumed roughly 100,000 people over six hours. By the war’s end, roughly 75 percent of the bombs dropped were incendiaries. Described as a “slaughter bombing” by



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Radio Tokyo, the area bombing raids took roughly 650,000 lives and forced millions into homelessness.18 Despite U.S. interceptions of Japan’s diplomatic cables to Soviet intermediaries seeking negotiations for surrender terms (mainly for the sovereign integrity of the emperor), U.S. planners would prove unable to resist the perceived gains to be derived from the atomic bombs on Japan. From six targets, Hiroshima and Kokura were prioritized as their geographies would maximize the data harvest, and in May a large “war plant” in Hiroshima was determined as the target. Having tested Fat Man prototypes in “Project Camel” at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) ranges in California, on July 16, 1945 a Fat Man (“The Gadget”) was detonated and measured at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Informed of the success as he met with President Harry Truman met with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Potsdam, Berlin, on July 25, 1945 President Truman described their “discovery” of “the most terrible” and yet “most useful bomb in the history of the world.” “Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic,” Truman continued, “we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new . . . The target will be a purely military one.”19 By Victory Day on May 9 it was clear that Moscow would honor the Yalta agreement and enter the war against Japan. Truman, Stimson, and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, anticipating a Soviet “land grab” as the Red Army pushed the Japanese Imperial Army (IJA) out of Inner Mongolia and Manchuria from August 8, decided to “bookend” it with “Little Boy” on the 6th and “Fat Man” on August 9. By December the numbers of dead men, women, and children in Hiroshima were 140,000 and in Nagasaki 70,000. The residual effects from burns and radiation exposures would lead to the illnesses and premature deaths of hundreds of thousands more.20 As the United States displayed its heliocentric and techno-scientific supremacy to the world, this impressive atomic spectacle provided a great distraction from the continuing quest for territorial control in Northeast Asia. With 50 percent share of world GDP at the end of the Second World War, U.S. industrial, military, and state planners were already planning a national security state based on a permanent war economy. As the Soviet Union took the Sakhalin and Kuril Islands in August–September 1945 before formal Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945, the United States was planning to ensure its sphere of influence in Japan’s former colonial trophies. The Containment Doctrine, first formulated in February 1946 by diplomat George F. Kennan and disseminated in 1947–1948 with the help of Secretary of Navy James Forrestal, aimed at territorial division and encirclement of the Soviet Union. As early as October 1947, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCOS)

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requested four hundred “Fat Man” plutonium bombs from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and increased defense spending by 20 percent of GNP for nuclear war-fighting technology and militarization in Europe and Northeast Asia.21 To this effect, the United States committed significant resources to support the Kuomintang nationalists in the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). And on August 10, 1945 the JCOS ordered Dean Rusk and John McCloy from the War Department to divide the Korean peninsula, which they did at the 38th parallel. On September 7, twenty-five thousand U.S. Army combat troops entered southern Korea to establish the U.S. Army Military Government (USAMG) (1945–1948) led by General Hodge in Seoul and under direction of General MacArthur from GHQ Tokyo (since September 2). Rhee Syng-man was handpicked and flown from the United States to Seoul in October 1945. The USAMG refused to recognize the non-aligned anti-colonial mandate of the provisional government of the People’s Republic of Korea (PRK) derived from the popular People’s Committees, which was abolished by military decree in September 1945. The U.S. command and South Korean government, with Japanese assistance, continued “mop-up” operations. After declaring statehood in May from the foundation of the Republic of Korea (ROK) under President Rhee Syng-man on August 15, 1948 and overlapping with the official onset of the Korean War on June 25, 1950, an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 “political opposition” were killed, mostly in the popular uprisings in Cheju-do and Yosu Sunchon.22 The USSR withdrew its troops from northern Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was founded in September 1948 under the leadership of Kim Il-sung, one of the main Korean guerrilla leaders who, alongside Chinese Communist forces, had established armed resistance against the Japanese occupiers and who supported the Soviet Army in driving them out.23 Amid ongoing U.S. atomic testing, the first Soviet atomic test on August 29, 1949, and Communist Chinese victory on October 1, 1949, cross-border incursions increased as the U.S. built an official ROK Army with the support of Japanese manufacturing. After stopping one particular incursion by four ROK divisions at 4 am on June 25, the North crossed the border with roughly seventy thousand Soviet-trained Korean People’s Army (KPA) troops and T-34 tanks to reach Seoul the next day. Rhee Syng-man fled from the capital to the South. With the casus belli “to keep Rhee in power” against North Korean “aggression,” on June 27, 1950 General MacArthur was appointed Commander in Chief of the so-called United Nations Command (UNCOM) following the



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adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 82 and the United States led a coalition of twenty nations as part of a “police action” during a “cold war.” This interrupted Beijing’s plans to complete the unification of China across the Taiwan Strait, denying it weapons from Moscow and forcing it to redeploy PLA troops from the south. On the ground in Korea, the U.S.-led invasion perpetrated massacres, executions, torture, and other egregious human rights abuses. After the U.S.-led troops entered Pyongyang on October 15, 1950, on October 19 the People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) (estimates vary between 250,000 and 900,000) crossed the Chinese border at the Yalu River. General LeMay, head of U.S. Strategic Air Command, used the Fifth Air Force and the Far Eastern Air Forces to carpet and firebomb areas on both sides of the 38th parallel. On January 3, 1951, for example, eighty-two flying fortresses further used incendiaries on a Pyongyang with “no military objectives left.”24 At this point the U.S. AEC delivered its Fat Man bombs, but a large proportion of the North Korean “mole people” were already living in tunnels dug by hand. Seoul was exchanged several times between December 1950 and June 1951. Eventually, the PVA forced the U.S.-led coalition into trench warfare at the 38th parallel and peace talks were begun in July 1951. MacArthur then ordered LeMay to deploy an “air pressure strategy” to force concessions from North Korean and Chinese negotiators, which meant “rolling over everything” to ensure there was no room for “error.”25 MacArthur advocated between “thirty and fifty atomic bombs” along the border with Manchuria and radioactive cobalt (a highly toxic “dirty bomb”) across the Sea of Japan and Yellow Sea.26 With more bomb tonnage used on seventyeight cities and thousands of towns in North Korea in three years than in the entire Pacific theatre during the Second World War,27 between 1952 and 1953, B-29s also hit five of the largest hydroelectric and irrigation dams on the Yalu River, killing innumerable farmers, blocking electricity supply, and destroying vital food supplies to Pyongyang. Estimates of total deaths/wounded/missing in the mid-1950 to mid-1953 period range from 2.5 to 3 million people.28 Roughly 990,900 South Koreans and 1.5 million North Koreans of a total population of 8–9 million in 1950 in the North were killed. Many more were left homeless and hungry. Roughly 500,000 PVA soldiers were killed and 490,000 wounded. Just like those who suffered the Holocaust and the atomic bombs, North Koreans also swear “Never again!” An armistice treaty between North Korea and the United States was signed on July 27, 1953. While it was agreed to reach a settlement within ninety days and that no weapons of mass destruction would be deployed on the Korean peninsula (Article 13b), no peace treaty was signed, U.S. troops remained

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in ROK (at present there are 28,500) as a “tripwire,” and the U.S. deployed tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea between 1957 and 1991. LEGAL ISSUES: U.S. AREA AND ATOMIC BOMBINGS IN JAPAN AND KOREA From the area and atomic bombing of Japanese cities to the area bombing of the Korean peninsula, U.S. planners would repeat this method during the American war in Vietnam. From Hiroshima to Vietnam legal questions inevitably follow. Just as the Hague Conventions (1907), Geneva Conventions (1929), and the international humanitarian law (IHL) were applied at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (1946–1948) to prosecute and convict Japanese wartime military and government officials for Japan’s war of aggression in China and East Asia, so too was the United States obliged to conform to the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The decision to use the atomic bombs, the steadfast refusal to admit responsibility and express contrition by U.S. leaders for wrongdoing and a repeated willingness to “do it again” has been supported by a standardized narrative: a humanitarian and economic form of warfare that hastened a “mercy end” to the Pacific war and saved American (and Japanese) lives and materiel from a prolonged conflict; vanquishing an inherently fanatical, savage, and sacrificial Japanese enemy; the regrettable “collateral damage” from targeting militaryindustrial structures in Hiroshima (and Nagasaki); advancement of technoscientific civilization through atomic energy; and defense against the Soviet Union and communism. Over time, these claims have either been refuted or complicated by further findings. For example, conventional bombs could have destroyed “militaryindustrial targets” in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (already bombed). Further, the use of area and atomic bombing to lower morale and pacify an “evil enemy” that refused to surrender did not match with a civilian population already weary (and subsequently cooperative) from total war and part of a military cabinet seeking surrender terms. If the Japanese “warrior culture” was so problematic, how was it possible that the emperor was not prosecuted and many indicted former imperial Japanese military and government officials were rehabilitated and reinstated? U.S. realpolitik determined the use of the atomic bombs for “experimental and political aims.”29 On the one hand the use of the atomic bombs provided the optimal conditions to test radiological effects on a live population. As project scientists and officials had some prior knowledge of the thermal



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blast and radiological impacts, those project and USSBS teams who were promptly dispatched in the aftermath were to maximize data recovery. Project scientists were to determine tolerable radiation exposure limits (and devise radio-protection methods) for military personnel in a war zone, while USSBS officials surveyed blast damage to contribute to the first ever nuclear doctrine. While working with former Korean and Japanese collaborators in South Korea and summoning up a (second) Red Scare at home, the U.S. leadership mobilized public consciousness through a fear campaign against a “Communist menace.” This supported ongoing militarization and dictatorship in the South (lasting until 1989) and aligned with geostrategic interests. U.S. planned and systematic area and atomic bombing in Japan and Korea violated the four key principles of international humanitarian law as preexisting in the Hague Conventions and encoded in the Geneva Conventions Protocol I 1949: the lack of military necessity (minimal air defense, imminent surrender); disproportionality for designated targets; indiscriminate killing of civilian populations; inhumane treatment of civilians and POWs. While the attack or bombardment by whatever means of undefended areas was already prohibited in the Hague Convention IV (“The Laws and Customs of War on Land IX,” 1907, Article 25), several states (principally United States and Great Britain) refused to ratify The Hague Draft Rules of Air Warfare 1922–1923 at the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932 to prohibit strategic area bombing of non-combatant populations in defended areas as it was deemed “unrealistic.” Although major powers were considering mutual restraint from bombing civilian targets outside combat zones, this quickly degenerated into indiscriminate bombing of enemy cities by all belligerents. Despite the omission of strategic aerial bombing from the war crimes prosecuted at Nuremberg or Tokyo, it could be implied de plano from the Hague Convention that the use of atomic bombs met the criteria of “wanton destruction of undefended cities” (i.e., civilians), without discriminating between military and non-military objectives and being a disproportionate use of force (in this line of argument a similar case can be made for indiscriminate area bombing as opposed to targeted aerial bombing).30 Further, it could be argued that U.S. area and atomic bombing in Japan were not necessary for self-defense, the United States was in breach of Article 51 and Article 2 (4) (threat or use of force on a sovereign state) of the United Nations Charter (1945) and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 as ratified by the U.S. Senate (aggressive war as an instrument of policy). In addition, the legal lacuna concerning a breach of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibiting chemical and biological weapons with regard to atomic bombs, and the breach of the Geneva Conventions (Protocol I 1949, Article 11) concerning medical

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research without treatment on experimental subjects, often with forced or coerced consent, can only be answered by the degree of prior knowledge. As indicated by Project studies in 1939–1941, and the ABCC data (i.e., surveys and tissue) collection and the U.S. radiation experimentation programs, there could be a claim.31 Although the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice to the UN General Assembly of the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons (1996) unanimously found that the threat or use of nuclear weapons violates international humanitarian law, the chemical and medical aspects of the atomic bombs remain contestable. It is possible to conclude, however, that the application of international law in the Pacific War and Korean War has been selective and has had significant consequences. First, the lack of international legal tribunals to prosecute the use and threat of area and atomic bombing has normalized and precipitated their repetition and encouraged the proliferation of nuclear weapons arsenals in military doctrines. Second, those who seek to deny and abjure wartime state criminality have been provided the opportunity to reject the authority of international law as enshrined in the UN Charter and to potentially ignore the sacrifice of millions of people in the Second World War. Third, public understanding of the criminality of such acts has been distorted and underlying causes and motives for these conflicts have been neglected or dismissed. Finally, the suspended conclusion to the Korean War and “permanent” regional division has contributed to instability in Northeast Asia and beyond. In the present risk of full-scale regional war which poses significant danger to the whole planet, it is necessary to step away from dead-end strategic calculus and propose more realistic and viable long-term solutions.

CONCLUSION WITHOUT CONCLUSION In this continuum between U.S. area and atomic bombings of Japan and Korea, we are obliged to re-think how commemorative practices regarding the atomic bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have served to reinforce selective agendas and mask or limit public knowledge and discourse. This imbalance ultimately undermines the application of the universal principles of international law. In the successful inscription of U.S. atomic and area bombings in Japanese collective memory and in international discourse, it is nearly axiomatic that similar Korean and particularly North Korean experiences during the Korean War are neglected and ignored. In such political, legal, and historical asymmetry, while hibakusha may enact their forgiveness to U.S. leaders in return



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for recognition as framed within a strong U.S.–Japan alliance, the suffering of Korean and other people in the recent past who have been exposed to indiscriminate bombing tends to be regarded as unrelated. At the same time, North Korea is isolated and portrayed as a dire threat. After all, both North Korea and Iran, unlike Japan and other “umbrella” states of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence, were among the 123 nations that voted in favor of the 2016 United Nations Resolution (“L.41”) (38 opposed, 16 abstained) to negotiate a legally binding instrument for the prohibition of nuclear weapons leading to their total elimination.32 Part of the problem is the repetition of commemorative rituals as if the atomic bombs occurred in isolation, as a force majeur or even as if hibakusha as sacrificial victims and sole symbols of the mission to achieve world peace and the total abolition of nuclear weapons could possibly expunge the injustice and suffering caused to millions of people from very similar hells across national and generational boundaries from indiscriminate area bombing and the myriad uses of atomic weapons. While it appears justified to delegitimize nuclear weapons (uranium, plutonium, fissile or otherwise) as consistent with any other weapon of mass destruction, sovereign states exposed to threats of military intervention (nuclear or otherwise) and regime change are unlikely to relinquish whatever means of self-defense they deem necessary to ensure their integrity. The U.S.–North Korea nuclear crisis of 2016–2017 underlines the necessity for a more through historical understanding of its causes. As outlined here, conflict in Northeast Asia did not end with the Second World War but continued in re-aligned form including through nuclear proliferation, throughout the Korean War until the present. In this context, if hibakusha are to be seriously regarded as representatives of global nuclear disarmament in the spirit of upholding universal peace and the sanctity of human life, then they must also be decoupled from U.S. and Japanese exceptionalism. To avoid their instrumentalization, the momentum from this treaty passed on July 7, 2017, could extend to delegitimize the threat or use of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence (nuclear or otherwise) by one or more states upon other states and populations in ways that fail to meet the requirements of self-defense and international humanitarian law. If Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and area bombing in Japan and Korea (to name two) are considered not in isolation but within a continuum of primarily U.S. geopolitical and geo-economic strategy since the nineteenth century, this may be useful in weighing the factors that have underpinned North Korean attempts to obtain nuclear weapons capability. It may even assist in building confidence toward a constructive settlement in this pivotal hub of Northeast Asia and strengthen the effort to achieve total nuclear abolition.

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NOTES   1.  Article 51, UN Charter.   2.  Unnamed U.S. officials declared that the United States had no intention to use military force against North Korea in response to either a nuclear test or a missile launch. Matthew Pennington, “Trump Strategy on N Korea: ‘Maximum Pressure and Engagement,’” Associated Press, April 14, 2017, https://apnews.com/86626d21ea2 b45c79457a873a747c452/Trump-strategy-on-NKorea:-%27Maximum-pressure-and -engagement%27.  3. Annual Foal Eagle drills (since 1997) regularly involve cross-border exercises. In 2017, a “Korea Massive Punishment & Retaliation” (KMPR) battle plan utilized U.S–Japan–ROK intelligence sharing (GSOMIA) as part of a U.S. war plan “OPLAN5015” for DPRK “decapitation strikes” (among numerous plans). Nuclear bomber flights were included.  4. One Tomahawk cruise missile is estimated at USD 1–1.6 million, with a roughly USD 100 million strike cost excluding operational deployment. Tomahawks can be armed with nuclear warheads.  5. The Syrian government claimed this attack was a “fabrication,” a RussianIranian document called for independent investigation by the UN Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), while France provided evidence from Turkey to claim Syrian government responsibility.   6.  The thermobaric MOAB could conceivably avoid prohibition as a “nuclear weapon.”  7. Other B61 variants—3, 4, 7, 11—are deployed in Belgium (20); Germany (20); Italy (70); Netherlands (20); Turkey (50). 180 B61–12s are to be deployed on various aircraft platforms by March 2020. It is worth noting that the U.S. nuclear modernization program implemented by the Obama administration has increased the yield of its existing ballistic missile forces by a factor of three and which suggest an intention to use in a surprise attack.   8.  It is believed that North Korea conducted an underground nuclear teat on September 3, 2017, its sixth since 2006. It has also tested various missiles of intermediate and long ranges. Although at the time of writing some experts are convinced that it has already achieved an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile capability, others have estimated it will take between two and ten years. Altough it has achieved solid fuel rocket engines, demonstrated effective guidance systems and possible re-entry cladding, it is yet to be proven whether it can sufficiently miniaturize a warhead for an ICBM.   9.  THAAD is integrated within Air Force Global Strike Command as part of U.S. nuclear first-strike strategy. The radar enhances U.S. surveillance of missile storage and launch sites thereby reducing rival deterrence. 10. The LDP Cabinet considered additional Aegis Ashore or THAAD systems to its Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) Aegis interceptors (mid-range), and ground-to-air Patriot (PAC-3) missiles (short range). 11.  The KPA is the fourth largest army in the world, behind the United States with 1.4 million.



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12. See Joel Wit, Daniel Poneman, Robert Gallucci, Going Critical: The first North Korean Nuclear Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2004). 13.  See Pierre Salinger and Eric Laurent, The Secret Dossier: The Hidden Agenda behind the Iraq War (New York: Penguin Books, 1991); Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992). 14.  Reiji Yoshida, “U.S.-Korean War Hype Rings Hollow as Verbal Jousting Continues,” Japan Times, accessed April 18, 2017, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/ 2017/04/15/national/u-s-korean-war-hype-rings-hollow-verbal-jousting-continues/ ?utm_source=Daily+News+Updates&utm_campaign=e1f0158071-Sunday_email_ updates16_04_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c5a6080d40-e1f0158071 –332620045#.WPK2P44lG1s.; Gideon Rachman, “Bombing North Korea Is Not an Option,” Financial Times, accessed March 20, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/ 9c6cdb9a-0d4e-11e7-b030–768954394623. 15.  See the Drs. J. Conant, A. Compton, and H. Urey, “Groves Memo,” S-1 Section, Office of Scientific Research and Development, October 1943. 16.  From 1944, human experiments (injected plutonium) were conducted in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; University of Chicago; and University of California. See Ruth Faden et al., “Experiments with Plutonium, Uranium and Polonium,” Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, October 1995, http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/ research/reports/achre/index.htm. 17.  A. P. De Seversky, Victory through Airpower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942); G. Douhet, Command from the Air (New York: Coward-McCann, 1921). 18. For example see “Bombing of Tokyo in World War II,” World Heritage Encyclopedia, accessed June 14, 2017, http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/Bombing_ of_Tokyo_in_World_War_II.; Mark Selden, “A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities & the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 5.5.2 (May 2007), accessed June 14, 2017, http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html. 19.  President Harry S. Truman, “Diary, July 25, 1945,” Truman Library, accessed June 14, 2017, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/flip_books/index.php?tldate=1945– 07–25&groupid=3702&titleid=&pagenumber=1&collectionid=ihow. 20.  Roughly 450,000 hibakusha were recognized as having died by the Japanese government in 2014 and 230,000 survivors with an Atomic Bomb Survivor’s Certificate remained. 21.  George Kennan, “The Charge in the Soviet Union February 22, 1946, U.S. State Department,” Wikisource, accessed June 14, 2017, https://en.wikisource.org/ wiki/The_Long_Telegram. 22.  U.S.-led forces committed massacres at No-gun Ri, Sariwon, Paechon, Sinchon, Pyongyang and Yonan. See, for example, Su-kyoung Hwang, Korea’s Grievous War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Bruce Cummings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Random House, 2011); Hun Joon Kim, The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 23. The Japanese Kwantung Army (and with Manchurian forces) conducted a large-scale systematic counter-insurgency campaign against Korean and Chinese

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Communist guerrillas between 1929 and 1941. See Dae-Sook Suh, Documents of Korean Communism, 1918–1948 (New York: Studies of the East Asian Institute, 1970). 24. On January 5, 1951, for example, it was reported to the UNSC that 7,812 houses had been burned down, and of the 50,000 remaining inhabitants (from 500,000 total), many had been killed by bomb fragments, burnt alive, and suffocated by smoke. Minister of Foreign Affairs, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, “Cablegram to United Nations Security Council Concerning Complaint of Aggression to Republic of Korea,” United Nations Security Council (January 12, 1951): 1–2. 25. Thomas Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (New York: Crown Publishers, 1986), 306. 26.  Bruce Cumings, “Why Did Truman Really Fire MacArthur? . . . The Obscure History of Nuclear Weapons and the Korean War Provides the Answer,” New York Times, April 9, 1964. 27. Taewoo Kim, “Limited War, Unlimited Targets: U.S. Air Force Bombing during the Korean War, 1950–1953,” Critical Asian Studies 44.3.21 (August 2012): 467–92. 28.  See, for example, “Death tolls for major wars and atrocities of the Twentieth Century–Korean War,” Necrometrics, accessed June 14, 2017, http://necrometrics .com/20c1m.htm#Ko. 29.  The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Impact of The A-Bomb. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945–85 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985). 30. See Shimoda et al. v. The State at the Tokyo District Court, December 7, 1963, accessed June 14, 2017, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ryuichi_Shimoda_et_al._v._ The_State; Richard Falk, “The Shimoda Case: A Legal Appraisal of the Atomic Attacks Upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” The American Journal of International Law 59:4 (October 1965): 759–93. 31.  Reports of cases of soldiers and civilians with cholera, anthrax, plague, encephalitis, and hemorrhagic fever emerged during the war saw the U.S. accuse North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union of a “propaganda campaign.” The United States accused North Korean and Chinese officials of brainwashing and torturing U.S. POWs who gave confessions of Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) use. The U.S. weapons stockpile at Fort Detrick, Maryland developed from Japanese and Nazi data, and U.S. government CBW instructional films in Korea and China in 1952 remain suggestive. See, for example, Joseph Needham et al., “The Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the facts concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China,” September 1952, Peking (700pp); Bentley Glass (ed.), “Biological and Chemical Warfare: An International Symposium,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 16:6 (June 1960): 226–56. 32. Toshiki Fujimori, assistant secretary general of the Japan Confederation of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Sufferers Organizations (Nihon Hidankyō), testified on 27 March 2017 at the United Nations conference involving representatives from 115 countries to negotiate a legally binding ban on nuclear weapons. Nihon Hidankyō has been a stalwart campaigner to prevent the proliferation of hibakusha in the world.

Chapter Six

Hibaku Jumoku, Nature, and Hiroshima’s Recovery after the A-Bomb Glenn Moore

Yamasaki Kanji was sixteen when the atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima. His childhood home was located near the north entrance of today’s Peace Memorial Museum, and he remembers the neighborhood as a vibrant one, with “hospitals, a big Japanese inn, a sewing factory and other businesses. In the summer,” he added, “children used to swim in the Motoyasu River. The sound of their playful laughter was heard throughout the neighborhood.”1 As you walk through Hiroshima’s Memorial Peace Park today it is hard to imagine that the stark expanse, punctuated by grim memorials, was once the bustling neighborhood Yamasaki recalls. Indeed, the park’s memorials are designed to focus attention on the bomb’s deadly power rather than the lively neighborhoods that it destroyed, and although Yamasaki now visits the park every day to take water from the Motoyasu River as an offering to the dead, he feels no emotional connection to the park. “I don’t feel nostalgic,” he explained.2 Stretching from the A-Bomb Dome (Genbaku Dōmu) at one end to the Peace Memorial Museum at the other, the Peace Memorial Park leads visitors along a series of somber memorials. The A-Bomb Dome is less a tribute to the building’s stubborn survival than it is a reminder that the rest of the city was destroyed and 140,000 lives lost.3 The Cenotaph, containing the names of those who died, continues this theme. The pedestal supporting the Flame of Peace is designed to look like two hands held palms upward, symbolizing the bomb victims who died of thirst. The Children’s Peace Monument commemorates the children who died, and the colorful paper cranes draped over it are a reminder that Japanese folklore and tradition—in this case that a young girl folding one thousand paper cranes would be granted her wish to live—offered no more protection from radiation than the Yamasaki family’s wood and paper house gave against the bomb’s initial blast. 117

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The inescapable impression created by these memorials is of the bomb’s destructive power, but there is a deeper message. Ran Zwigenberg has argued that the park advertises that Japan has renounced its imperial past, a past that led it down the road to war, and embraced a “forward looking narrative that celebrates the supposed transformation of the city from a military capital to a capital of peace.”4 In this reading, the destructive effects of the bomb were evidence of the power of Western science and technology, and this power transformed Japan from a tradition-bound, aggressive nation, into a modern, democratic, peaceful one.5 This message is sharpened by the concentration of the memorials in a single park. There are no distractions, and Zwigenberg makes the further point that the park’s physical separation from the city by the Horikawa and Motoyasu-gawa rivers signifies “a much deeper division between the past and the present, as if Hiroshima wished to demarcate and distance itself from the past.”6 Another set of memorials tells a very different story. These living memorials are the 170 survivor trees (hibaku jumoku) within the area affected by the bomb. Unlike the Peace Park’s separation from the city, the hibaku jumoku are dispersed through an area extending two km from the hypocenter, taking in current residential and commercial neighborhoods.7 This dispersal creates a far less structured viewing experience to the one in the Peace Memorial Park. The people of Hiroshima see the hibaku jumoku randomly, as they go about their daily business. In other words, the trees are occasional but inescapable reminders of the bomb. This would be unbearable if their message was the same grim one emanating from the Peace Park memorials. However, while the A-Bomb Dome, the Cenotaph, the Flame of Peace, and the Children’s Peace Memorial all illustrate the lethal power of the bomb, the hibaku jumoku show in their silent, dignified way that all life did not end with the bomb’s blast. In this chapter I argue that for seventy years the hibaku jumoku have sustained the people of Hiroshima, giving them hope and keeping them connected with their traditions. Following the initial blast the city was a dead zone. Nothing, it seemed, had survived, and people worried that the burnt earth would stay barren for generations. The resilience of the hibaku jumoku encouraged people to stay in Hiroshima and rebuild their city. The subsequent construction of the Peace Memorial Park revealed another function that the hibaku jumoku fulfilled in a way that the park could not: Whereas the Peace Memorial Park symbolized a “forward looking narrative,” the survivor trees connected people with a past they loved. Accordingly, they cared for the hibaku jumoku, and when they rebuilt Hiroshima they planted new trees to make the city as green as it had been before the war.



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THE BOMB, THE OCCUPATION, AND THE ASSAULT ON TRADITION At the end of World War II, the survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima were dazed. The bomb’s effect was so terrible that the hibakusha struggled to describe it. Sixteen-year-old Yanagawa Yoshiko, who was 15,000 meters from the hypocenter when the bomb detonated, said, “I saw a living hell that went beyond description.”8 The people of Hiroshima also shared the pain of defeat with the rest of Japan. Millions of soldiers and civilians lost their lives, and daily life was a struggle for the survivors. Things were worst in the cities, where American bombing was focused. The Japanese used the term yaki-nohara (burnt plain) to describe the cities that had been bombed.9 Homes, factories, and infrastructure were destroyed, unemployment was high, and millions left for rural areas. Many of those who stayed were reduced to living in makeshift shelters, and with rice production at just 60 percent of prewar levels and distribution channels disrupted, city dwellers made humiliating trips to the countryside to barter treasured heirlooms for food.10 As well as the physical destruction, losing the war dealt the Japanese people a psychological blow. Belief in Japan’s invincibility was shattered. By 1945 it was hard not to doubt the wisdom of going to war, but to a people accustomed to a structured society in which their lives were guided by concepts like duty (giri), seeing their wartime leaders tried as war criminals must have been a jolt. At a deeper level, the bomb challenged the ideas that underpinned Japanese society’s cohesion and order. These ideas reflected Japan’s geography and agriculture, and the people’s reverence for nature itself. Japan mostly consists of forest-covered mountains, and the small amount of arable land had to be used wisely. The solution was growing wet or paddy rice. Paddy rice’s high productivity supported a relatively large population, and historians believe that because it required cooperation amongst farming communities, it gave rise to the Japanese stress on harmony (wa) and strict adherence to social etiquette.11 Harmony was an all-encompassing concept. It meant good relations between husband and wife, teacher and student, between neighbors, and between mankind and nature.12 A successful harvest was tied to the seasons. Spring rain was needed to irrigate the paddies, and summer sun was needed to ripen the rice. All of this meshed neatly with the indigenous, nature-based Japanese religion Shintō, which had its own seasonal rituals and ceremonies. Shintō also provided a creation myth that described how the Japanese islands were created by the gods, and asserted that the emperor was descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu.13 These beliefs helped countless generations of

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Japanese cope with the vagaries of life. They prayed at shrines dedicated to the deity Inari for a good harvest, ceremonies such as Seven-Five-Three (Shichigosan) and Coming of Age Day marked rites of passage, and it gave them the reassurance of knowing that their emperor was descended from the gods.14 Nature was even the basis of the Japanese sense of beauty and style that, according to Donald Keene, valued “irregularity, simplicity and perishability.”15 This aesthetic meant that homes were made of unpainted, natural wood, irregular cups and bowls were prized, and Japanese gardens tried to replicate nature, albeit in a stylized way. All of these traditions and sensibilities were challenged by the bomb, which said in the most brutal, emphatic way, that Western science could destroy nature and fracture the harmony of Japanese life. Robert Lifton described this in his book Death in Life when he wrote how it seemed that trees, grass, and flowers would never again grow in Hiroshima; from that day on, the city would be unable to sustain vegetation of any kind. The message here was: Nature is drying up altogether . . . In a culture placing such stress upon nature as aesthetically enveloping and energizing all of human life, such symbolism had great emotional force.16

Although they were shaken, the Japanese drew on tradition and heeded the emperor’s exhortation to “endure the unendurable” by accepting surrender and the coming occupation.17 The truth was that the occupying forces were not the demons many Japanese had feared. General MacArthur gave strict orders that no occupation soldier was to assault a Japanese citizen or to eat scarce Japanese food, and in fact American soldiers gave candy to children.18 Nevertheless, their well-intentioned reforms further chipped away at the Japanese belief system. The occupation administration led by MacArthur (SCAP) wanted to rebuild Japan, but to rebuild it in a certain way. According to Ian Buruma, “the key word in the early years of the occupation for everything that was wrong with Japanese culture was ‘feudalism.’”19 Of course, “feudal” was a European term that did not quite fit Japan, but it was useful as a catchall for describing the rigidly structured, tradition bound society that had blindly followed its military leaders down the road to war. SCAP began by dismantling the structures of the old state. The armed forces were disbanded, the zaibatsu business cartels were broken up, land was redistributed from landlords to tenant farmers, and a new constitution was written containing a clause renouncing the right to wage war.20 Attempts were then made to undermine the traditions, myths, and symbols that supported the old “feudal” state. The emperor was persuaded to renounce his divinity, and SCAP ended state financial support of shrines. Recent scholarship casts doubt on whether Shintō was ever genuinely a state religion,



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but the separation of church and state was one of the founding principles of American democracy, and from an American perspective, this was an essential step towards the modernization and democratization of Japan.21 To make the separation complete, SCAP also tried to erase Shintō symbols and rituals. The custom of an imperial envoy making an annual visit to Emperor Jimmu’s tomb at Mount Unebi was stopped after 1945.22 Scenes showing Mount Fuji, a sacred symbol in Shintō, were also cut from Japanese films.23 The Japanese were hardly likely to give up deep-seated beliefs because they could not see Mount Fuji in films, but they worried about what was happening to their children. One concern was SCAP’s reform of the education system. Courses on morality and ethics were axed, and individualism and independent thinking were encouraged over the traditional rote learning and quiet obedience.24 These reforms, which threatened the Japanese notion of harmony, came at a time when the impact of American popular culture was also being felt. Of course, Japan had been exposed to American culture in one way or another since Commodore Perry’s black ships arrived, but it had been discouraged and censored by the government from the 1930s until the end of the war, only to return with a vengeance during the occupation. Jazz, for instance, was suddenly freely available on American armed forces radio, and soon it was fashionable for young people to meet at jazu kissa (jazz cafés).25 The unease these cultural incursions caused was captured in the Mary Yukari Waters short story “Aftermath,” where the protagonist, Mariko, although relieved that the war was over, could “not ignore a sense that Japan’s surrender had spawned a new threat, one more subtle, more diffuse.”26 At this traumatic time the Japanese found little comfort in change, even when it was couched as progress. With friends and family members dead, their cities in ruins and their traditions under assault, they craved continuity. PLANNING, REBUILDING AND CONTINUITY Hiroshima was not the only city to suffer from American bombing. The notorious firebombing of Tokyo left large swathes of the city in ruins, and twentyfive thousand houses were burnt to the ground in just one night in Nagoya, where the Chunichi Shimbun described the burnt city as a “living hell.”27 In Hiroshima, things were just as bad, if not worse. A staggering 70,147 out of a total of 76,327 buildings were either completely destroyed or partly damaged by the a-bomb.28 Takahashi Akihiro, a fourteen-year-old student when the bomb fell, recalled that when he picked himself up off the ground it seemed as though “the city of Hiroshima had disappeared.”29 Devastation on this scale meant that planners had a clean slate with which to work, but there were

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fears that the ongoing effects of the radiation had rendered the city unlivable, and the idea of rebuilding on another site was actually floated.30 With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that people were panicking, but there were very real, very rational fears behind the relocation idea. It soon became clear that the people who survived the initial blast were at risk of radiation-induced sickness and possible death. This was reflected in the very name hibakusha, which is generally taken to mean “survivor,” but is more accurately translated as a person who simply experienced or was affected by the bomb.31 As unease grew about the ongoing effect of radiation on humans, people also wondered whether Hiroshima’s soil was so poisonous that plants would also get sick and die. Indeed, the consensus was that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for seventy-five years. Soon after the bomb fell, these grim predictions must have seemed plausible. The city had the appearance of “a radioactive desert, covered by ash, seemingly broken and devoid of life.”32 Most trees within an area two kilometers from the hypocenter had either been torn out of the ground or had their trunks snapped in half. Those that remained standing were seared by a blast of heat so intense that a streetcar nine hundred meters from the hypocenter was completely oxidized.33 Isao Kita, who was working at the Hiroshima Weather Bureau a distant 3.7 kilometers from the hypocenter, recalled how “even though there was a window glass in front of me, I felt very hot. It was as if I was looking directly into an oven.”34 The heat caused spot fires to break out, and within thirty minutes the city was engulfed in a firestorm that burnt any trees that had survived the initial blast.35 As the city administration put it, the bomb had reduced the city to “an ashen colored wasteland bereft of all green.”36 Then, almost miraculously, new green shoots emerged from some of the blackened, charred branches. Broad-leafed trees such as camphor and ginkgo proved most resilient, while needle leafed trees like pine and Japanese cedar struggled to regenerate.37 A few trees that were so burned and broken that they had no viable branches left even managed to sprout new shoots out of their blackened stumps, and a weeping willow just 370 meters from the epicenter that was completely felled by the blast sent up new shoots directly from its roots. Perhaps the most stubbornly vital of all the burnt plants was the oleander, one of which actually bloomed the year after the bomb fell.38 The shoots emerging from the survivor trees were not the only early signs of green. Weeds also appeared a few months after the bomb fell. The weeds helped signify that Hiroshima’s soil was not as poisonous as everyone had feared, and with food scarce, people used horseweed to bulk out their meager diet.39 But somehow, in spite of the weeds’ utility, the impact of the survivor trees was deeper. Nishikori Akio was a second grader when the bomb fell. “We were told nothing would grow for 75 years,” he recalled. “However,



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Figure 6.1.  An example of a regenerated weeping willow. Photographed by the author, November 29, 2016.

trees put out new shoots! Everyone was really moved to see the green leaves. These trees were the first to encourage the human beings.”40 Trees are special to the Japanese. The cherry blossom is a much loved sign that spring has arrived, a sakaki tree appears in the myth of the sun goddess Amaterasu, from whom the imperial family is descended, and trees are always planted around temples and shrines.41 There are even festivals, such as the Onbashira Festival, dedicated specifically to trees.42 The survivor trees, moreover, had actually lived through the blast. Their resilience implied that radiation might not be an automatic death sentence for humans either.

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They also demonstrated the resilience of nature itself. As Robert Lifton has explained, to the Japanese, the idea that nature could be subdued by Western science was the “ultimate form of desolation.”43 Their belief system, the values and the rituals they had relied upon to guide their lives, had all been challenged. Then suddenly, when buds appeared on the survivor trees, these age-old beliefs and traditions had been re-affirmed, and there was hope that life could return to the way it had been before the war. Hiroshima had always been a green city. It was originally a castle town, and the castle and official residences in the city had gardens full of trees. The military bases built after Meiji Restoration continued this green tradition.44 Of course, military bases were off limits for civilians, but some of the gardens built by aristocratic families were open to the public, and in 1940 the Asano family donated Shukkeien Park, a wooded expanse across the Kyobashi River from the present day JR Hiroshima Station. By 1941 the city boasted thirteen public parks, and a street-planting program had been underway for four years.45 Bearing in mind that Hiroshima’s population then was barely a third of what it is today and covered a much smaller area, this created a city that seemed connected to the surrounding farms and tree covered mountains.46 At the end of the war the Japanese government drew on the experience of reconstruction following the Great Kanto Earthquake to devise a blueprint for urban redevelopment. Known as the “Basic Policy for the Reconstruction of War-Damaged Areas” (Sensai-chi Fukko Keikaku Kihon Hoshin), its immediate focus was on essentials like burying the dead, clearing the rubble, and restoring basic infrastructure like sewage and streetcar lines.47 Within this broad framework, each city decided how to proceed and what to emphasize. To determine the direction Hiroshima would take, the city’s governor, Kusunose Tsunei, invited six community representatives to join him in 1946 for a round table discussion. The governor himself was focused on restoring basics like bridges and housing, and the Kure deputy mayor stressed the importance of a “memorial graveyard.” The remaining five panel members, however, were more concerned with what we today would call “lifestyle issues.” Oshio Hikojiro, the director of NHK’s Hiroshima office, believed that a library, movie theaters, and playhouses were essential for the city’s cultural wellbeing. The assistant abbot of the Betsuin Temple called for a temple in each neighbourhood, and artist Fukui Yoshiro and novelist Ota Yoko both stressed the need for greenbelts alongside the city’s rivers. “Many trees should be planted in the city,” said Ota. “I would like to interweave dream and reality in harmony and enrich the citizens’ lives.”48 The Kusunose panel’s recommendations can only be understood by taking into account the desire to maintain continuity with the past, something that



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Hiroshima city officials are well aware of today. “Hiroshima’s reconstruction,” they explain, was not an attempt to “create everything anew.” It was also an attempt to bring back “social functions, culture, and traditions that had existed in the Hiroshima communities before the bombing.”49 This meant many things: Hiroshima castle, flattened by the bomb, was rebuilt. Hondori, the shopping street at the heart of the city’s retail life, was restored to its former glory. Care was also taken to ensure that the anniversary of the bomb was not just marked with the Peace Ceremony held in the Peace Memorial Park. To mark the day in a more traditional way, allowing the people of Hiroshima to make contact with the souls of those who died, the city instituted a night-time Lantern Ceremony, where candle lit lanterns are floated down the Motoyasu River. Re-greening was undertaken in the same spirit of restoring continuity with Hiroshima’s past. A few months after the Kusunose panel convened, a plan for rebuilding roads was adopted that included an allocation of land for parks and green areas.50 At this point the city had no trees for replanting—the few surviving plant nurseries had been given over to food production during the war—but farmers donated saplings, and the mayors of nearby towns donated larger trees.51 The first large scale replanting effort was in 1948 in Hijiyama Park, and in 1950 trees were planted along streets, with neighborhoods being lined with a particular species to give them a distinctive identity. Unfortunately, due to scarce water and poor soil, which in many cases was little more than rubble, many of these early plantings struggled to survive. At this point, the city still had a damaged, bare look. Although progress was slow, the city administration demonstrated its ongoing commitment to re-greening when it clashed with Tange Kenzo, the architect who designed the Memorial Peace Park. Tange wanted to extend the Peace Park north into the Moto-machi neighborhood adjacent to Hiroshima Castle, but city planners had designated that area as green parkland. The city won the battle, creating the fifty-eight-hectare Central Park (Chou Koen) and confining Peace Memorial Park to the Nakajima site it now occupies.52 In other words, the physical separation of the Peace Park from the city was essentially a pragmatic decision, even though the park stayed true to Tange’s modernist design, allowing it to convey the “forward looking narrative” detected by Zwigenberg.53 In 1957 another initiative, using the slogan “A Dream-Hiroshima 20 Years Hence,” led to mass plantings along Peace Boulevard, in Chou Park, along the riverbanks, and even along the perimeter of Peace Memorial Park. According to Nakagoshi, Watanabe, and Kim, “strenuous efforts” have been made in the years since to continue the greening process.54

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SURVIVOR TREES AND HIROSHIMA TODAY Hiroshima has emerged today as a vibrant, green city, and those qualities celebrate the city’s resilience. The desperate efforts seventy years ago to get a few streetcars up and running after the bomb fell are honored each year on the anniversary of the bombing, when one of the vintage cars carries passengers around the city.55 Those efforts paved the way for the gleaming, new cars that run smoothly through the city today, taking people to and from work, to shop in the Hondori stores, or perhaps to see the Carp play at Zoom Zoom Stadium. Buddhist temples and the Shintō shrines squeezed of funds during the occupation have been rebuilt, bringing a spirituality to the city, and the rivers where people sought refuge from the burning heat are now lined with mature trees, and people enjoy the views from cafes and restaurants alongside the Kyobashi River. Trees have given Peace Boulevard a stately appearance and, as the city boasts, provide pedestrians “with leafy shade in summer and take the edge off the cold in winter with vistas of green foliage.”56 The hibaku jumoku, which seventy years ago stood out as oases of green against a desolate, grey cityscape, are now woven into the fabric of this lively city. Being part of everyday life both diminishes and amplifies the hibaku jumoku’s message. It can mean that the impact gets lost in the ordinariness of the trees’ setting. The Moto-machi parking lot where a surviving camphor tree grows hardly invites quiet reflection. Other survivor trees can be hard to find. Marked by modest plaques and sometimes set amongst other trees— three hibaku jumoku are in Shukkien garden—it is easy to walk by without noticing anything. All of this brings home the fact that Peace Memorial Park is easy to navigate exactly because it is separated from the muddled, busy life of the city, with nothing to distract from its message. However, being part of the city whose regeneration they inspired is itself a powerful message, and in many cases the setting of the hibaku jumoku reinforces continuity with the past and highlights the resilience of Japanese values and culture. Survivor trees growing in shrines and temples are perfect examples of how the trees complement Japanese religion and other traditions. Trees play a much larger part in religion in Japan than in the West. It is believed that pine trees provide a pathway for the gods to descend to earth—matsu, the Japanese word for pine, literally means “waiting for a god’s soul to descend from heaven”—and as previously noted, a sakaki tree appears in the Japanese creation myth. Both pine and sakaki are typically planted in and around Shintō shrines and buddhist temples, especially at the gates, where they are thought to invite visits from the gods.57 Accordingly, the hibaku jumoku at shrines and temples are treated with special reverence. Shirakami Shrine is a case in point. Built in 1591, the shrine was destroyed by the bomb, with everyone



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inside killed. The bomb’s heat was so intense that it turned rocks inside the shrine red, but somehow three camphor trees survived. They provide a link to the past in the rebuilt shrine, and today people file in from busy Peace Boulevard every day to pay their respects. A ginkgo on the grounds of the Hosenbo Temple in Tera-machi provides a similar link to the past, and the rebuilt temple also highlights the Japanese concept of wabi sabi. Dedicated to the Jodo Shinshu or “Pure Land” school of Buddhism, Hosenbo was built early in the Edo period. The temple and the ginkgo tree were badly burned by the bomb and the head priest and three of

Figure 6.2.  The ginkgo tree with the Hosenbo Temple main hall built around it. Photographed by the author, November 29, 2016.

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his family were killed, but the ginkgo stubbornly survived and eventually sent out new shoots. When the priests were finally ready to rebuild the temple’s main hall in 1994, the ginkgo had grown so big that it would have to be cut down for conventional rebuilding to proceed. The priests, however, were not willing to cut down such a revered tree, so they built the hall around it. Bending the temple to accommodate the ginkgo is a classic example of wabi sabi. Wabi sabi is one of those core Japanese concepts that Westerners find hard to pin down. As Andrew Juniper admitted, it “does not yield easily to a definitive, one line interpretation.”58 The intuitive understanding the Japanese themselves display surely reflects the fact that it intersects with other core values and concepts. According to James and Sandra Crowley, although it was refined by Buddhist monks in the Heian period, wabi sabi is rooted in Shintōism, and it reminds people how “human life is but one small aspect of the natural order.”59 So while Western architecture and design emphasize precision, symmetry, and straight lines, wabi sabi seeks to make a building or article as natural as possible. The rustic, imperfect cup and the asymmetrical flower arrangement used in the tea ceremony are both wabi sabi. Like the irregular temple, these items demonstrate mankind bending to accommodate nature rather than seeking to dominate it, which in any case would be a futile endeavor. As the Hosenbo ginkgo shows, even a tree burned black by an atomic bomb can grow again. Some hibaku jumoku earned special respect. From a Western perspective respecting a tree seems a little strange, but it comes easier to the Japanese. The key is “kodama.” Translating kodama is tricky, but while it might not correlate exactly with the Christian idea of the soul, it can be taken to mean the spirit or the personality of the tree.60 Trees that have overcome adversity and lived to an old age—in other words, shown grit and fortitude—are admired above all others.61 While every one of the 170 hibaku jumoku have these qualities, there are a few that stand out. One such tree is the kurogane holly growing in the garden of the Rai Sanyo Shiseki Museum. The museum was a mere 410 meters from the hypocenter, and the force of the bomb was so intense that it shattered the museum’s stone gateposts. The parts of the building not instantly flattened quickly caught on fire, and all that remained of the holly was a blackened stump. There were no signs of life, but then in 1949, a full four years later, it miraculously sprouted new green shoots. Sixty-seven years later the museum holly is still nowhere as high as the average full grown kurogane holly, and its leaves are a little sparse, but it is healthy and clearly possesses a kodama befitting the man to whom the museum is dedicated, who overcame hardship to write an influential history of Japan, Nihon Gaishi, while under house arrest at the museum site.62



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While it is plausible that people’s connection to the hibaku jumoku might abate over time as the rawness of the bomb recedes, there is evidence that it remains strong. In 1973, the city administration moved to officially recognize the role played by the hibaku jumoku in the regeneration of the city by adopting an official city tree and city flower. Using plants as symbols is itself something of a Japanese tradition, with the chrysanthemum the symbol of the imperial throne and adopted as the imperial crest in 1889.63 People voted from a short list of survivor trees compiled by a committee consisting of city council members, academics, municipal employees, and a media representative. The vote resulted in decisive decisions in favor of the camphor tree (gaining 63 percent of the vote) and the oleander (gaining 64 percent of the vote.) There were two factors determining the outcome. First, the voters wanted to acknowledge resilience to the bomb blast—the kodama displayed—that in turn inspired the people of Hiroshima to rebuild and re-green their city. Second, they looked for connections with the past and the ability to engender the nostalgia hibakusha search for in vain at Peace Memorial Park.64 The oleander was chosen as the city flower because, by being the first to bloom after the bomb, “it gave hope and strength to the city residents as they poured their utmost efforts into rebuilding the city.” The camphor tree recalled memories of the huge trees that grew in Hiroshima before the war, trees whose “stately airs used to soothe people’s hearts.” Like the oleander, the regenerating camphor gave people the strength to rebuild, and according to the city it and other trees “have come to symbolize the reborn Hiroshima.”65 The ongoing significance of the hibaku jumoku was further demonstrated in 2011 by the formation of a volunteer organization called Green Legacy Hiroshima (GLH). GLH members care for the trees, and gather their seeds to grow second-generation survivor trees.66 Propagation keeps the hibaku jumoku relevant, because while first generation hibakusha were concerned with the effect of direct exposure to radiation, the focus gradually shifted, first to the effect on the in-utero population, and today to the effect on the children and grandchildren of a-bomb survivors, who take heart from healthy second-generation survivor trees.67 Saplings have now been given to schools all over Japan, giving a new generation the chance to nurture trees and learn about the role played by the hibaku jumoku. Saplings have even been sent overseas to universities, botanical gardens, and organizations like the Red Cross, to serve as “ambassadors in their countries of Hiroshima.”68 When a ginkgo sapling was planted at the Australian National University in 2016, the university chancellor, Gareth Evans, said that the tree was “a symbol of optimism and hope.”69 That was exactly what the people of Hiroshima thought when they first saw green leaves sprout from charred survivor trees.

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NOTES   1.  Kanji Yamasaki, “The War Deprived Me of Home,” Asahi Shimbun Messages from Hiroshima, accessed December 14, 2016, http://www.asahi.com/hibakusha/ english/shimen/kikitakatta/kiki2008–03e.html.   2.  Kanji Yamasaki. “The War Deprived Me of Home.”  3. Olwen Beazley, “A Paradox of Peace: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) as World Heritage,” in Fearsome Heritage: Diverse Legacies of the Cold War, eds. John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft (New York: Routledge, 2007), 36. Daisuke Yuasa, “Hiroshima as a Social Landscape: Bright Peace and Social Alternatives,” in Ritsumeikan Center for Asia Pacific Studies (RCAPS) Occasional Paper No.07–2 (April 2007). Yuasa argues that the A-Bomb Dome was preserved in its original state “to remember the impact of the atrocity.” Daisuke, “Hiroshima,” 13.  4. Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 24.   5.  As Olwen Beazley has pointed out, this Orwellian language, where the park’s memorials would “link the atomic bomb with post war peace,” perfectly suited the United States. Beazley, “A Paradox of Peace,” 37.  6. Zwigenberg, Hiroshima, 2. Although she would like to see more contrition for Japanese aggression in WW2, Lisa Yoneyama also believes that the A-Bomb Dome “symbolizes the country’s rebirth and departure from the past,” in Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3.   7.  The fireball radius extended just 180 meters from the epicenter, but the bomb killed humans and trees up to 2 kilometers from the epicenter. Introduction to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (Hiroshima: Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 2015), 5. Trees within a 4-kilometer radius had their leaves and branches blown away, and suffered burnt trunks, but mostly survived. The City of Hiroshima, “A History of Hiroshima’s Greenery,” accessed December 26, 2016. http://www .city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1274090206341/index.html.  8. Asahi Shimbun, “Messages From Hiroshima,” accessed January 9, 2017. http:// www.asahi.com/hibakusha/english/hiroshima/.  9. Gary Allison, Japan’s Postwar History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 45. 10. Allison, Japan’s Postwar History. 46–54; W. Scott Morton and Kenneth Olenik, Japan: Its History and Culture, Fourth Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 190–91. 11.  Janet Hunter, The Emergence of Modern Japan: An Introductory History Since 1853 (New York: Routledge, 1989), 82. 12. Boye Lafayette De Mente, Elements of Japanese Design (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2006), 7–8. 13.  Ian Reader, Shinto (London: Simple Guides, 2007), 55–59. 14.  As Paula Hartz put it, “Shinto virtues flow through every level of Japanese life, from the home to the workplace, and are the bedrock of [Japanese] culture.” Shinto,



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(New York: Chelsea House, 2009), 82. For a description of ceremonies such as Coming of Age Day, see Ju and John Brown, China, Japan, Korea: Culture and Customs, (North Charleston, SC: Book Surge, 2006), 74–76. 15.  Donald Keene, “Japanese Aesthetics,” in Japanese Aesthetics and Culture: A Reader, ed. Nancy Hume (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 29. 16. Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991, first published 1968), 68. 17.  Edward Beauchamp. ed. History of Contemporary Japan, 1945–1998 (New York: Routledge, 2011), vii. 18.  Nissim Otmazgin, “Americanization and Democratization: Cultural Aspects of Japanese Democracy,” in Japan’s Multilayered Democracy, eds. Sigal Ben-Rafael Galanti, Nissim Otmazgin, and Alon Levkowitz (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 151. 19.  Ian Buruma, Inventing Japan: 1853–1964 (New York: The Modern Library, 2004), 135. 20.  Takeshi Matsuda, Soft Power and its Perils: US Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 3. 21. Helen Hardacre, Shinto: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Hardacre points out that Japanese historians have shown that the government funding Shintō shrines received was not significant, and the broad use of the term “State Shintō” means that it “loses a lot of its explanatory power.” Hardacre, Shinto, 355. Nevertheless, SCAP did prohibit state funding of shrines. 22.  Peter Martin, The Chrysanthemum Throne: A History of the Emperors of Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 20. 23. Buruma, Inventing Japan, 135. 24. Buruma, Inventing Japan, 135; Morton and Olenik, Japan: Its History, 194. 25.  Eckhart Derschmidt, “The Disappearance of the ‘Jazu-Kissa’: Some Considerations about Japanese ‘Jazz Cafes’ and Jazz Listeners,” in The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Leisure, eds. Sepp Linhart and Sabine Fruhstuck (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 303. 26.  Mary Yukari Waters, “Aftermath,” Manoa 13.1 (2001): 94. 27.  Edwin Hoyt, Inferno: The Fire Bombing of Japan, March 9-August 15, 1945 (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 2000), 60. 28.  Hiroshima for Global Peace Plan Joint Project Executive Committee, Hiroshima’s Path to Reconstruction (Hiroshima: Rijo Printing, 2015), 30. 29.  Testimony of Akihiro Takahashi, in “The Voice of the Hibakusha,” accessed January 15, 2017, http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hibakusha/index.shtml. 30.  Green Legacy Hiroshima, “The Story of Green Legacy Hiroshima,” accessed January 12, 2017, http://www.unitar.org/sites/default/files/glh_-_revised_infornation _note_oct_2012.pdf. 31. John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Vintage Books, 1985, first published 1946), 92. 32.  Green Legacy Hiroshima, “The Story of Green Legacy Hiroshima,” accessed January 12, 2017, http://www.unitar.org/sites/default/files/glh_-_revised_infornation _note_oct_2012.pdf.

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33.  The Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, Hiroshima (Hiroshima: Ujina Insatsu Jusanjou, 2011), n.p. 34.  Testimony of Isao Kita, in “The Voice of the Hibakusha,” accessed January 15, 2017, http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hibakusha/index.shtml. 35.  Sheauchi Cheng and Joe McBride, “Restoration of the Urban Forests of Tokyo and Hiroshima Following World War II,” in Greening in the Red Zone: Disaster, Resilience and Community Greening, eds. Keith Tidball and Marianne Krasny (New York: Springer Books, 2014), 229. 36.  The City of Hiroshima, “A History of Hiroshima’s Greenery,” accessed January 15, 2017, http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1274090206341/index .html. 37. Hiromi Tsuchida and Peter Del Tredici, “Hibaku Trees of Hiroshima,” Arnoldia: The Magazine of the Arnold Arboretum 53.3 (1993): 26–27. 38.  Tsuchida and Del Tredici, “Hibaku,” 27. 39. Yoshiteru Kosakai, Hiroshima Peace Reader (Hiroshima: Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, 2007), 17. 40.  Green Legacy Hiroshima, “An Introductory Video,” accessed January 6, 2017, http://www.unitar.org/greenlegacyhiroshima. 41.  Yves Bonnefoy and Wendy Doniger, Asian Mythologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 269. 42.  Keisuke Matsui, Geography of Religion in Japan: Religious Space, Landscape and Behaviour (Tokyo: Springer, 2014), 22. 43. Lifton, Death in Life, 68. 44.  The City of Hiroshima, “A History of Hiroshima’s Greenery,” accessed December 26, 2016, http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1274090206341/ index.html. 45.  Cheng and McBride, “Restoration of the Urban Forests,” 233. 46. Cheng and McBride, “Restoration of the Urban Forests,” 245. According to Nobukazu Nakagoshi and Toshihiro Moriguchi, Hiroshima’s growth has meant that forests have shrunk 10 percent since 1945, and that “farmland is disappearing rapidly.” “Ecosystem and Biodiversity Conservation Planning in Hiroshima City, Japan,” Journal of Environmental Sciences 11.2, 150. 47. Andre Sorenson, The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning to the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2002), 59. 48. Kosakai, Hiroshima Peace Reader, 18, 19. 49.  Hiroshima for Global Peace Plan Joint Project Executive Committee, Hiroshima’s Path to Reconstruction (Hiroshima: Rijo Printing, 2015), 24. 50.  Hiroshima for Global Peace Plan, 27. 51.  According to Ian Douglas the mayors of Hiroshima were important in gaining the support from mayors of neighboring towns. Ian Douglas, Cities, an Environmental History (London: I.B. Taurus & Co, 2013), 38. See also Cheng and McBride, 226. 52.  “The Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law and Commentary” (A Publication of the Planning and Coordination Department, Planning and General Affairs Bureau, the City of Hiroshima), 6. Norioki Ishimaru, “Changes in Plan-



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ning Zone of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park Proposed by Kenzo Tange and Their Significance,” paper presented at the 15th International Planning History Society Conference, accessed January 25, 2017, http://www.fau.usp.br/iphs/abstractsAnd PapersFiles/Sessions/33/ISHIMARU.pdf. 53. Zwigenberg, Hiroshima, 2. 54.  The City of Hiroshima, “A History of Hiroshima’s Greenery,” accessed January 12, 2017, http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1274090206341/index. html. Nobukazu Nakagoshi, Sonoko Watanabe, and Jae-Eun Kim, “Recovery of Greenery Resources in Hiroshima City after World War II,” Landscape and Ecology Engineering 2.2 (November 2006): 112. 55. One of the cars that survived the bombing (car 654) is on display at the Numaji Transport Museum. http://www.vehicle.city.hiroshima.jp/VEHICLE_HP/ Contents/01_home/0100_top/pg_top.html. Its sister car, 653, is put back into service for a few days in August to mark the anniversary of the bombing. 56.  The City of Hiroshima, “A History of Hiroshima’s Greenery,” accessed January 12, 2017. http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1274090206341/index .html. 57.  Hiroshi Omura, “Trees, Forests and Religion in Japan,” Mountain Research and Development 24 (May 2004): 179–80. 58. Andrew Juniper, Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2003), ix. 59.  James and Sandra Crowley, Wabi Sabi Style (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2001), 9. Lauren Prusinski also makes the point that “the Japanese aesthetic sensibility originated from Japan’s indigenous Shinto religion, the essence of which is the awe-inspired deification of nature.” “Wabi Sabi, Mono no Aware, and Ma: Tracing Traditional Japanese Aesthetics Through Japanese History,” Studies on Asia Series IV. 2 (March 2012), 26–27. 60.  Theresa Bane, Encyclopedia of Spirits and Ghosts in World Mythology (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2016), 81. Hiroshi Omura defines kodama as “a tree’s soul and its echo,” “Trees, Forests and Religion in Japan,” Mountain Research and Development 24 (May 2004):180. 61.  J. W. T. Mason. The Meaning of Shinto (Victoria, Canada: Trafford Publishing, 2002, first published 1935), 75. 62.  William Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann, Sources of Japanese Tradition, Vol. 2, 1600–2000, Second Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 575–79. 63.  Peter Martin, The Chrysanthemum Throne: A History of the Emperors of Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 5. 64.  The City of Hiroshima, “City Tree and City Flower,” accessed January 21, 2017, http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1274167272946/index.html. See also Tsuchida and Del Tredici, “Hibaku,” 27. 65.  The City of Hiroshima, “City Tree and City Flower,” accessed January 21, 2017, http://www.city.hiroshima.lg.jp/www/contents/1274167272946/index.html. 66.  Green Legacy Hiroshima, accessed January 22, 2017, http://www.unitar.org/ greenlegacyhiroshima.

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67.  Radiation Effects Research Foundation, Introduction to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (Hiroshima: RERF, 2015), 5–17. 68.  Green Legacy Hiroshima, accessed January 22, 2017, http://www.unitar.org/ greenlegacyhiroshima. 69.  Natasha Boddy, “Hiroshima Survivor Tree Planted at ANU,” Canberra Times, July 21, 2016.

Chapter Seven

“In the Shadow of the Cloud”1 Hibakusha Poets as Public Intellectuals Cassandra Atherton

At the seventy-first commemoration ceremony2 of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a message from the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was read out by a representative: Today, the world needs the hibakusha spirit more than ever, at a time when global tensions are rising and progress on nuclear disarmament is “hard to find,” [hibakusha] have special responsibility to prevent another Hiroshima.3

The complexity of the commemorative ceremonies in Hiroshima each year highlights the ongoing relevance of Hiroshima, and the need to continue to seek deeper understandings of the bomb. Hibakusha Oguro Keiko argues that in lobbying for a nuclear free world, “Imagination is key.”4 By this, she clarified, she believes writers, artists, and poets most successfully encourage empathy in their readers. As a scholar in literary studies, I have always turned to atomic bomb literature to try and understand the moments after pika-don. I focused my attention on hibakusha poetry because of its stark simplicity and the way, like the ABomb Dome, it bears testimony to “the most destructive force ever created by humankind; . . . [while simultaneously] express[ing] the hope for world peace and the ultimate elimination of all nuclear weapons.”5 There is no direct translation of the word “public intellectual” in Japanese. The closest word is probably chishikijin (知識人), which captures the “intellectual” part of “public intellectual” but stops short of addressing the essential “public” part of this role. However, it is clear that there have been many Japanese across the political spectrum who have fulfilled the same function as the Western public intellectual, such as Mishima Yukio, Ōe Kenzaburō, and Ishihara Shintarō. When hibakusha poets specifically communicate their 135

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message of both protest and peace to a large public, via the dissemination of their poetry, they can be identified as public intellectuals. Alternatively, hibakusha who wrote poetry but did not court a broad public for their readership fulfil an important role in the private sphere. No less powerful, their poetry also offers a kind of authentic “evidencing” and recording of the horror of the events of the atomic bombing, but for a smaller and often more personal readership. However, this chapter will focus exclusively on those hibakusha poets who sought a public readership. It begins with analysis of atomic bomb poetry to demonstrate the way in which hibakusha poets, such as Kurihara Sadako and Tōge Sankichi, can be identified as public intellectuals and ends by discussing outsiderness and uncomplicated language as key features of public intellectualism. A MOMENT IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE ATOMIC BOMB Poet Fukagawa Munetoshi stated that in Hiroshima, among writers, it was the poets who most quickly responded to the atomic bombing. He argued that “perhaps this was because the Japanese lyric is a conveniently simple genre that could be readily adapted to discussions of the bomb.”6 Certainly, the kind of order that traditional meter prioritizes would have provided some kind of refuge when writing about the chaos that ensued after the dropping of the bomb. Poets may have felt some sense of security writing about tragedy within this ordered frame. For example, haiku by Ichiki Ryujoshi and Hatanaka Kyokotsu are disciplined and thoughtful. This form eschews verbosity, rambling, or embellishment and each syllable is carefully chosen to capture a moment in a short and controlled space. They are visual snapshots of confronting scenes; explorations the post-atomic moment in a structured form: Out of the infernal fire       corpses in the summer river 業火脱がれ来て夏川の屍となる7 Swollen with burns unable to make a weeping face he weeps 火ぶくれて泣く表情にならず泣く8

Similarly, two examples of tanka by Koyama Ayao demonstrate control and strong emotion, but the form allows for more detailed expression than haiku. Tanka encourages longer meditation and the use of traditional poetic devices such as metaphor and personification. These tanka focus on the experience of deteriorating health after the atomic bomb. Quite sterile and spare they mirror a hospital’s interior in their containment but the emphasis



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on the emotion involved in the complexities of monitoring the white blood cell count is searing in its mood of impending doom: Again and again I count his white blood cells since it is below several thousand I don’t tell the patient 幾回も繰返し数へし白血球数千に足らざれば患者には云はず If I know my white blood cell count is decreasing my energy will wither I don’t check my own 白血球減るとし知らば我が気力衰えぬべし己のは調べず9

Indeed, as John Whittier Treat points out, many of the first generation of atomic bomb poets composed in the most traditional of meters with the most conservative choice of words . . . Such poets turn to the authority of a familiar repertory of symbols (including in the less accomplished examples, clichés) in seeking a concrete idiom for the atrocity and its aftermath.10

However, to counter this tradition, some hibakusha poets searched for new poetic forms to express life in a post-atomic world. Their dissatisfaction with traditional modes of poetic expression stemmed from their belief that what came before the atomic bomb could not convey the experience of atomic warfare; there had been a rupture that traditional forms could not contain. Furthermore, Karen Thornber argues, Poets felt that haiku and tanka (two of the most popular forms of poetry that were initially used by hibakusha) were taming the experience of atomic warfare beyond recognition and were inadequate for this reason.11

For this reason, poets began to move away from haiku and tanka to free verse. Free verse allowed the poet free reign to experiment with new techniques to represent the fracture and annihilation they had experienced. KURIHARA SADAKO, TŌGE SANKICHI AND FREE VERSE Kurihara Sadako was at home, four kilometers north of the epicenter, when the bomb was dropped in Hiroshima. After surviving this experience, she made the transformation from shopkeeper to one of Japan’s most controversial poets. Her poetry confronts the reader in its foregrounding of chaos and violence. Her first major collection of poems, Black Eggs, published in 1946,

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was highly censored by American Occupation authorities because she dared to address the horrors of the aftermath of the bomb. Edward A. Dougherty states that “American Censors deleted stanzas and whole poems from the book before publication, and because of an earlier run in with Occupation Officials, she herself cut additional materials out.”12 Despite this, it still managed to sell three thousand copies. The full, uncensored volume of Black Eggs, survived like a “fossil,” hibakusha poet Hiromu Morishita observed, until it was re-published, in its restored uncensored format, in 1986.13 Indeed, identifying hibakusha poems as “fossils” is an appropriate metaphor for the way in which the poetry, despite censorship, was preserved. Often published (or re-published) at a later date to reach new and broader readerships, these preserved poems provide a unique insight into the A-bomb and its effect on Hiroshima. After the war, Kurihara pursued anti-war ideals through literature and became a political activist, publishing a substantial body of work—mostly in regional and local venues. She spent her lifetime “cherishing thinking” and spreading her message of peace. Significantly, Kurihara’s poetry demonstrates what she has called the “dehumanizing logic where Mankind stopped being mankind and completely became a machine.”14 While her oeuvre extends the experience of Hiroshima to discuss Vietnam, the Holocaust, and the killing fields of Rwanda, I will focus on her poetry concerning Hiroshima. In Black Eggs, Kurihara’s more elegiac poems are expressed in traditional Japanese poetic forms, while free verse—a form just over one hundred years old—is used for the poems that convey anger and violence. It is as if these emotions break the bounds of convention to be liberated in the “newer” free verse. The haunting “City Ravaged by Flames,” written in 1945, is composed as a tanka and ends on the seasonal reference to autumn. The poem primarily evokes sadness and mourning. The use of the words “silence” and “unspoken” hark back to the argument that tragedy is ineffable or unspeakable and the use of numbers underlines the massive loss of life: Amid rubble/ravaged by flames/the last moments/of thousands:/what sadness!/ Thousands of people,/tens of thousands: /lost/the instant/the bomb exploded./ silent, all sorrows/unspoken,/city of rubble/ravaged by flames:/autumn rain falls.15

However, Kurihara has become best known in Japan and internationally for her poem “Umashimenkana” or “Let Us Be Midwives!” It is apparently based on her experiences in the aftermath of the destruction of Hiroshima



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and prioritizes humanism; in the center of chaos and destruction, humans reach out to others to ease their suffering. The use of free verse is particularly effective as it allows Kurihara to use many different line lengths, creating a chaotic rhythm to mirror the disorder. This choice of poetic form also allows her freedom to recount a series of moments prioritizing realistic dialogue. While the people in this poem act in “a concrete structure now in ruins,” this also reflects the way free verse destabilizes traditional verse: Let Us Be Midwives! —An untold story of the atomic bombing Night in the basement of a concrete structure now in ruins. Victims of the atomic bomb jammed the room; it was dark—not even a single candle. The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death, the closeness of sweaty people, the moans. From out of all that, lo and behold, a voice: “The baby’s coming!” In that hellish basement, at that very moment, a young woman had gone into labor. In the dark, without a single match, what to do? People forgot their own pains, worried about her. And then: “I’m a midwife. I’ll help with the birth.” The speaker, seriously injured herself, had been moaning only moments before. And so new life was born in the dark of that pit of hell. And so the midwife died before dawn, still bathed in blood. Let us be midwives! Let us be midwives! Even if we lay down our own lives to do so.16

This poem suggests that there is hope for the next generation with the birth of a “new life”; an innocent in what is otherwise a fall from innocence. In her introduction to the 1946 edition of Black Eggs, Kurihara states, “behind the emotions of human life lie the ideas that are the essential pillar of human life.”17 In her words, her poetry is about “the living moment.”18 She unites ideas and emotion and makes the personal political in “Let Us Be Midwives!” which culminates in the moment where one life is brought into this world as another fades away. The final image of the midwife is of her “bathed in blood”; a coalescing of her fatal injuries with the blood from the child’s birth. Importantly, there is no difficult vocabulary in Kurihara’s poetry. It is not jargonistic, nor inaccessible, and its simple repetition has assisted in

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this poem’s endurance. “Let us be Midwives!” is one of the three or four most widely quoted atomic bomb poems. This poem’s value as a response to atomic warfare is immeasurable and its emotion and focus on humanity at the center of atrocity is incredibly moving. Written twenty-five years after the dropping of the atomic bomb, Kurihara’s “When We Say ‘Hiroshima”’ plays with the concept of memory and forgetting in its use of repetition. In this poem, Kurihara extends her experience of Hiroshima to comment on world politics. As Kate E. Taylor comments, she “unveil[s] the collective amnesia of post-war Japan in ‘When We Say “Hiroshima.”’”19 Like a mantra, the use of the word “Hiroshima” is difficult to forget when the poem turns on its repetition: When We Say “Hiroshima.” When we say “Hiroshima,” do people answer, gently, “Ah, Hiroshima”? Say “Hiroshima,” and hear “Pearl Harbor.” Say “Hiroshima,” and hear “Rape of Nanking.” Say “Hiroshima,” and hear of women and children in Manila thrown into trenches, doused with gasoline, and burned alive. Say “Hiroshima,” and hear echoes of blood and fire.20

In Kurihara’s poem, the word “Hiroshima” is synonymous with more than just atomic destruction. The poet extends this association across international borders to comment on Pearl Harbor and the Nanking and Manila massacres. In this way, the poem highlights Japanese culpability in these tragedies and posits that widespread blame and guilt are obstacles to world peace. Indeed, as Thornber argues, “Asia’s refusal to forget Japan’s wartime activities” are presented as “wounds everywhere continuing to fester.”21 Kurihara’s confronting images of “women and children . . . doused with gasoline/and burned alive” and the final words of the stanza, “blood and fire,” are reminiscent of descriptions and images of the moments after the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. In these shared images, Kurihara argues for an understanding of all victims of war, regardless of nationality. Makita Yurita argues, “for Kurihara’s testimony to be communicated to public spheres, she had to narrate her memory in a context transcending her own nation-state collectivity.”22 This demonstrates her capacity as a public intellectual in the way she was able to reach an international public by extending her experiences to comment on all victims of war:



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Say “Hiroshima,” and we don’t hear, gently, “Ah, Hiroshima.” In chorus, Asia’s dead and her voiceless masses spit out the anger of all those we made victims. That we may say “Hiroshima,” and hear in reply, gently, “Ah, Hiroshima.” we must in fact lay down the arms we were supposed to lay down. We must get rid of all foreign bases. Until that day Hiroshima will be a city of cruelty and bitter bad faith. And we will be pariahs Burning with remnant radioactivity. That we may say “Hiroshima” and hear in reply, gently, “Ah, Hiroshima.” we first must wash the blood off our own hands.23

In the second and third stanzas, Kurihara argues that there will never be a “gentle” response to the word “Hiroshima” until Japan “washes the blood / off our own hands.” This final, powerful image further references the way in which Japan has the opportunity to lead the way in reconciliation, particularly in Asia. She argues that it is more than just “laying down arms” and “get[ting] rid of all foreign bases,” it relies on the Japanese ridding themselves of any duplicity associated with wartime atrocities by cleansing themselves. This cleansing is implicit in the image of “wash[ing] hands” and is a contentious and rousing statement encouraging activism. Significantly, as Thornber argues, “the poet avoids chastising the Japanese by exploring how they might convince the world to be more sympathetic.”24 In this way, the simplicity inherent in Kurihara’s poem makes her arguments about war accessible to a broad and even international public. Tōge Sankichi was born in Japan in 1921 and was the most public and politicized of the early Hiroshima poets. He started writing poetry at the age of eighteen and was twenty-four when the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Tōge died at age thirty-six, a victim of leukemia resulting from the A-bomb and his death lent his poetry further gravitas. His first collection of atomic

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bomb works, Poems of the Atomic Bomb, was published in 1951 and he was widely recognized as the leading hibakusha poet of his time. At a Field-Dressing Station you who cry, but there is no outlet for your tears you scream, but there are no lips to become words you try to struggle, but your fingers have no skin to grasp you who let flutter your limbs, covered with blood, greasy sweat, and lymph and who let eyes shut like a thread shine white your underwear’s elastic, all that remains on your swollen stomachs and you, who no longer feel shame, even when exposed oh! that until a little while ago you all were lovely schoolgirls who can believe it?25

The horrors of atomic warfare are laid bare in the opening lines of this poem. The free verse allows for uneven line lengths, a series of rhetorical questions, and the uneven rhythm underlines the unpredictability of the moment. His salute to the ineffability of tragedy is expressed in his juxtaposition of past and present. The past is full of movement and life, whereas the present is represented as confronting war wounds. The opening lines, “you / who cry, but there is no outlet for your tears / you scream, but there are no lips to become words / you try to struggle, but your fingers have no skin to grasp” is confronting for the reader not only because of its graphicness but also as a result of the use of the second person address. In this way, Tōge invites the reader to experience, vicariously, death in life: from the dimly flickering flames of a burnt and festering Hiroshima you who are no longer you fly and crawl out one by one and struggling along to this meadow you bury your heads, nearly bald, in the dust of anguish why have you had to suffer like this? why have you had to suffer like this? for what purpose? for what purpose? and you children do not know

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already what form you’ve become how far form the human you’ve been taken26

The middle section of this poem uses a series of rhetorical questions to convey to the reader the pointlessness of atomic warfare. Just as the “you” in Tōge’s poem is unrecognizable, he makes the point that so, too is the post-atomic world unrecognizable. The use of metaphors allows Tōge the opportunity to compare the monstrous looking victims to the monstrousness of the atomic bomb: only thinking you’re thinking of those who until this morning were fathers, mothers, little brothers, little sisters (meeting them now, who would recognize you?) and of the houses where you slept, got up, ate meals (suddenly, the flowers along the fence were torn to pieces, and now not even a trace of their ashes remains) thinking thinking sandwiched between classmates who stop moving one by one thinking of before, of the day you were girls human girls27

The simplicity and directness of this poem ensures that the political statement is clear. While its main referent is the atomic bomb, like Kurihara’s poetry, it comments on humanity and the death of innocence, in terms of atomic warfare. Similarly, in “August Sixth,” the “flash of light” opens the poem and illuminates the post-atomic horrors in the ensuing lines. A series of broken, overlapping images become more and more abject and shocking as the poem progresses. This is juxtaposed with an emphasis on the numbers of dead in the opening lines where “thirty thousand people ceased to be / The cries of fifty thousand killed”: August Sixth can we forget that flash? suddenly 30,000 in the streets disappeared in the crushed depths of darkness the shrieks of 50,000 died out

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when the swirling yellow smoke thinned buildings split, bridges collapsed packed trains rested singed and a shoreless accumulation of rubble and embers—Hiroshima before long, a line of naked bodies walking in groups, crying with skin hanging down like rags hands on chests stamping on crumbled brain matter burnt clothing covering hips corpses lie on the parade ground like stone images of Jizō, dispersed in all directions on the banks of the river, lying one on top another, a group that had crawled to a tethered raft also gradually transformed into corpses beneath the sun’s scorching rays and in the light of the flames that pierced the evening sky the place where mother and younger brother were pinned under alive also was engulfed in flames and when the morning sun shone on a group of high-school girls who had fled and were lying on the floor of the armory, in excrement their bellies swollen, one eyed crushed, half their bodies raw flesh with skin ripped off, hairless, impossible to tell who was who all had stopped moving in a stagnant, offensive smell that only sound the wings of flies buzzing around metal basins28

Images of fire and references to heat are twinned with death to intensify the gruesomeness of the moments after the bomb is dropped. The heat only serves to speed up decomposition as the bodies are “gradually transformed into corpses beneath the sun’s scorching rays.” Tōge uses the abject to sear confronting images into the mind of the reader. In this way, the “skin hanging down like rags” and survivors “stamping on crumbled brain matter” are prioritized in the poem. The abject builds to the moment where young, innocent girls lose all dignity in death: “a group of high-school girls / who had fled and were lying / on the floor of the armory, in excrement / their bellies swollen, one eyed crushed, half their bodies raw flesh with skin ripped / off, hairless, impossible to tell who was who.” Their final resting place among refuse, their bellies expanding with the heat and their appearances ghoulish, perhaps the worst part of this image is the end of the innocence that these schoolgirls repre-



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sent. The second half of the poem moves from more collective remembrances of victims in the first half of the poem, to rousing rhetorical questions about remembering the horrors of atomic warfare: “can we forget that silence” and “can it be forgotten?!” Tōge uses the silence of the victims to suggest that as they cannot speak for themselves, the living must remember them and possibly tell their story in an effort to lobby for nuclear disarmament: City of 300,000 can we forget that silence? in that stillness the powerful appeal of the white eye sockets of the wives and children who did not return home that tore apart our hearts can it be forgotten?!29

“August Sixth” is a protest poem that Lifton identifies as “less gentle in its protest.”30 With an emphasis on the abject, Tōge strives to preserve in “unsparing detail, the force of survivor memories.”31 In the line “How can I forget,” he entreats the reader to remember. PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND OUTSIDERNESS Outsiderness is an unfortunate feature of the hibakusha experience. During the Allied Occupation of Japan in 1945–1952, U.S. censorship ensured that the public was never fully aware of the extent of post-atomic devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This meant that hibakusha were stigmatized in their own society, largely due to ignorance. Ogawa Setsuko recalled: As a hibakusha, I was discriminated against. When I went to see a doctor in a hospital, people there sat somewhat apart from me because they thought Abomb disease was contagious. I was deeply hurt by the prejudice.32

Depending on the extent of their physical injuries, many hibakusha were hidden away and isolated in family homes. In addition to this discrimination, Lifton discusses the “death taint” and the idea that hibakusha were a threat to people’s own sense of “human continuity or symbolic immortality.”33 Keloids, scarring and burns were obvious reminders of the A-bomb and its dark legacy. Indeed, Paul Ham argues that keloids “had the segregating power of leprosy . . . the afflicted worked nocturnal jobs out of private shame and public revulsion.”34

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When asked in an interview about the hibakusha being chased to the fringes, Nakazawa Keiji, the manga author of Barefoot Gen, stated: With the discrimination, it came to be the case that you couldn’t talk about having been exposed to the atomic bombing. You simply couldn’t say publicly that you were a hibakusha. The discrimination was fierce. You couldn’t speak out against it . . . I often heard stories, such as the neighbor’s daughter who hanged herself. Discrimination. Dreadful. There were lots of incidents like that, in which people had lost hope.35

The hibakusha’s outsider status means that when they publish for a large public or publics like Tōge, they can be identified as public intellectuals who act from the margins, or even outside society. This is an important feature of Edward Said’s definition of the public intellectual, to which I will return. First, I will provide a frame for the discussion of public intellectualism. The public intellectual existed long before the term “public intellectual” was coined by C. Wright Mills in his 1958 The Causes of World War Three, where he challenged his peers “to act as political intellectuals . . . as public intellectuals.”36 It is a slippery term that changes over time. Definitions are often either too broad, encompassing anyone who has ever had an idea, or far too narrow to include the full range of public intellectuals. Two key players who brought the discussion of the public intellectual into the public arena are Richard Posner and Russell Jacoby. Posner tries to define public intellectuals in his book, Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline, numerous times but has been rightly criticized for not prioritizing the “intellectual” part of the public intellectual. Jacoby is cleverer in his refusal to define public intellectual in his book, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, but does suggest that it has something to do with “those who cherish thinking and ideas and contribute to open discussions.”37 Noam Chomsky is often identified as the number one living public intellectual.38 He is quick to point out that there are two kinds of public intellectuals: “conformist subservients” and “dissidents.” He argues that the only true public intellectual is the dissident: If you look through history you will find that it is the conformist intellectuals who are respected, honored and so on, and in the old Soviet Union, it’s the commissars and not the dissidents; dissidents could be praised in the west but not in the soviet union and it’s the same here, although of course dissidents in the United States aren’t sent to the gulag. We have other ways in the west for marginalizing and silencing the voices that aren’t liked. Orwell wrote about that, in his introduction to Animal Farm. He said, in free countries like England, unpopular views can be suppressed without the use of force.39



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In the 1993 BBC’s Reith Lectures, Edward Said discussed the “public role of the intellectual as outsider, ‘amateur,’ and disturber of the status quo.”40 Recalling Julien Benda, he argues that “real intellectuals are supposed to risk being burned at the stake, ostracized, or crucified.”41 For Said, “The intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy of opinion to, as well as for, a public.”42 Indeed, Said makes the point that “exile was an actual, metaphorical and metaphysical condition.”43 Exile, he argues, fosters “eccentric angles of vision”44 which hone the public intellectual’s voice and encourages objectivity in the critiquing of society. HIBAKUSHA POETS AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS Hibakusha poets can be identified as public intellectuals and contextualized within these definitions when, like Tōge and Kurihara, their poetry reaches a broad public and they take up active public roles. In this way, their poetry turns on this kind of “thinking” and “angles of vision” about atomic warfare and human extinction. A “leading” but unnamed Hiroshima anthologist who spoke to Lifton believed that: “poets will emerge from Hiroshima like prophets.”45 Indeed, Chomsky identified “prophets” as dissident intellectuals who were “marginalized, tortured, or sent into exile . . . Intellectuals who dissent remain marginalized in most societies.”46 Therefore, following this line of thought, many poets emerged from Hiroshima like dissident public intellectuals. First and foremost, a public intellectual needs to be able to reach some kind of public. Without a public, he or she is just an intellectual. Given the American Occupation censorship, the way in which hibakusha poets reached any kind of public is important if they are to be identified as public intellectuals. Monica Braw, author of The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan, discusses how “American censorship was deficient in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.”47 In addition to this, it was not entirely straightforward and was largely open to interpretation. Therefore, despite censorship, some hibakusha poetry was published directly after the dropping of the bomb. This allowed poems like Kurihara’s “Let Us Be Midwives!” to be published. Interestingly, hibakusha poetry has proven incredibly enduring and continues to find new publics with each decade that passes. Books published under American censorship, such as Kurihara Sadako’s Black Eggs, were republished later, restoring, in many cases, what censors had suppressed. Then anthologies were published and what followed was translation into many

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different languages and discussion of this poetry all over the world. Scholar Richard Minear’s translations of Japanese works into English are particularly significant in this setting as he introduced English speakers to the work of Ota Yōko, Hara Tamiki, and Tōge Sankichi. More recently, the internet has allowed for a worldwide online public to experience hibakusha poetry in translation. For example, Tōge Sankichi’s Poems of the Atomic Bomb, translated by Karen Thornber, is free to download as a pdf online.48 The choice of language is one of the most important factors when aiming to reach a public. Many poets cannot be public intellectuals because their poetry uses too much jargon or difficult language to be widely disseminated in the public arena. However, hibakusha poetry and indeed much traditional Japanese poetry, such as haiku, is not exclusionary in terms of its language. The importance of accessible language for the public intellectual is particularly essential and relevant to the discussion of hibakusha poets because their poetry has been criticized for its use of simple language and its lack of sophistication.49 Scholar Daniela Tan points out: all atomic bomb literature have been heavily criticized: that these accounts lack literary qualities and serve as a cheap means for the authors to distinguish themselves, that they are descriptions mainly of political events.50

The use of jargon undermines public dissemination and discussion. This is not to suggest that language needs to be “dumbed down” for the public, just that impenetrable language prevents public conversation. American public intellectuals Chomsky and Howard Zinn have commented on this, suggesting that jargon is divisive and subversive of public understanding: I am very impatient with mystification, with pretentious language and a pretty closed circle of people who are the only ones who understand what is being said. One of the important aspects of being a public intellectual is that the public must know what you are saying; must be able to understand what you are saying . . . Clear concise communication is the most important thing.51

Discussing the language of some intellectuals, which prevents them from being public intellectuals, Chomsky states: It is mostly unintelligible gibberish. I look at it, but mostly out of curiosity. It falls into two categories as far as I can see: unintelligible and truism. The truism is said in very inflated rhetoric, polysyllables and so on. What it turns out to be. Is a way for intellectuals to be more radical than thou, but do nothing except talk to each other in academic seminars and not get involved with the general public in real activism . . . it is a cocoon, almost impenetrable, impossible to understand what they are talking about.52



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Identifying hibakusha poets as public intellectuals turns not just on their marginalization and use of poetic language—as this is common to all hibakusha who wrote poetry—but on their ability to reach a public audience and readership. Afflicted by atomic warfare, they were ostracized and wrote about their experiences while being exiles in their own country. CONCLUSION Hibakusha poets’ highly evocative and stirring poetry and their devotion to the abolition of the A-bomb is protest poetry at its most powerful. Whether hibakusha poets can be identified as public intellectuals like Kurihara Sadako and Tōge Sankichi, or private chroniclers of atomic war, they embed important political messages in their poetry. Most importantly, their unwavering focus on world peace provides an enduring reminder of the fragility of human life. Indeed, in a moving tribute, Mark Selden argues: If we live in an era that may be called the Nuclear Age, the literary, artistic and citizen representations of the bomb and the hibakusha experience constitute among humanities’ most precious creative achievements, ones that open the path to an epoch of peace and human fulfillment rather than the war and destruction that many have seen as the dominant legacy of the long twentieth century.53

Seven decades after Hiroshma and Nagasaki, as the long-term effects of irradiation and aging take their toll, the number of hibakusha is dwindling rapidly. However, hibakusha poets, like Tōge and Kurihara, continue to play roles as public intellectuals, through the ongoing dissemination of their poetry. Indeed, since the end of both Civil Censorship and Allied occupation, the works of many hibakusha poets have been available and widely circulated, first in printed form and now on the internet. In this way, their readership continues to grow, long after their death. Their poetry ensures that in a post-atomic society, we never forget we are living “in the shadow of the cloud.”54 NOTES 1.  “Season of Flames,” in Tōge Sankichi, Poems of the Atomic Bomb (Genbaku shishū), trans. Karen Thornber (1952) 2011, accessed May 3, 2017, 37, https://ceas .uchicago.edu/sites/ceas.uchicago.../Genbaku%20shishu.pdf. 2.  An earlier version of this article appeared in The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus, June 8, 2015, http://http://apjjf.org/Cassandra-Atherton/4328.html.

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 3. Japan Times, August 6, 2016.  4. Ogura Keiko, Atomic Bomb Testimonies (Hiroshima Interpreters of Peace, International Conference Center Hiroshima, August 6, 2015).   5.  UNESCO, “Hiroshima Peace Memorial: Genbaku Dome,” accessed June 14, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/775.  6. John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 156.  7. Atomic Bomb – Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eds. Kyoko Iriye Selden and Mark Selden (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1989), xxxii.  8. Selden, Atomic Bomb, 141.  9. Selden, Atomic Bomb, 135. 10. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 160. 11.  Imag(in)ng the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film, eds. David Stahl and Mark Williams (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, Hotei Publishing, 2010), 272. 12.  Edward A. Dougherty, Memories of the Future: The Poetry of Sadako Kurihara and Hiromu Morishita, 3–5, accessed February 17, 2015, http://wlajournal.com/ 23_1/images/dougherty.pdf. 13.  See: “Poets Against the War,” accessed February 17, 2015, http://poetsagainst thewar.org/content/sadako-kurihara-japanese. 14.  Edward A. Dougherty, Memories of the Future, 5. 15.  Kurihara Sadako, Black Eggs, trans. Richard Minear (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994). 16. Sadako, Black Eggs, 1. 17. Sadako, Black Eggs, 1. 18. Dougherty, Memories of the Future, 5. 19.  Kate E. Taylor, On East Asian Filmmakers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 20. Sadako Kurihara and Richard H. Minear, When We Say “Hiroshima”: Selected Poems. (Ann Arbor: MI: Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, 1999), 20–21. 21.  Stahl and Williams, eds. Imag(in)ing the War in Japan, 284–85. 22. Makito Yurita, Metahistory and Memory: Making/remaking the Knowledge of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bombing (PhD diss., Michigan State University, 2008), 107. 23.  Sadako and Minear, When We Say “Hiroshima,” 20–21. 24.  Sadako and Minear, When We Say “Hiroshima,” 20–21. 25.  Tōge Sankichi, Poems of the Atomic Bomb (Genbaku shishū), trans. Karen Thornber (1952), accessed May 3, 2017, https://ceas.uchicago.edu/sites/ceas .uchicago.../Genbaku%20shishu.pdf, 17–18. 26.  Tōge, Poems, 17–18. 27.  Tōge, Poems, 17–18. 28.  Tōge, Poems, 5–6. 29.  Tōge, Poems, 5–6. 30. Lifton, Death in Life, 441.



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31. Lifton, Death in Life, 441. 32.  Memories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Messages from Hibakusha, The Asahi-Shimbun Company, accessed February 17, 2015, http://www.asahi.com/ hibakusha/english/hiroshima/h00–00014–3e.html. 33.  Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29. 34.  Paul Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath (London: Transworld Publishers, 2012), 440. 35.  “Barefoot Gen, the Atomic Bomb and I: The Hiroshima Legacy: Nakazawa Keiji interviewed by Asai Motofumi,” trans. Richard Minear, The Asia Pacific Journal, last modified January 20, 2008, accessed February 17, 2015, http://www .japanfocus.org/-Nakazawa-Keiji/2638. 36. C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster 1958), 124. 37.  Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 221. 38.  Duncan Campbell, “Chomsky is Voted World’s Top Public Intellectual,” last modified October 18, 2005, accessed February 17, 2015, http://www.theguardian .com/world/2005/oct/18/books.highereducation. 39.  Cassandra Atherton, In So Many Words: Interviews with Writers, Scholars and Intellectuals (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013), 129. 40.  Raphael Sassower, The Price of Public Intellectuals (Basing Stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 44. 41. Sassower, The Price of Public Intellectuals, 44. 42.  Jim McGuigan, Culture and the Public Sphere (London: Routledge, 1996), 185. 43. Christopher A. Strathman, Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, Blanchot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 62. 44. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994), 39. 45. Lifton, Death in Life, 440. 46. Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on MisEducation (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 18. 47.  Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: Atomic Censorship in Occupied Japan (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1991), 148. 48.  Tōge Sankichi, Poems of the Atomic Bomb (Genbaku shishū), trans. Karen Thornber, (1952) 2011, accessed February 17, 2015, https://ceas.uchicago.edu/sites/ ceas.uchicago.../Genbaku%20shishu.pdf. 49. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 183. 50.  Daniela Tan, “Literature and The Trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 12.40.3 (October 6, 2014), accessed February 17, 2015, http:// asiapacificjournal.org/-Daniela-Tan/4197. 51. Atherton, In So Many Words, 124.

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52. Atherton, In So Many Words, 134–35. 53. Mark Selden, “Bombs Bursting in Air: State and Citizen Responses to the US Firebombing and Atomic Bombing of Japan,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 12.3.4 (January 20, 2014), accessed February 17, 2015. http://asiapacificjournal.org/-Mark -Selden/4065. 54.  Tōge, Poems, 37.

Chapter Eight

The Flowers of Hiroshima Monica Braw

For many years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the world knew very little about the conditions there, and it was not until 1959 that the first literary work was published outside of Japan.1 This was the novel The Flowers of Hiroshima, by the Swedish-born author Edita Morris (1903–1988). An initial reason for the continuous lack of published writings on this subject in Japan as well as abroad was the censorship introduced by the American occupation authorities in Japan on September 18, 1945. Material about the atomic bombings were in practice prohibited. It is true that in the censorship logs (i.e., lists of prohibited subjects), the atomic bomb was not included. But headings like “criticism of the Allied Powers and the occupation” and “disturbing public tranquility” were formulas used for censoring a wide range of subjects, including accounts regarding conditions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Early examples of censorship of atomic bomb material are cases against the national news agency Domei and the national daily Asahi. Domei transmitted a report that included the sentence: “Japan might have won the war but for the atomic bomb, a weapon too terrible to face and one which only barbarians would use.” As a punishment Domei was shut down for twentyfour-hours. All local newspapers were dependent on Domei and thus were deprived of national news during that time. Asahi Shimbun had published an article by the politician Ichirō Hatoyama (later prime minister), including the following sentence: “So long as the United States advocates ‘might is right,’ it cannot deny that the use of the atomic bomb and the killing of innocent people is a violation of international law and a war crime worse than an attack on a hospital ship or the use of poison gas.” For this and other criticism, on September 18, the same day 153

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that the censorship operations were announced, Asahi was suspended from publication for two days. The censorship operations were erratic. Taken as a whole, the four years of censorship resulted in a lack of knowledge about the effects of the atomic bombings among the vast public in Japan. News reports, non-fiction (including medical reports), fiction, and autobiographies by Japanese writers were, with few exceptions, not passed for publication.2 An unknown number of manuscripts were never submitted out of fear for the consequences. The situation outside Japan was largely similar, partly because all foreign reporters in Japan had to be accredited with GHQ, the American occupation authorities, and, in case of travels, obtaining special permission. As a result, during the occupation only one book was published abroad, John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946; first as articles in The New Yorker the same year). In Japan, it was not published until 1949 and only after an extended internal discussion within the Civil Censorship Department. The Authors’ League of America brought the question to light. This caused the Supreme Commander of the Allied Occupation General Douglas MacArthur, who usually never dealt with such questions, to deny the delay had anything to do with censorship. Immediately after censorship operations were dissolved in October 1949, some publication of atomic bomb material occurred. However, there were no translations of Japanese texts about Hiroshima and Nagasaki into foreign languages. The early 1950s was a time in international politics when the further development of nuclear weapons, including the first successful Soviet atomic bomb testing in 1949, led to the nuclear armament race. Discussions about atomic warfare were actively discouraged in the United States, justified by national security. However, American nuclear tests at the Bikini atoll in the Pacific from 1946 onward, and especially the first hydrogen bomb test in 1952, gave incentive to a growing international anti-nuclear movement. As a counterweight, in a speech at the UN in 1953, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced “Atoms for Peace.” This was a program presenting nuclear power as a positive force, in fact to counter negative impressions of atomic power as a means of war. In Japan, this American propaganda effort was introduced in 1956 with an exhibition, also called Atoms for Peace, strategically placed in Hiroshima. The real results of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, above all, the living conditions of the hibakusha, atomic bomb survivors, remained largely unknown, both in Japan and in the rest of the world. In November 1949, Kawabata Yasunari (recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1968), chairman of the Japan chapter of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, together with three more members of the board visited Hiroshima. They met with their colleague Tanabe Koichiro. As a consequence,



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Japanese PEN in April 1950 held a meeting in Hiroshima. A Declaration of Peace was signed by authors, other artists, and by the mayor, Shinzo Hamai. The peace declaration was forwarded to PEN Clubs in sixty-two countries. Ogura Kaoru, who was the main contact between Hiroshima hibakusha and the world through his liaison and interpreting work at the city office, wrote in Hiroshima ni naze (Why were they in Hiroshima? 1980) that the signing of the Declaration of Peace was a bold act during the strict conditions of the American occupation. The same year International PEN held its yearly meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland. At this gathering the Japanese delegate Abe Tomoji took the opportunity to hold a speech about the atomic bombings and to show pictures from Hiroshima. Abe was a radical writer who, during the 1930s, had criticized other intellectuals for their lack of resistance to military rule. After the war he travelled widely, translated authors as diverse as Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and engaged himself in international and national political questions. Unfortunately, his lecture about Hiroshima at the PEN meeting in Edinburgh has not been found in the papers of Japanese PEN. Only the name of the lecture is known: Jinrui no han shita daizai (A great crime against humanity). Among the participants in Edinburgh were Edita Morris and her husband, the American writer Ira Morris. Edita was born in Sweden and named Edit Toll. The Toll family was a proud noble family with distinguished soldiers active from the seventeenth century on all sides of the Baltic, including in the Russian army against Napoleon. Edit had married Ira Morris, the son of the American ambassador to Sweden 1914–1919, Nelson Ira Morris, and since then used the name Edita Morris. She started writing, mainly in English, in the 1930s. She became a very well-known short story writer, published in many of the large magazines of the United States. She also published a novel. The couple lived mainly in France, where they had a small chateau not far from Paris. Edita and Ira Morris were, like other participants at the PEN congress, shaken by the lecture by Abe. But they had not been completely ignorant about Hiroshima. The son of Edita and Ira Morris was Ivan Morris, born in 1926. In 1944, as a student at Harvard, he had been called up and placed at the Navy School in Boulder, Colorado for intensive training in Japanese. Among other students were Donald Keene and Edward Seidensticker. All three would become distinguished Japan specialists after the war. Their war assignment was to interrogate Japanese POWs, to interpret and to translate Japanese materials. However, the education of Ivan Morris was not completed until in late summer 1945 when the war was already over. He was sent to join the occupation forces in Japan. When he returned to the United States in the spring of 1946, his mother found him very despondent. In her autobiography, Sjuttioåriga

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kriget (Seventy Years’ War 1983, published in Swedish only), she describes his mood and links it to his experiences as an interpreter for the first American investigative team into Hiroshima: New York is full of demobilized soldiers. My darling beside me is one of them. His clenched teeth do not open. I am the one talking. “Well, now the war is over,” I say to my son. Silence. And I understand that to Ivan the war will never be “over.” It lives in his unconscious. In his exhausted brain, in his tormented mind. He keeps his eyes to the ground. They have seen too much. The last crime they witnessed—the crime greater than all other crimes—Hiroshima—has done him in. Oh, why did he learn Japanese in the military language school in Colorado? During the end of the war he was interpreter for American “scientists” in Japan. They poked their bomb victims with sticks of asbestos. Ivan poked them with—questions. “Poor scientists,” I say as we walk along Third Avenue in New York. “Is it true that radiation is deadly? We still know so little about it! People talk about bone cancer, about leukemia. Wasn’t it dangerous for your American scientists to touch radiated atomic bomb victims?” I ask. Ivan laughs his new old man’s laughter. “Don’t worry about ‘my’ scientists. Washington had provided them excellently. They had protective clothing! Especially gloves and aprons. And face masks.” “And what did you have?” “Oh, we the young ones were regarded as rubbish. I had no protection against radiation. No protection of any kind . . . ” Can radiation explain the strange exhaustion of Ivan? His tired ways? And that he never looks into anybody’s eyes? To break the silence, I ask another stupid question: “What did the bomb victims look like? What did they look like in the rubbish heap that was their city?” No answer. After a long silence, Ivan answers: “They looked like fried bacon. Coal-black.”3

Edita Morris writes that Ivan wanted to commit suicide in order not to live in that “epoch of mass murders.” Later, according to her, he says he will marry although he can never have children, being sterile from radiation. Edita Morris was all her life convinced that her impressions of Ivan were factual. They influenced her as one of the factors leading to her writing the novel The Flowers of Hiroshima. However, it is not clear whether the conversation regarding Ivan and Hiroshima really took place as she remembers it. The truth regarding his visit is in fact very different. It is described in the diary he wrote during his stationing in Japan, kept in the archives of Columbia University, Ivan I. Morris papers, 1931–1976. Neither does Edita Morris’s account of the experiences of Ivan in Hiroshima correspond with the first visit of American scientists there. It was undertaken in order for the American military to inspect the damage done by this the very first atomic



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bombing. A large delegation of American military personnel and scientists accompanied by the Red Cross representative Marcel Junod arrived in Hiroshima September 6. Their interpreters were not military. The members of the delegation recorded with horror the views of the city, interviews with doctors and survivors as well as their own experiences. In contrast to what Edita Morris claims Ivan told her, from pictures it can be ascertained that no one of the American team wore protective clothing. Shortly afterwards, a campaign was even undertaken to convince the public, especially in the United States, that radiation was no danger. In fact, Ivan Morris did not arrive in Japan until October 1945. He was stationed in southern Japan and worked on a minesweeper with a Japanese crew, clearing parts of the Inland Sea. He made a short visit to Nagasaki. On December 12, while being transferred to Tokyo, he made a quick trip from the military harbor Iwakuni into Hiroshima. In his diary, he noted that it had been a visit to a place of utter desolation. In a letter to his parents, copied in the diary, he wrote that the view was worse than he could have imagined. He noted that a city of over a quarter of a million now only had a few chimneys and four guttered buildings standing. He did not see a single inhabitant in the city center, and only sometimes glanced passing people wandering around, carrying things. He marveled that all that desolation could have been caused by one single bomb. This was the extent of the description Ivan Morris sent to his parents. It does not seem that he has written about his short visit to Hiroshima in any other context. In general, he was very taciturn regarding his short time in the occupation forces. In 1955 Ivan had a position to do research in Japan. Ira and Edita Morris went there to visit him and his Japanese wife, the ballet dancer Ogawa Ayako, and for Edita to recover from an illness. In Tokyo, they contacted their colleagues in Japanese PEN, Kawabata Yasunari and Abe Tojiro. They had decided to visit Hiroshima and received letters of introduction to the mayor, Mr. Hamai, and to the local PEN representative, Mr. Tanabe. The visit became decisive for both of them, but especially for Edita. In her memoirs, Edita wrote: We dig in the ruins and find unspeakable things. Too much sorrow under the atombombed city! Too much—inhuman! We decide to do something! Trees? Should we plant thousands of trees among the treeless ruins? I discuss with the dean of the University. He thinks “trees” would be a good thing. I think it is better to plant—smiles! We haven’t seen one single smile in the city that America leveled. “So why not plant smiles, Ira?” “Fine!” We rent a former tea house by the river Ohta. We make it into a resthouse for the atom bombs victims. Not for living, for smiling!

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In 1957, after two years of preparations, the tea house, actually a former inn, became a rest house for hibakusha, Ikoi-no-ie (The house of repose). Edita and Ira Morris funded it for seventeen years, periodically with financial assistance from radical friends and acquaintances in the United States and Europe, among them Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Günther Anders, Pearl Buck, and Linus Pauling. Tanabe Koichiro and his wife worked as caretakers. At Ikoi-no-ie food and refreshments were served and activities of many different kinds, including a library for reading, were arranged. There was also the possibility of pleasant baths as the house was situated on the riverbank—hibakusha were shunned at public bathhouses because of their terrible keloid scars. Many of the visitors came from out of town on their way to medical examinations. Ikoi-no-ie also became a place where foreign visitors could meet survivors. During the establishment of Ikoi-no-ie Edita Morris had the opportunity to meet many atomic bomb victims, interview them, and visit their homes. Some of them became friends of hers. Ira and Edita Morris also financed the schooling of a young hibakusha, whose upbringing they followed in the way of foster parents. During later visits Edita Morris met many of these friends anew and continued to correspond with them from her home in France. But it was the material from the first long stay in Hiroshima, during the establishment of Ikoi-no-ie, which became the basis for the novel The Flowers of Hiroshima. Edita Morris was a political activist of her own kind. She participated in many movements, especially against nuclear weapons but also against war in general, as well as against poverty, colonialism, militarism, and dictatorship. In addition, toward the end of her life she engaged herself against the threat of world hunger and in the struggle to preserve the environment. These were subjects about which she wrote novels, among them about the Mau Mau against British rule in Kenya, about the massacres in Indonesia in 1965, and about the dictatorship of the military junta in Greece. Her way of dealing with these complex subjects was not deep political analysis. Instead, she showed how atrocious circumstances forced ordinary people to fight for survival. This was also how she wrote about Hiroshima and the results of the atomic bombing in The Flowers of Hiroshima. The storyline is simple: the main character is the housewife Yuka. She seems very happy about her little world, where she rules. The beginning of the book gives the reader no clue about what her life really is like: “How pleasant it is to kneel on the floor, stitching away, while the tea water bubbles in the brazier beside me. I love my little house, love to toil for my home, for my husband, for my gay fat children, my thin young sister.” Her husband Fumio tries to work, and above all not to show his employer how weak he is, being an atomic bomb survivor:



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Ah! [The manager] has come out at last. He’s leaving. No! Now he’s changed his mind. Pulling out more crumpled documents from his bulging briefcase, he goes back into my husband’s office, and Fumio bows and smiles, bows and smiles, while surreptitiously wiping sweat from his hollow temples. We live in terror of his losing his job; that would be so great a calamity we don’t dare contemplate it. And so my husband stands respectfully listening, and I close my eyes and prepare for another long wait.

There is also Yuka’s younger sister Ohatsu. She is beautiful but cannot recover from the memory of the death of their mother in the conflagration. A young American, Sam, wanders into the area where the family lives. Yuka gathers her courage and asks him if he would not like to rent a room with her family. In describing how she prepares Ohatsu for meeting the American, Edita Morris subtly touches on a subject that some still hesitate to discuss openly—the feelings of survivors towards persons from the country which dropped the bomb: “The young American is going to spend a couple of days with us, small sister.” That was how I broke the news, and Ohatsu was furious. Not that she said anything, of course. That would have been unthinkable for a younger sister. But she blew up her cheeks like balloons, as angry children do, and she kept her breath inside her face as I spoke to her. (Well, that’s better than blowing it out, isn’t it? Especially if harsh words would have flown out at the same time.) “You will be nice to him, Ohatsu, won’t you?” I went on. “If he likes it here, he might recommend us to other foreigners. You’ll entertain him in the garden after supper, won’t you?” “I don’t like haro-sans, elder sister.” “I wish you wouldn’t use that stupid expression,” I admonished her. But then I had to smile, for the fact is that I too always think of Americans as “harosans.” “It’s silly. Just because Americans always say ‘hello’ is no reason to call them hello-sans” [ . . . ]

The family lives under very precarious circumstances in a street where many other survivors make a life, most of them even poorer. Sam-san, as they call the American guest, is curious to know more about Japan—not especially Hiroshima—and accepts, not knowing that Yuka does not have any extra room. In fact, she has only two, where the whole family lives. But with a screen and some inventiveness she manages to arrange a place for him. At the same time, she does her all for him not to notice anything about the tragedy of her own family or that of her neighbors. She is afraid that he would leave them if he knew they were hibakusha. The welcome addition to the family economy would disappear.

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Sam is enchanted by everything, not the least by Ohatsu. It takes a long time before he starts realizing that he is living in the middle of the area of survivors. When he does, he does not abandon them. On the contrary, he has become their friend. The flowers of the title is no cute metaphor for hope: We stroll by the river and cross by the new bridge. Down below we see a little man fishing with a net from the shore, repeatedly drawing in the net from the water and throwing it again. It falls in a circle, sending up a shower of spray. Close by the shore, wedged between two stones, is one of the bouquets, and I hurry on, hoping that Sam-san will not notice it. “Look, there’s a bunch of flowers, just like the other day. It’s the damndest thing! They look just like they’d been put there on purpose.” [...] “You’re right, Sam-san. That’s Ohatsu’s bouquet,” I say softly, standing beside Sam-san, looking over the railing. Sam-san gives a start. “Ohatsu’s?” “Yes,” I say. “She puts fresh flowers in the river every morning on her way to work.” And I tell Sam-san what it would have been quite impossible to tell him a few days ago. I’ve never spoken of it to anyone, not in all these years. I tell him that this was the spot where our mother, become a living torch, jumped into the river after the bomb exploded. The remains of twenty thousand such living torches lie beneath our river, I tell him. And now and then people come to lay flowers on the river’s surface. It’s the only grave they have to decorate.

Edita Morris avoided the polemical way of depicting the American as indirectly responsible for the atomic bombing. In addition, she did not take the opportunity of having the hibakusha express any direct hatred or accusations against him or the United States (which in other connections she did not hesitate to do). Sam belongs to a new generation of Americans, shaken by his insights into the effects of the atomic bombings. The friendship between Yuka and Sam, to be developed further in the follow-up to The Flowers of Hiroshima, The Seeds of Hiroshima (1965), points towards a hope for the future. The novel is not reportage. The personalities the author had met are the inspiration for her multi-faceted characters. She was adamant in underlining that the family she wrote about was fictional. It took extensive work for her to find the form for the novel. In letters, Edita Morris tells about the work and the struggle to develop a simple language. Part of the attraction of the text is also a sense of humor and descriptions of everyday life. She was humble about the result and wrote to Tanabe Koichiro that one might think it pretentious of her to speak in the voice of hibakusha and of “the great national tragedy.” She added that her understanding of Japanese customs may be faulty. Indeed, in some cases it is. The tone of conversations, especially that of Yuka, sometimes



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suffers from the kind of exoticism that is shunned nowadays. Also, the life of the housewife Yuka feels dated, even from a Japanese point of view. But the reader might do well to remember that this was written in the 1950s when the life of Japanese women and of life in general were very different. The novel is a skillful balance between the naïve and the insightful. The horrors of the bombing and the twelve years that have passed are described in such simple, yet straightforward, terms that in some countries the book has been used in schools to teach about the results of atomic bombings. Edita Morris explained her intentions with the book to Tanabe: [Sam] is shaken to the roots of his being when he sees what the terrible atomic bomb has meant for one single family and when he multiplies this fine little family whom he has become so close to with thousands and thousands other atomic bomb victims the young man promises himself to devote his life to the struggle against nuclear weapons. He has learnt his lesson. Hiroshima has taught him that all of us must fight for peace in all of our lives. Otherwise we will share the fate of the family in Hiroshima, with the people the young American lived with and with those whose lives forever were ruined by the bomb. The story is small but the message is big.

In fact, there are several themes apart from the living conditions of Yuka’s family. One is the sheer difficulty for an outsider to understand what has happened. Arriving in Hiroshima in the end of the 1950s there was nothing left of the “atomic desert” that can be seen in pictures. The only remnant, to this day, is the Atomic Bomb Dome, the ruin of the industry exhibition hall, which survived because it was built of concrete. It is famous as a memorial. Fifteen years after the bombing the city had risen anew. Immediately shacks, then gradually new houses and buildings were being rebuilt. In 1949, the city administration initiated a rebuilding plan. A part of the most devastated area was being transformed into the Peace Park. The Atomic Bomb Museum, by the architect Tange Kenzo, was inaugurated in 1955. In the novel, the destruction of the old city by the atomic bomb and the development into a new city is described through the finding of an old guidebook during an excursion. But another theme is even more important: the fear of the future. Yuka’s husband Fumio gets more and more ill as a consequence of the bombing. His employer must not know this. Fumio would lose his job and the family would be without means of living. They might even lose their home if the owner of the house starts suspecting that they soon will have no income. They would be threatened by destitution. At the time, the middle of the 1950s, there was no special medical support for atomic bomb victims. It took years of struggle on the part of the victims themselves to make the government create such a system. Even then it was extremely difficult to obtain support. To prove

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exactly at what distance from the epicenter one had been at the time of the bombing, necessary for subsidized medical treatment, was often impossible. The victims also lived with discrimination because of their terrible scars and illnesses and were met with a general discomfort and mistrust. Even deeper was the fear for coming generations. In the novel, this fear is exemplified by the story of the young, beautiful sister of Yuka. Ohatsu falls in love with a young painter and photographer from a fine old family. But she will not be welcomed by his parents. The reason: she is a hibakusha. They have only one son and the future of the family depends on him. Ohatsu as a survivor carries the risk that her future children will be handicapped because of the radiation she was exposed to. Not only in the novel but also in reality, this is a fear some descendants of survivors carry to this day. Extensive research on first and second generation survivors has shown no such genetic changes. Still, the fear persists. The power of The Flowers of Hiroshima is its combination of somber reality and of hope. Under difficult circumstances and in spite of dire poverty the survivors help each other. In their shanty town, where the houses, the roads, the water supply, and much else is under par, they still watch cherry trees in bloom, catch fireflies in the summer, and celebrate New Year together. Meeting outsiders they are careful that their kimono sleeves don’t slip to show their keloid scars. But among themselves nobody stares at the hairless heads of women or the hands of the artist who can´t hold his brushes unless they are tied to his wrist. A recurring theme of Edita Morris’s in this novel, and in her other books, is that only the strength of love can save mankind. Her intentions were well understood in her time. When the follow-up to The Flowers of Hiroshima, The Seeds of Hiroshima, was published in Germany during the twentieth anniversary of the atomic bombings, the back blurb celebrated her as a committed woman, who turns against war and annihilation in the name of humanity. The publication of The Flowers of Hiroshima in England 1959 took place during a nationwide Anti-A-Bomb Week. Edita Morris was deeply engaged in this movement, travelling around the country with famous British activists like the Labour parliamentarian Michael Foot and Diana Collins, the wife of the radical Anglican priest Canon John Collins, known also for his activities against South African apartheid. Edita Morris planned to use some of the proceeds from her book for the anti-nuclear movement. Together with her husband Ira she was tireless in spreading The Flowers of Hiroshima. In Japan, however, it took twelve years before it appeared, although this does not seem to be related to any political resistance against the publication. The translator was Tomoji Abe, who had heard that speech at the PEN congress in Edinburgh. The publisher was the comparatively radi-



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cal newspaper company Asahi. At the publication, a party was arranged in Hiroshima. Unfortunately, Edita Morris herself was unable to attend because of Ira’s state of health. But she cherished the plaque with autographs from the guests that she later received. During Edita Morris’s life The Flowers of Hiroshima reached a circulation of thirty million in twenty-nine languages, a very high number in those days. New editions appeared often. She was especially happy about the fifth printing in French, which included a preface written by Dr. Benjamin Spock, the world-famous pediatrician. He was something of a guru in the field of raising children, advocating a freer relationship between parents and children. He recommended parents to read the novel to their children in order to make them understand what nuclear weapons bring “not as statistics but in sorrow and pain.” The praise for Flowers of Hiroshima was widespread when the first editions appeared. Saturday Review called it moving: “Without the intuitive understanding [of Mrs. Morris] we would not have been able to see into Yuka-san´s heart and understand what we find there, and better understand ourselves.” Publishers’ Weekly, a magazine for publishers, claimed that the novel could “melt a heart of stone.” London’s Times Literary Supplement emphasized that this was not propaganda. Another magazine about books and reading, Books and Bookman, commented that the novel “skillfully balances on the thinnest line above the precipice of sentimentality and horror—Edita Morris has written a mature and deeply engaging novel in simple prose.” The end was “written with exceptional restraint, with a pathos and courage which cannot but move the most jaded reader.” In her home country Sweden, where she was not very well known, the critics were ambivalent. On the one hand her book was called charming, on the other denounced as peace-preaching. Originally written in English, it was translated, but not by Edita Morris herself. The result was not totally successful (another, more congenial translation appeared in 1985). On the other hand, it was compared to the pacifistic novel Down with Arms by Bertha von Suttner, who had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905. Edita Morris was praised for a humanitarian message as well as criticized for “Communist vulgar propaganda.” In spite of negative views regarding the style and the language, many attested to being moved. Edita Morris was praised for “standing on the side of life,” as the otherwise negative critic in Aftonbladet wrote. In 1961 Edita Morris received the prestigious Albert Schweitzer Prize for The Flowers of Hiroshima. Schweitzer was a German medical doctor and a famous organ musician with his own hospital for leprosy patients in Lambarene, Gabon. He had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. Edita Morris was also the first woman to become a Hiroshima city honorary citizen. The decision was not uncontroversial. Originally, it was intended

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just to give Ira Morris the honor as an appreciation for the work with Ikoi-noie. It was soon realized that Edita, who had done at least as much as Ira for Ikoi-no-ie, also must be honored. But to award honorary citizenship at one time to two persons, and one of them a woman at that, had never happened before. It was finally decided that she could be rewarded as the author of The Flowers of Hiroshima. Thus it is because of her book and the worldwide attention it had drawn to the plight of hibakusha that Edita Morris became the first woman honorary citizen of Hiroshima. Until the first decade of the millennium The Flowers of Hiroshima was still reprinted in several languages and also as an eBook. At www.worldcat .org, an inventory of books in libraries all over the world, in 2016 it was listed in eighty-nine editions in fifteen languages as diverse as English, German, French, and Swedish on the one hand and Slovenian, Turkish, and Hebrew on the other. In spite of this, she herself continued to call it “a small book.” That was not principally a reference to the modest size—187 pages with large print in the first edition (1959)—but to its narrow scope of dealing with the vast subject through the eyes of one family. On Goodreads.com, an Internet site founded in 2007, with fifty-five million members recommending and discussing books, The Flowers of Hiroshima has comments filling eleven pages. A majority of the mostly young readers give the book a top rating of five stars and write very positively about the novel, not the least its power to move. The Flowers of Hiroshima was also made into an opera. In 1966, the composer Kurt Jean Forest read the novel, at that time translated into German and published both in West Germany and in East Germany. An agreement was reached, resulting in Forrest writing both the libretto and the music to a work that Edita Morris insisted should be called Die Blumen von Hiroshima. Forest (1909–1975) was a former child prodigy on the violin, later playing in city orchestras of pre-war Germany. In 1945, after having been called up, he deserted to the Soviet Union. After the war he became a leading name in the field of music in the DDR. Among other positions he was the main conductor of the DDR radio orchestra. He also composed symphonies, film music, and operas. His opera Die Blumen von Hiroshima was recorded in November-December 1967. The LP record is accompanied by a booklet, where he is introduced as a composer whose message is socialism and its view of man. In combination with his longtime interest in Hiroshima, the result was “a necessary opera” where neither visions and dreams, nor appearances, were as important as inner developments. Thus the theme is not the horror of the atomic bombing itself but the conditions of the rebuilt Hiroshima where advertisement and tourism are used to cover up what happened. The main story revolves around the love of the young American towards the beautiful Ohatsu. The moral is that suffering can only be conquered by belief in man. Regarding the mu-



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sic, the combination of twelve-tone music and atonal jazz with more poetic strains is described as drilling into the conscience of the times. Opening night was at Deutsche Nationaltheater in Weimar in October 1967. That legendary theatre from the time of Goethe and Schiller had become the leading music theatre house of DDR, world famous under Harry Kupfer. Edita Morris was present together with her son Ivan and his Japanese wife at the time, Nobuko. They were received by theatre people and by local politicians and Russian generals in gala uniform. Edita Morris was her famous elegant self, Ivan Morris as always dressed as an English gentleman and Nobuko in kimono. Her comment regarding the opera: “I felt like we Japanese do when we see Madame Butterfly.” The opera was later performed also at Staatsoper in Berlin and in Karl Marxstadt. A Hollywood contract for a film was never realized. In the 1980s, when Edita Morris was in her eighties, she travelled in Sweden, giving talks about The Flowers of Hiroshima. At that time, it was also read as a feuilleton on the national Swedish radio. As has been shown, The Flowers of Hiroshima filled a gap outside of Japan conveying the life of the atomic bomb survivors fifteen years after the bombings. In addition to the immediate results it showed that when nuclear weapons are used there are longtime serious effects of previously unknown physical, mental, and social nature. As there were no Japanese literary works translated into foreign languages at this time The Flowers of Hiroshima became a form of witness literature that made an important imprint on the rest of the world. It was not until 1965 that the renowned Japanese writer Ibuse Masuji published his great work on the atomic bombings, Kuroi Ame, translated the next year into English with the title Black Rain. In the same year, the future recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, Oe Kenzaburo, published his account of Hiroshima and the peace movement, Hiroshima Noto, translated into English as Hiroshima Notes (1965). But even with these and later innumerable other books, both fiction and facts and not the least manga, The Flowers of Hiroshima retains a place as an important introduction to the results of the atomic bombings in August 1945 and in general of using nuclear weapons. It is unfortunately as timely to read in 2017 as ever. NOTES 1.  This chapter is based on extensive documentation from the following archives: • Ira and Edita Morris Papers, 1892–1988 and Ivan I. Morris Papers, 1931–1976, in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York.

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• Ikoi-no-ie Archives, Hiroshima Municipal Archives, Hiroshima. • Jean-Kurt-Forest-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. 2.  An important exception was Takashi Nagai: Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of Nagasaki), published in 1948 after an extensive discussion within the Censorship Department. See Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed. American Censorship in Occupied Japan. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1991. 3. Edita Morris, Sjuttioåriga kriget (Seventy years’ war), excerpt translated by Monica Braw. Stockholm: Gidlund, 1983.

Chapter Nine

The Manhattan Project Historical National Park David Lowe

In December 2014, the U.S. House of Congress and then the Senate passed a bill enabling the creation within one year of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.1 The park was officially established on November 10, 2015, and is today partly open, with work underway to enable public access to more buildings and areas within its sites. This chapter considers the formation of the park in the context of the rise of atomic remembering in the United States. In particular, it considers the forces behind the creation of the park, the dominant messages intended and now projected in its operation, the park’s setting within the broader realm of atomic weapons remembering, and its problematic disconnectedness to the first uses of the bomb in Japan in August 1945. The Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MPNHP) was the product of a long campaign and then a difficult passage with U.S. legislators, some of whom found it too hard to separate the project from the horror that it unleashed. The difficulties were also bureaucratic. The proposal was developed by the U.S. Department of Energy, which won congressional approval for a major study in 2004, and required collaboration with the National Park Service before the Secretary of the Interior recommended to Congress in mid2011 the establishment of the park. This has three sites (Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington) and is under the management of the Department of Energy-National Parks Service collaboration. Congressional hearings in 2012 and 2013 produced lively debates and did not result in the bill being passed, but opposition was overcome in 2014, enabling President Obama to sign the relevant act, the National Defense Authorization Act, into law on December 19 that year. According to its purpose statement, the park “preserves and interprets the nationally significant sites, stories, and legacies associated with the top-secret race to develop an atomic 167

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weapon during World War II, and provides access to these sites consistent with the mission of the Department of Energy.”2 One of the main sources of impetus behind the park was the Atomic Heritage Foundation and its energetic founder and champion, Cynthia Kelly, aided by the author of a prize-winning book on building the bomb, Richard Rhodes, and persistent congressional lobbying from the three concerned states.3 Kelly has also provided a short history of the process.4 As with many heritage projects this one grew suddenly in reaction to the prospect of imminent destruction of buildings in the late 1990s, in this case, at the Los Alamos testing site. At the same time, a new government heritage fund, Save America’s Treasures, provided the basis for a public-private bid to save the atomic bomb infrastructure if matching private money could be found. Kelly quickly founded the non-profit Atomic Heritage Foundation to provide the private component. Uppermost in the early campaigning to save bomb-related sites was a powerful sense of commemoration of the scale of the endeavor to build the bomb in human terms (around 130,000 people lived on the three sites at their peak, and more than 600,000 were at some point connected to the project) and the audacity of the race to build a bomb in time for its use in war. In a well-publicized symposium sponsored by the Foundation held in 2002, to build academicpolitical-community momentum behind the quest for a national park, it was the “can-do” and the extraordinary secrecy factors behind the project that were celebrated above all: doing “in just 27 months what every other leading nation in World War II concluded was impossible.”5 Journalist Stephane Groueff recalled being told by experts that the Manhattan Project was a human achievement comparable to the building of the pyramids or the Great Wall of China. Groueff wrote that the project was a superb illustration of the “American system” in getting an apparently impossible job done: By “The System,” I do not mean only the government, the military and political organizations, the scientific and industrial establishments. I have in mind a specifically American spirit of the time, or call it “the American way”—the mentality, habits and culture of the individual citizens. I am talking of the unusual role in problem solving played by ingenuity, readiness for risk-taking, courage for unorthodox approaches, serendipity, or dogged determination.6

The mayor of Oak Ridge, Thomas Beehan, put it similarly in his testimony to a congressional committee in 2013: The Manhattan Project is an incredible story and deserves to be preserved and told. Let me be clear, however, and the interpretation of these sites will be about giving current and future generations an understanding of this indisputable turning point in American and indeed world history. Despite what some detractors may claim, this is not a park about weapons. I believe this is a historical park



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about scientific, energy and engineering accomplishments at a time when our country was defending itself, both during World War II and the cold war.7

Of the three locations constituting this park of accomplishment or “the American way,” the best known is Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the weapons testing was headquartered, and the other two are Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the secret research and manufacturing site that refined uranium and plutonium samples for use in weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima; and Hanford, Washington State, the site of the first industrial size nuclear reactor that produced plutonium for testing and for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The chief aim of those campaigning for the park was for the preservation and opening to the public of so-called “signature facilities” at the three sites. In fact, some of these were already publicly accessible. Among the signature facilities at Oak Ridge are the graphite reactor and gaseous diffusion plant—already the subject of organized remembering in the nearby American Museum of Atomic Energy which opened as early as 1949. This was also when the town itself shed its secrecy, having been built in 1942–1943 and kept hidden from any maps until then. Initially, the museum embraced the excitement associated with the powers of the atom, which promised limitless, clean, and cheap energy. Tourists could literally buy into the spirit of genius, modernization, and the power of the atom by purchasing small chunks of uranium, or the more popular irradiated dimes, as souvenirs. Renamed the American Museum of Science and Energy in 1978, the displays changed in tone, blending science with nostalgia. In Washington State, from 2009, the Department of Energy organized tours to its famous Reactor B at Hanford for U.S. citizens over the age of eighteen from 2009, and extended this to school groups from late 2015. At Los Alamos, a makeshift museum opened in the mid-1950s and quickly outgrew its original quarters. In 1970, it was named after the Los Alamos Laboratory’s second director, Norris E. Bradbury, and in 1993 moved into its big site in downtown Los Alamos. The site where the plutonium bomb was developed was restored by a federal grant in 2006. The new MPNHP incorporates some of these developments but goes further, covering more than forty properties, some of which will be made suitable for opening to the public in accordance with a twenty-year management plan still taking shape. ATOMIC REMEMBERING In 2012 historian Jon Wiener published a book based on his tour of Cold War related sites in the United States and concluded that despite the popularity of

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museums and historical sites as places that Americans enjoyed visiting, and despite significant efforts to make Cold War sites attractive to tourists, the Cold War triumphal narrative had not gripped. Americans were not embracing the conservative narrative that good had triumphed over evil in the Cold War. How we forgot the Cold War includes details of Wiener’s visits to, and reflections on, museums, memorials, and popular culture relating to missiles, atomic testing, espionage, fall-out bunkers and presidential libraries.8 What we might also deduce from his observations was that the greatest popular interest in the bomb lay less in the long Cold War than in its origins and early testing. As Wiener noted, atomic themed museums have grown in the United States in recent years, some featuring in the memorialization of the Cold War now entering the pantheon of wars to be remembered. For those that emphasize science, engineering, and discovery, such as the above-mentioned sites of the Manhattan Project, it is a delicate balance to reflect both the heady excitement of atomic possibilities dreamed in the wake of mastering nuclear energy, and the sobriety of the arms race in their messages. Since the 1990s at Oak Ridge, the excitement of science remains, aimed particularly at children and school groups, but, as the re-naming of the museum suggests, it has also become less anchored to the atom. The vision of the American Science and Energy Museum Foundation, chartered in 1996 as a non-profit organization, is for the museum to grow as “a premier museum for educating the public in science, technology and history of the Manhattan Project.”9 The nuclear identity of Oak Ridge has been captured in a blend of nostalgia for the special years of the “secret town,” and pride in helping to “end the Second World War,” a theme that remains prominent in online tours and other exhibits. This is a powerful echo for museums to feature, as the invitation to join in a gigantic enterprise that would help win the war was the deliberately vague information given to the more than twenty-five thousand who worked there.10 Permanent exhibits at Oak Ridge mix the story of the town with nuclear-related careers at the still-operating Y-12 National Security Complex, manufacturing nuclear weapons components, and the “World of the Atom”; and they connect to displays relating to other sources of power and hands-on robotics and science activities of color and movement. The souvenirs available at the museum hark to Einstein and the early atomic days of Oak Ridge, but the science kits are more solar and weather related, and there is a strong emphasis on classroom programs across the spectrum of exciting science for juniors.11 Elsewhere in the United States, some of the remembering is connected to weapons testing. Between 1951 and 1992 there were over one thousand tests at the main test site in Nevada, with one hundred of these being above-ground explosions. The National Atomic Testing Museum at Las Vegas is not only



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a logical home for a museum recalling this experience, but it is also the most embracing of playful atomic pop culture. Its website invites potential visitors to come and experience “Nevada’s explosive history,” and includes pop-up photos of a “Miss Atomic Bomb” beauty.12 The museum boasts a fulsome history of Cold War atomic testing in the Nevada desert, and has a repository for archived materials relating to U.S. testing in Nevada and also the Pacific in the 1950s. The museum maintains an excitement about the nuclear age partly by decoupling it from international relations. The tests are made less problematic by their becoming the “experience” while the Cold War narrative and overseas events are marginalized, thereby steering away from contemplation of the nuclear holocaust that might have been. Designated a national museum in 2012, early exhibits at the museum provided visitors a blend of: information and displays about atomic testing in Nevada; a simulated bomb blast, including sudden blasts of air; the story of the development of atomic bomb; tracking and monitoring radiation; the technology and science of underground testing; and atomic culture, including civil defense preparations. More recently, there have been increased simulation experiences made available and a special feature on “Atomic Culture: Learn how to survive an atomic blast and go beyond “duck and cover” and into the Atomic Age.”13 In addition to T-shirts, mugs, caps, patches, signs and educational texts, visitors can buy Fat Man or Little Boy bomb pins.14 The museum works closely with schools, and in 2012 was involved in a notable exchange program: a group of Las Vegas high school students traveled to east Kazakhstan, in the region near the Soviet nuclear test site of Semipalatinsk, where more than six hundred tests (including more than one hundred above ground) took place between 1949 and 1989. Later, Kazakhstan students made the return exchange trip to Las Vegas and compared notes with their hosts on the aftermath of living near testing areas. The National Atomic Testing Museum invites nostalgia through easily recognized (and electronically available) images, such as photographs of hotel-sponsored “Miss Atomic Bomb” beauties and “bomb-watch parties” featuring citizens of Las Vegas watching post-test mushroom clouds over the rooftops of their city.15 Such photographs, and artistic works on the same theme of atomic testing foregrounded by Las Vegas scenes, are highly evocative and depend partly for their impact on the visual connection of the mushroom cloud from Hiroshima to subsequent test explosions.16 It is all the more remarkable, then, that the work of all of the above-mentioned museums suggest that it is possible to remain nostalgic about atomic weapons development. The two key factors enabling this seem to be celebration of the science-engineering-can-do formula for success and recalling the early utopian hopes for an atomic-powered future. At the same time, the ghastly effects of weapons, either manifested in Japan in August 1945 or threatened

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in Cold War rivalry, necessarily recede. Running through the museums at Oak Ridge and Las Vegas is textual and pictorial information that one historian has described as an “alchemical narrative,” inviting visitors to recall the transformational excitement of the powers of the atom. As the public learned about atomic energy in the late 1940s and 1950s, it assumed near magical qualities. The invisibility of radiation even added to the sense of mystery.17 Museums celebrate the scientists associated with atomic research, including the physics father-figure of Albert Einstein, and build a focus on pioneering achievement rather than its horrific consequences. And highlighting the sacrifices and achievements of the thousands of workers, those who lived through the Depression and then the Second World War before embarking on heroic post-war rebuilding, taps into the discourse of the “greatest generation,” made popular by American writer Tom Brokaw.18 Recalling such a valorized generation helps to ease places such as Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge into a patriotic landscape. Two additional factors help detach nuclear weapons from their consequences in public memory. The first, a heady mix of populist mystery and conspiracy theories, applies particularly to the Nevada testing site. The National Atomic Testing Museum has embraced the mystery of Area 51, the highly secret military base and testing facility in southern Nevada that has spawned colorful conspiracy theories, including suggestions of work with UFOs.19 The base adjoins an area used for nuclear testing and its name, Area 51, is an Atomic Energy Commission designation. Area 51 was where topsecret U.S. reconnaissance aircraft, including the high-altitude U-2 spy plane and forerunners to the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird,” were developed. It has figured in many popular culture forms, including the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day. Special lectures in the National Atomic Testing Museum’s calendar for early 2013 included “Hunting UFOs,” “The U2 and Area 51,” and “Inside Top Gun.” Similarly, Los Alamos in New Mexico has been part of “Top Secret” tours taking in the Bradbury Science Museum operated by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, and the UFO Museum in Roswell.20 Working with atoms still conjures mad scientists, over-eager generals, and governments experimenting secretly in dangerous ways. This is borne out in the pop culture that persists, this second factor bringing playfulness to popular memories of the bomb. Given a new lifeline by museums, tours, and internet shopping, the pop culture deriving from atomic literature, official and fiction, music, movies, and comic strips, is eagerly consumed. Sources such as the U.S. “CONELRAD” website (active since 1999) devoted to “the pop culture fall out of living with the atomic bomb” invite visitors to recall the music, movies, TV sitcoms, civil defense materials, and personal reflections



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of especially the late 1940s and 1950s as a distinctive period.21 With one eye on stirrings of memory, including museum exhibits, and the other eye on the generation for whom atomic pop culture was entwined with blossoming consumerism, such sites celebrate atomic kitsch and Cold War consumerism. CONELRAD invites baby-boomer consumption of the past, too, with many opportunities to buy artifacts and music or TV and movie collections. It is noteworthy that the classic U.S. Civil Defense film, Duck and Cover (1951), instructing millions of schoolchildren during the 1950s in how to shelter from a nuclear attack, was selected for the 2004 National Film Registry of “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” motion pictures.22 Finally, the end of the Cold War provided for the dismantling of weapons sites and some further opportunities for tourism. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) of 1991 committed the United States and the USSR (then Russian Federation) to substantial reduction of nuclear weapons and means of delivering them. Missile sites in the American Midwest began to be dismantled with START I rendering a fraction available for tourism, or adding to what Edward Linenthal has called the “martial landscape” sustaining American patriotism.23 Today, tourists can visit several decommissioned weapons silos, including the Minuteman Missile site in South Dakota, the Nike Missile site near San Francisco, and the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona. Similarly, command bunkers such as the government redoubt hidden at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia and the North American Aerospace Defense Command control center, a bunker complex built inside Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain, are now well known. Greenbrier has been open to the public since 1995 and provides tourist-friendly evidence of how the U.S. government would have tried to carry on business in the wake of a nuclear war.24 STATES AND AGENTS At the outset, the making of the bomb was driven by a state determined to do whatever it needed in the interests of national security. This, in fact, was a feature of the land acquisition in the United States in the middle years of the twentieth century. Between 1937 and 1957 the area seized and restricted for military use increased from three million to thirty million acres. In remembering the bomb, the state remains extremely important but far from dominant. There is a mix of social agency and state involvement in the more recent building of institutions to remember American nuclear history, and it is a productive if sometimes uneven mixture that derives from different resources being brought to bear. The Save America’s Treasures initiative supporting the MPNHP kick-started a public-private partnership; the American

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Science and Energy Museum is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy (which contracts out management) and is supported by its Foundation, drawing on public, private and volunteer support; the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas is also part federal and part privately funded (the private funders including military contractors Lockheed Martin, Wackenut, and Bechtel); the Minuteman site in South Dakota is maintained by the U.S. National Park Service; and the Titan Missiles Museum in Arizona is operated privately. Most sites allow for volunteers to guide visitors and steer their engagement in particular directions. Indeed, the SF-88 Nike Missile Site near San Francisco, the base for 280 anti-aircraft Nike missiles with nuclear warheads between 1953 and 1979, is also managed by the National Park Service but is dependent on volunteers for its tour guides and ongoing restoration.25 Since the early 1990s, the National Park Service interpretive guidelines have emphasized the need for consideration of mainstream, radical, and revisionist histories, engagement with a wide range of professional historians and other interpreters, and the production of appropriate, high quality site-based and other educational materials. This has sometimes been hard to implement in the face of growing volunteer enthusiasm for Cold War site restoration and remembering. One analysis found that depending for staffing on volunteers at SF-88, many of whom were base veterans, has fostered a narrative of heroic defense of the nation but with little complexity or perspectives from the other side of the Cold War.26 On the other hand, the National Park Service website for the Minuteman site in South Dakota linked to oral histories and a scholarly and richly contextualized study of the “missile plains,” incorporating details of the Soviet strategies and missile capabilities, local protests against U.S. missile bases, and the role of the U.S. Air Force generally in South Dakota’s modern history.27 Given the different experiences in these cases, what guidelines exist for enabling or silencing alternative voices or sources of controversy in the Manhattan Project’s remembering? One partner to the joint endeavor, the National Park Service, draws on a strong, 101-year record of interpretive planning and management. Over the last ten years in particular, the service has become more concerned with civic engagement, with local communities telling untold stories, expanding educational agenda. The other partner, the Department of Energy, currently has custody and control of all sites. Is the Department of Energy likely to critique its past achievements? The new park will operate in a manner consistent with Energy’s mission—to ensure America’s security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions—but what will this mean in practice? Commentators have written scath-



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ingly of the department’s lack of openness and its persistence with secrecy and bureaucracy in its attempts to move parts of the Manhattan Project, such as the Hanford site, into the realms of heritage and tourism.28 Ten years ago, visiting historian Paul Williams found the Hanford experience to be working in a dual register: On the one hand, the site has frustratingly little about the bomb beyond technical facts. Moral and political questions and cultural, social, and economic costs are avoided, restraining one’s ability to think across space and time. Yet, on a knowing, self-conscious level, the secretive, compartmentalized treatment of information can be seen to accurately reflect the bomb’s reality for most Americans, who did not know of its functions or whereabouts.29

The shift in heritage work from Energy to National Parks is underway, but how the partnership works in practice remains to be fully tested. In the recently released (January 2017) Foundation Document governing how the park will take further shape, the division is thus: “The National Park Service will provide administration, interpretation, education, and technical assistance in support of resource preservation efforts. The Department of Energy will continue to be responsible for management, operations, maintenance, access and historic preservation activities of the historic Manhattan Project sites.”30 The document is, in some ways, encouraging. It provides a balanced and broad summary of the Manhattan Project, including details of the devastation wreaked on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a result of its success. It acknowledges the significant work ahead as the park takes shape, including not only remediation and preservation but also the need for ongoing consultation with community groups, including native peoples evicted from lands acquired as part of the project and with Japanese groups. And the document identifies four interpretive themes that are worth setting out in full: • The “secret cities” created for the Manhattan Project, and the sacrifice and displacement connected to them, exemplified this massive wartime effort and demonstrate remarkable opportunities to reflect on the extraordinary lengths to which people and nations go to protect their futures. • The revolutionary science and engineering that fueled the race to create the world’s first atomic weapon make these places a powerful illustration of technological innovation and collaboration, and offer guidance and insight into solving today’s complex problems. • From beginning to end, the Manhattan Project, its World War II context, and the many complex decisions that led to the incomprehensible destructive power of nuclear weapons, prompts us to confront the profound choices and consequences that the world continues to struggle with today.

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• The Manhattan Project thrust humanity into the nuclear age and forever changed the world, provoking consideration of dramatic scientific and technological advances as well as severe human costs and environmental consequences.31 Much will depend on how these four themes are interpreted and translated to exhibits and experiences in the new park. Social history and incredibly complex and expensive preservation efforts for huge industrial plants do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, but, taken as a whole, the Foundation Document appears to be preparing for contemplation of more controversial themes such as: the displacement of old settlements and native peoples to make way for the new industrial sites; the impact and enduring legacies of the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the nexus between development of the bomb and the subsequent nuclear arms race; and the consequences of nuclear weapons production for human health and the environment.32 While the growth of the peace movement and organized protest at nuclear weapons production is a striking absence, the list does suggest a new preparedness— more accurately, an overdue preparedness—to engage with controversy and debate stirred by the production of nuclear weapons. The park takes shape in a climate of increasing heritage tourism and interest in past conflicts. A recent survey found that 57 percent of Americans said they visited a historical site or museum in the last year.33 The great champion of the new park, the Atomic Heritage Foundation, is doubtless hopeful that, more than twenty years on from the “culture war” over the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution in the mid-1990s,34 the political climate now provides a strong base for public engagement with the development of the bomb. In fact, the Foundation held a workshop on the Enola Gay controversy, simultaneously acknowledging its impact on museums and establishing daylight between then and now. Since then, the foundation has continued its unstinting research and advocacy for greater public engagement with the Manhattan Project. It has undertaken an ambitious oral history project, capturing recollections from the broadest possible range of participants and others affected. It is thereby building a social history repository around the bomb.35 Others connected to atomic remembering have been even more bullish about the virtues of museum collections, and the problems with other sources of information about the past. A 2013 posting from the National Atomic Testing Museum’s e-bulletin, The Blast, from then C.E.O. Allan Palmer suggested that, in “a chaotic world,” museums were the most trusted sources in an age of political correctness and untrustworthy academic and other public institutions.36 As outlined above, however, the museum experience to date has varied significantly. One of the museums more focused on a broader range of



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human experience relating to weapons production—the pioneering but also the environmental and health legacies—the Rocky Flats Cold War Museum in Arvada, near Denver, Colorado, has struggled to find a permanent home, and exists mostly online. Rocky Flats was the site of a nuclear weapons production plant, secretly building seventy thousand plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons between 1952 and 1989, after which it was decommissioned and the surrounding area “remediated.” Before then, two fires at the plant in 1957 and 1969 led to significant releases of radioactive materials into the air; and the plant was the subject of major protests in the late 1970s and early 1980s in response to environmental and health concerns. The Rocky Flats Cold War Museum (online) also boasts an impressive oral history collection, including the recollections of those who suffered health problems and those who protested the work of the plant.37 THE MANHATTAN PROJECT IN THE WORLD What Stephane Groueff celebrated as the “American system” or the “American way” that produced the atomic bomb points to what has been a feature in remembering to date and what is indeed an indisputable part of the history of the bomb: the enormous achievement of more than 600,000 people engaged in an unparalleled enterprise of science, engineering, and war effort. With this has come a perhaps inevitable tendency toward an admiration of enterprise above contemplation of consequences. Similarly, the extreme secrecy attaching to all work enables the focus to stay on the revelations of what happened and where. Not only did Americans not know the scale of the effort, but, beyond the reasonably well-known testing grounds of New Mexico, most did not know of its geography. As has become clear in the successful effort to legislate a national park, the bomb-building effort sits like a tripod on a map of the United States: Hanford in the northwest, Los Alamos in the southwest and Oak Ridge in the east. If we factor in the importance of the University of Chicago laboratories in the early stages of experimentation, there is almost a nicely symmetrical four-point pattern. The scale of the project was enormous, involving hundreds of thousands, it stretched across the United States, and was somehow kept secret from the public. Opening up this vault of stored memories and lifting the veil of secrecy sustains the tasks of those working in atomic heritage. The trend towards social history, and recovering the memories of those who worked on the Manhattan Project, provides additional fuel. Oral histories of those involved are providing a valuable and multi-faceted view from below, and work continues on their collection—more than 400 and growing collected by the Atomic

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Heritage Foundation and Los Alamos Historical Society, and, extending the remit to post-war weapons, more than 150 by the Rocky Flats group made available through the Boulder Public Library.38 The number of American memories connected to the bomb and the industry it spawned is huge. In recent years, security concerns attaching to visits of some of the sites making up the park have added to the sense of inward gaze by requiring that visitors be U.S. citizens. In the wake of 9/11 there were drastic upgrades of security attaching to weapons and materials sites that retained working roles. A tourists’ bus tour of buildings at Oak Ridge, for example, was restricted to those with U.S. citizenship and photographic proof of identity, and this remains the case today.39 The proximity of the still-operational Y-12 nuclear plant there is no doubt a factor. Elsewhere, at Hanford a bus tour that used to be restricted to U.S. citizens has been made available to foreigners; the same openness applies at Los Alamos; and those joining the very occasional tours of the Nevada test sites do not need to be U.S. citizens, but the list of requirements makes it hard work for foreigners to comply. In some places, the current restrictions also reflect dilapidation of buildings and low-level radiation sites to be avoided as well as security concerns. In the case of Hanford, the radioactive contamination is the highest of any site in the western hemisphere. Some nineteen thousand scientists have been spending $1 billion a year in their efforts to contain leaking from 177 underground tanks of liquid waste, and a plume of radioactive groundwater heading towards the Columbia River, a process that will continue until at least 2038.40 When Jon Wiener toured the Hanford site some seven years ago, he counted three mentions of the Cold War during his five-hour tour, and twenty-one mentions of “cleanup.”41 Some of the “cleanup” challenges will determine just how accessible parts of the three sites of the MPNHP will be. Among those international visitors who have been able to experience the museums and mnemonic activity around the bomb, it is not surprising that Japanese officials, including those connected with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, have been prominent. There remains a strong common interest in remembering the work and events that led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, the Hiroshima Museum’s explanatory text around the decision to drop the bomb attributes to U.S. decision makers the view that “domestically the tremendous cost of development would be justified.”42 But for the most part, the Japanese mnemonic situating of the bomb is in the world, rather than in the Second World War, and a focal point for working toward peace rather than an opportunity to contemplate Japanese-U.S. relations. The presence of Japan in the new park is, at present, uncertain beyond general suggestions. National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis visited an exhibition of the “Hiroshima-Nagasaki Bomb” held in the United States in



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the middle of 2015, spoke with Shiga Kenji, director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and pledged to include tragic stories in the new park.43 To what extent are diverse perspectives, moral/political viewpoints, and controversies actually embraced in the entity taking shape? The Atomic Heritage Foundation, which lists supporting the MPNHP as its top project, envisages a traveling exhibit featuring the diversity of peoples involved in, and affected by, the Manhattan Project, to complement its “Voices of the Manhattan Project” oral history base. It will doubtless relish the ongoing challenge of maintaining popular interest and will embrace debate over interpretations as further injections of energy into its work.44 They and the new park managers benefit also from the recent screening of WGN America’s two-season TV series, Manhattan, screened 2014–2015, a fictional drama around the building of the bomb. More critically acclaimed than a huge commercial success, the two series did not dumb down the language of the key physicist central characters and its creator Sam Shaw drew on the constant tension between the scientists’ need for freely exchanged ideas and the huge secrecy and bureaucracy of the project. Interviewed in December 2015 for their thoughts on the production of series two, Atomic Heritage Foundation members enjoyed reflecting on its connections with the “real history” of the bomb, and on its impact on public interest: “‘Manhattan’ has been a terrific boon for AHF and nuclear history by raising public awareness of the Manhattan Project. We live-tweet each episode, and receive many tweets with questions about the history of the Manhattan Project. After the season 1 premiere, our website hits doubled.”45 Manhattan the TV production ended with the successful (Trinity) test and did not take the viewer through to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this regard, it shares with museums a weighting toward the project rather than its humanly experienced outcomes. What hangs heavily marginal in these U.S. interpretations and commemoration, even if often alluded to, is the dropping of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki two days later. In its most boundary-setting form, sometimes insisted by advocates of the MPNHP, the Manhattan Project was to build atomic bombs. What happened thereafter was another story and out of the hands of those involved in their building. The asymmetry of a proudly all-American enterprise suddenly, upon dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, becoming a matter of international relations and thereby locating messy debates outside of America, has been one of the least satisfactory aspects of institutionalized remembering to date. Provincial pride has, with a bang, flicked to international responsibility with barely a pause for considering the fate of the two Japanese cities. Undoubtedly, too, the political-veterans-services vitriol heaped on the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in the mid-1990s during its ill-fated attempt to mount a multi-perspective exhibit centered on

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the act of dropping the bomb has left curators and heritage experts very conscious of boundaries beyond which they venture at their peril. Now that the park exists and is taking incremental shape, observers are watching eagerly for potential tensions between the Department of Energy interests and the efforts of the National Park Service, and wondering if there will be more invitations to consider the bomb’s use from oppositional perspectives. Will, for example, Admiral Leahy’s claim that he warned in 1945 of adopting “ethical standards common to barbarians in the dark ages” be available for visitors to Los Alamos?46 Prize-winning author and board director of the Atomic Heritage Foundation Richard Rhodes has anticipated such debates and has corralled them. He locates the Manhattan project and its consequences in more contextualized history of the evolution of human-kind’s race to build bigger, more efficient weapons extending the notion of total war and killing more civilians than military. Thus, for him, the bomb represents a climax, but less of a revolution when we take into account the mass bombardment and fire bombing raids of the Second World War. Rhodes sees the bomb as both a logical culmination of such developments and as a transformational moment: The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes removed the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation. The discovery of how to release nuclear energy, and its application to build weapons of mass destruction, is gradually removing the prejudice on which war itself is based: the insupportable conviction that there is a limited amount of available energy in the world to concentrate into explosives, that it is possible to accumulate more of such energy than one’s enemies and thereby militarily to prevail.47

Welcoming the announcement of the MPNHP, Rhodes reflected on the value of preserving key aspects of the physical past that also embodied the social past, and recalled the way in which Robert Oppenheimer recruited scientists to work on the project. Unable to tell them exactly what their work would be, Oppenheimer walked across university campuses with his recruits inviting them to join in a venture that would probably end the war and might also end all war. This is the social reality that Rhodes hopes will be captured in recalling the summer of 1945 when the bomb was used, a reality he contextualizes with reference to the preceding use of aerial bombardment in the war, and the subsequent absence of war between nuclear powers since 1945.48 As is clear in the ways that atomic remembering has taken shape in the United States, and now unfolds in the context of the MPNHP, focusing on Rhodes’s social reality of vast human endeavor and unprecedented secrecy has proven a strong foundation for well-resourced, publicly acceptable commemorative activities. In general, most museums and historical sites relating to the



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bomb are easily incorporated into triumphalist, conservative narratives.49 But, as was pointed out in 1995 at the height of the Smithsonian controversy, such an approach risks glossing the central point that dropping the bomb made it Japanese history, too.50 NOTES   1.  A small section of this chapter appeared first in David Lowe and Tony Joel, Remembering the Cold War: Global Contest and National Stories (Abington: Routledge, 2013).   2.  National Park Service and U.S. Department of the Interior, Foundation Document: Manhattan Project National Historical Park, January 2017, 15.  3. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).   4.  Cynthia C. Kelly, “The Making of the Manhattan Project Park,” Federation of American Scientists, 68.1, 2015, accessed December 1, 2016, https://fas.org/pir-pubs/ making-manhattan-project-park/.   5.  Cynthia C. Kelly, “Preserving the History of the Manhattan Project,” in Remembering the Manhattan Project: Perspectives on the Making of the Atomic Bomb and its Legacy, ed. Cynthia C. Kelly (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 2004), 13.   6.  Stephane Groueff, “The Manhattan Project: An Extraordinary Achievement of the ‘American Way,’” in Remembering the Manhattan Project: Perspectives on the Making of the Atomic Bomb and its Legacy, ed. Cynthia C. Kelly (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 2004), 32.   7.  Statement of the Hon. Thomas L. Beehan, Mayor, City of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Chairman, Energy Communities Alliance, House Hearing 113th Congress, Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation, on H.R. 1208 to establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, April 12, 2013, accessed May 1, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/document/322552866/HOUSE-HEARING-113TH -CONGRESS-H-R-1208-TO-ESTABLISH-THE-MANHATTAN-PROJECT -NATIONAL-HISTORICAL-PARK-IN-OAK-RIDGE-TN-LOS-ALAMOS-NM -AND-HANFORD.  8. Jon Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).  9. “AMSE Foundation,” American Museum of Science and Energy, accessed January 5, 2017, http://amse.org/sponsorship/amse-foundation/. 10.  Lindsey A. Freeman, “Happy Memories under the Mushroom Cloud: Utopia and Memory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” in Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, eds. Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown, and Amy Sodao (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 158–75; “Life in Happy Valley,” K-25 Virtual Museum, accessed March 3, 2017, http://www.k-25virtualmuseum.org/happy-valley/ index.html.

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11. “Exhibits,” American Museum of Science and Energy, accessed March 4, 2017, http://amse.org/exhibits. 12. National Atomic Testing Museum, accessed March 8, 2017, http://national atomictestingmuseum.org. 13.  “Permanent Exhibits,” National Atomic Testing Museum, accessed April 2, 2017, http://nationalatomictestingmuseum.org/exhibits/permanent-exhibits/. 14.  “Support the Museum,” National Atomic Testing Museum, accessed April 2, 2017, http://store.nationalatomictestingmuseum.org. 15. See “Flashback Friday: When the Atom Was King,” Blog.Vegas.Com, accessed April 20, 2013, http://blog.vegas.com/more-las-vegas-news/flashback-friday -when-the-atom-was-king-2633/. 16.  See, for example, the “Doomtown” series of paintings by Doug Waterfield, accessed March 24, 2013, http://dougwaterfield.com/portfolio/doomtown. 17.  See Robert A. Jacobs, The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). 18.  Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998). 19.  See “Exhibit: Area 51,” National Atomic Testing Museum, accessed October 30, 2012, http://www.nationalatomictestingmuseum.org/exhibit-area51.aspx. 20.  This “Southwest UFO Discovery Tour” (April 2013) is run by Alpventures tour company, accessed March 15, 2017, http://www.alpventures.com/topsecret/ TS_southwest_ufo_discovery_tour_PART1.html#.WTk-26Or2ek. 21.  See the “Conelrad” website, accessed February 5, 2017, http://conelrad.com/ index.php. 22.  The U.S. Federal Civil Defense Administration aimed at half a billion viewers of civil defense films in 1955: Melvin E. Matthews Jr, Duck and Cover: Civil Defense Images in Film and Television from the Cold War to 9/11 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co. 2012), 7. 23. Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 24. “Events Calendar,” accessed March 20, 2017, http://www.greenbrier.com/ Activities/Bunker-Tours. 25. “Golden Gate National Recreation Area,” National Park Service, accessed March 22, 2017, http://www.nps.gov/goga/nike-missile-site.htm. 26.  Greg Shine, “Presenting History at SF-88: an exploration and critical analysis of the role of memory in Cold War historical interpretation at the Golden Gate National Recreation’s Nike Missile Site SF-88,” 1998, accessed December 20, 2012, http://nikemissile.org/ColdWar/GregShine/shine.shtml. 27.  Mead & Hunt Inc, Christina Slattery, Mary Ebeling, Erin Pogany, and Amy R. Squitieri (prepared for U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service, Midwest Regional Office, The Missile Plains: Frontline of America’s Cold War, 2003, accessed March 20, 2013, http://www.nps.gov/mimi/historyculture/upload/MIMI%20 HRS%202006.pdf. 28.  See Bryan C. Taylor and Brian Freer, “The Politics of Heritage and History at the Hanford Plutonium Works,” Journal of Organizational Change Management 15.6 (2002): 563–88.



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29.  Paul Williams, “Going Critical: On the Historic Preservation of the World’s First Nuclear Reactor,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History Theory and Criticism, 5.2 (2008): 15. 30.  National Park Service and U.S. Department of the Interior, Foundation Document: Manhattan Project National Historical Park, 8. 31.  National Park Service and U.S. Department of the Interior, Foundation Document: Manhattan Project National Historical Park, 26. 32.  National Park Service and U.S. Department of the Interior, Foundation Document: Manhattan Project National Historical Park, 16. 33.  Quoted in Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War, 290. 34.  The details of this episode and the broader context of the “culture war” in which the controversy erupted can be found in numerous works elsewhere. One good introduction is Richard Kohn, “History and Culture Wars: The Case of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay Exhibition,” Journal of American History (December 1995): 1036–63. 35. See “Voices of the Manhattan Project,” accessed March 1, 2017, http:// manhattanprojectvoices.org. 36.  “The Blast,” National Atomic Testing Museum, 2013. 37.  “History,” Rocky Flats Cold War Museum, accessed March 23, 2017, http:// www.rockyflatsmuseum.org/history.html.; Austin Briggs, “Arvada’s Rocky Flats Cold War Museum Still Seeking Home 15 Years On,” The Denver Post, December 1, 2017, accessed March 23, 2017, http://www.denverpost.com/2016/03/01/arvadas -rocky-flats-cold-war-museum-still-seeking-home-15-years-on/; Boulder Public Library, “Collection: Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant,” last modified 2014, accessed March 23, 2017, http://oralhistory.boulderlibrary.org/collection/rfnwp/. 38.  For the Atomic Heritage Foundation collection, see http://manhattanprojectvoices.org; for the Rocky Flats collection, see http://oralhistory.boulderlibrary.org/ collection/rfnwp/page/10/; both accessed April 2, 2017. 39.  Arthur Molella, “Exhibiting Atomic Culture: the View from Oak Ridge,” History and Technology 19.3 (2003): 211–26; “Department of Energy Public Bus Tour,” accessed August 22, 2012, www.amse.org/2012-doc-facilities-public-bus-tour. 40.  Williams, “Going Critical,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History Theory and Criticism, 5.2 (2008): 1–18. 41. Wiener, How We Forgot the Cold War, 108. 42.  Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum: Exhibit text, February 2013. 43.  Japan Times, June 15, 2015. 44.  See “Projects,” Atomic Heritage Foundation, accessed March 2, 2017, http:// www.atomicheritage.org/about/projects. 45.  National Trust for Historic Preservation interview with Alexandra Levy and Nathaniel Weisenberg, December 18, 2015, accessed March 1, 2017, https://saving places.org/stories/trinity-test-gadget-spies-whats-true-in-season-2-of-manhattan# .WTuUD6Or2ek. 46.  Quoted in Laura Hein, “Remembering the Bomb: The Fiftieth Anniversary in the United States and Japan,” Critical Asian Studies 27.2 (1995): 4. 47. Richard Rhodes, “The Manhattan Project—A Millennial Transformation,” in Remembering the Manhattan Project: Perspectives on the Making of the Atomic

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Bomb and its Legacy, ed. Cynthia C. Kelly (Hackensack, N.J.: World Scientific Publishing, 2004), 28–29. 48.  Richard Rhodes, “Why the Manhattan Project Should Be Preserved,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 71.6 (2015): 4–10. 49.  For example, see L. Schweikart and D. Dougherty, A Patriot’s History of the Modern World, vol. 1, From America’s Exceptional Ascent to the Atomic Bomb: 1898–1945, (New York: Penguin, 2012). 50.  Given that the National Park Service has watched, in 2015, the USS Missouri Memorial Association successfully incorporate an exhibit of kamakazi memorabilia at the Battleship Missouri Memorial at Pearl Harbor, one hopes that the many opportunities for transnational questioning and remembering will find champions as the Manhattan Project story takes further shape.

Chapter Ten

Hi-Roshimon What We See When We Look at Hiroshima: Walking in the Peace Park Robert Jacobs The day that I arrived to take up my job at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University twelve years ago was the first time I had ever been to Hiroshima; in fact, it was the first day I had set foot in Asia. I transited from my long passage of trans-Pacific travel to my hotel in downtown Hiroshima late in the evening. Unable to sleep very long given both my excitement and jet lag, I left my hotel at about 3 am to walk around the neighborhood. The hotel was located just a block away from the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, and after looking around the neighborhood for a few minutes (Japan!) I headed over to the Peace Park for the first time in my life. It was foggy and quiet as I walked past the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum, and along the paths of the park. There was the cenotaph, the Flame of Peace, the many monuments and the sonorous bell located near the Children’s Memorial. And then, across the river, there was the A-Bomb Dome, lit up but shrouded by fog. This was the image I had always seen in my mind when I thought about Hiroshima as I had attended anti-nuclear weapon marches in the early 1980s, as I attended Hiroshima Day commemoration events in my adulthood, and as I plowed through my dissertation on the nuclear imaginary. I was so under-rested, and so dislodged from normalcy—it was like a dream. Within a few months, I would be passing through the Peace Park several times a day as I rode my bicycle to work and then home again. Always seeing crowds of people: schoolchildren, tour groups, and backpacking international travelers. The park would be jammed full in the daylight, and empty in the evenings. Inhabited only by teens and young people looking for open spaces to play guitars. I came to feel its natural rhythm, to appreciate its daily oscillation. 185

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Soon I began to notice other binaries in the space of the park. Visitors almost always stay on the east side of the long park. This is by design: this is where the primary monuments and paths are, and across the river to the east is the A-Bomb Dome. However, after having been in the park countless times I began to notice that there was a whole world taking place in the shade of the west side that I simply hadn’t noticed.1 Here, most days, older men drink beer and play board games as they sit around the benches and tables. On noticing this, I walked into the grove of trees on the west side and sat down on a bench. Everyone looked at me; I was clearly an intruder. What was I doing there? What was so striking to me was that all the other parts of the park were invitational, they welcomed me to be there. Strangers from all around the world passed through every day by the thousands. How was there still a part of the park that almost felt private? I began to think about what is acceptable to see and feel and think in the park, and what was hidden, in plain sight.2 As the years passed for me in Hiroshima, I began to see that there were many different Hiroshimas being experienced in many different ways.3 Some of them geographic, some of them ideological, and some of them temporal. Some of them sanctioned, and some of them hidden. STANDING ON THE BRIDGE (COMMERCE AND CHILDREN) Just like it was for me that first night in Hiroshima, considering the A-Bomb Dome is a fundamental experience for visitors to Hiroshima. It is the only United Nations World Heritage site in the city, and it is reproduced on everything from paper weights to Hello Kitty! hand towels.4 The Dome, which exists as a shell of its previous incarnation, reveals in physical form the destructive power of the bomb. It is one of the few reinforced concrete structures that were the only buildings to even partly survive the blast pressure of the nuclear detonation. The twisted metal of the fire escape staircases reveals the intense heat of the fireball. It is possible to infer exactly where the epicenter was located, six hundred meters in the air, by the progressive survival of more of the building’s walls from the southeast to the northwest points. The silhouette of the building, and its reflection in the river that divides it from the park, are captivating to gaze upon. The precise target of the nuclear attack was the T-shaped Aioi Bridge at the top of the Peace Park.5 There, a bridge connects the land that would become the park (formerly the Nakajima neighborhood) with a bridge crossing the river from the western part of the city into downtown. The crew of the Enola



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Gay missed the target slightly, as the bomb veered to the southeast of the Tbridge. On most days hundreds, perhaps thousands of people stand and face the Dome and take photographs. It is one of the most reproduced views of the city. However, if you were to turn around and look in the other direction from the T-bridge you would see something less visually compelling, but far more shocking. There, to the west, is the Honkawa Elementary School.6 The school is rebuilt now, and does not visually embody the blast, but it does embody a more powerful and a far more disturbing truth about the nuclear attack. Like the A-Bomb Dome the school building did survive the blast of the bomb—it was the first reinforced concrete school building in Hiroshima—but it was torn down. A section of the original building was preserved, and it now houses a small peace museum. On an average day, no tourist visits the Honkawa Elementary School Peace Museum. In an average month, there are probably few visitors who are not directly connected to the school and its history; however, on August 6, 1945 approximately four hundred schoolchildren died there in less than a second. As difficult as are the truths revealed by gazing at the A-Bomb Dome, the message it conveys is easier to digest than the message conveyed by Honakwa Elementary School. Before the nuclear attack, the Dome was originally the Product Exhibition Hall, designed by Czech architect Jan Letzel and completed in 1915.7 The Western style building was far more elegant than the concrete block construction of the Japanese elementary school. As visitors, we don’t really know who was inside the Exhibition Hall on August 6. Workers? Commercial promoters? Perhaps it was empty that day. Perhaps there were just some business people viewing a product exhibition. The elementary school does not catch the eye; however, it conceals a more gruesome truth. Unlike the former Product Exhibition Hall, we do know who was in the school on August 6, around four hundred students and ten teachers. And we know that none of them survived. Furthermore, as I have written elsewhere, the dead schoolchildren of Honkawa Elementary School, and all of the other schools within the blast zone, were used by the United States to calibrate the lethality of its nuclear weaponry. In a classified report on the “Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb,” which was the sixth volume of the Report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan produced by the Army Institute of Pathology and the Atomic Energy Commission in 1950, investigators at first could not determine the lethality of the bomb by distance as there was no reliable information about the distribution of population at various distances from the epicenter. The investigators settled on counting dead and injured schoolchildren as the most accurate measurement to determine the bomb’s lethality by distance, since this was one population where accurate data existed about the

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location and number of people on the morning of August 6. The number of children. And the number of teachers. This volume was the only volume of the report that was classified, and when it was published in 1951, the sections detailing numbers of fatalities and injuries to the schoolchildren of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was deliberately excluded from publication.8 This was something that we were not supposed to see. Standing on the T-bridge, watching the crowds of visitors pointing cameras at the A-Bomb Dome, and seeing the western side of the bridge facing Honkawa Elementary School, empty—no cameras clicking—most visitors to Hiroshima still cannot see what was classified so long ago. The former Product Exhibition Hall is a powerful monument to what happened on that day, but many are comforted to see that commerce itself has been reborn. Among the most frequent comments one hears from visitors is that it is amazing how the city has rebuilt and recovered. Other things that were lost are far less tangible, and often hidden. SEEING THE NUCLEAR PAST (THE INABILITY TO SEE THE NUCLEAR PRESENT) As an American teaching in Hiroshima on nuclear history, I lecture to numerous student groups and meet many travelers who have come to Hiroshima to visit the Peace Park and museum and to encounter the site of the first nuclear attack in history. Many are shaken as they pass through the Peace Memorial Museum and wrap their heads around what happened to this city, and to the people who endured that attack or whom it killed. They visit the sites of structural remains that reveal the force of the blast, like the A-Bomb Dome or some of the bridges or remaining reinforced concrete buildings. The embodied legacy of the bomb is visceral and people are frequently awed to stand beside these remnants. Most who visit come away with a deepened sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. However, visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki to understand nuclear weapons is like seeing a rifle wound in the sixteenth century; it tells you little about the nature of guns today. Similarly, the nuclear weapons that threaten us collectively are very different than the weapons that were used against Japan in 1945. Those weapons were partly assembled by hand; once we saw that they worked, we quickly set about improving both them and our means of delivering them to targets. The most important advancement to nuclear weaponry was the advent of thermonuclear weapons. This was accomplished by both the United States and the former Soviet Union less than ten years from the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thermonuclear weapons are thousands of times more



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powerful than the first nuclear weapons. While the nuclear weapons used in the attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed a large percentage of those within three kilometers of the detonation point, the first deliverable thermonuclear weapon tested by the United States, the Bravo device tested on March 1, 1954 in the Marshall Islands, resulted in the death of someone located approximately one hundred kilometers away. Beyond that, the Bravo test demonstrated that while the blast and heat of thermonuclear weapons were vastly more powerful than that of the fission weapons used against Japan, they had the additional property of producing radiological fallout on a level that dwarfed the lethality of the blast and heat. The Atomic Energy Commission of the United States superimposed the detailed map of the fallout cloud from the Bravo test produced by the U.S. military onto a map of the eastern seaboard of the United States and concluded that if such a weapon was detonated on Washington D.C. and had the winds blown in a similar pattern (hypothetically), the fallout from such an event would create levels of radioactive contamination sufficient to kill the entire populations of Washington D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City if they did not evacuate within a matter of days. This was ten years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: nuclear weaponry had advanced that dramatically—that quickly.9 During World War II, the Nazis did not develop nuclear weapons as the Allies feared they might, instead pouring their weapon technology resources into building rockets. These V2 rockets terrorized the United Kingdom during the course of the war. However, military strategists and scientists both were aware that these two technologies of the war, nuclear weapons and rockets, would ultimately come together after the war. By the 1960s both the United States and the former Soviet Union had developed ballistic missile technology and soon topped these missiles with nuclear warheads, allowing weapons with the lethal capacity of the Bravo weapon to reach targets anywhere in the world in less than an hour. By the end of the 1960s both countries had deployed thousands of these weapons, and by the 1970s tens of thousands of these weapons, threatening the world with a truly apocalyptic threat of global thermonuclear warfare involving tens of thousands of weapons in the course of a day. When you visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki you imagine that nuclear weapons can destroy a city. The horror of this encounter and realization can be overwhelming. There is no way for human beings to adequately grasp what would result from a global thermonuclear war. The arsenals of the United States and Russia are smaller now, numbering simply in the thousands, but many of these weapons are currently on alert status and can be launched by the leaders of these two countries in less than half an hour.10 The capacity to launch such attacks is never more than a minute away from these leaders.

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When the U.S. president travels away from an established command center (such as the White House) this capacity always travels with him in the form of a small suitcase known as the nuclear football. When Barack Obama visited Hiroshima in 2016, this suitcase, and the ability to launch over a thousand nuclear weapons in minutes, accompanied him to the Peace Park.11 RETROACTIVE LOGIC AND CURRENT ILLOGIC The logic used to justify the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is often discussed quite simplistically. For westerners, the two things most frequently invoked are the idea that the attacks ended the war, and possibly even saved lives. These two claims are presented with a kind of self-evident logic. The first claim has been challenged through archival work in the last decades, while the second is such a logical fallacy that it can be dismantled rather quickly. In the summer of 1945 it was not unusual for Japanese cities to be partially or completely destroyed, with casualties numbering as high as 100,000 people in a day. None of these attacks were conducted by a single plane, but this fact alone could hardly compel surrender. When announcing the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, U.S. President Harry Truman described the United States as possessing a new super weapon. He described it in fundamentally religious terms, as having been given to the United States by “God,” as harnessing the “basic power of the universe,” and threatened Japan with a rain of ruin from the sky that could hardly be imagined.12 Of course the United States had been delivering a rain of ruin from the sky that could hardly have been imagined since it began fire-bombing Japanese cities earlier that spring. The essential difference between the Hiroshima nuclear attack and earlier incendiary attacks such as that on Tokyo on the night of March 9–10 was the use of a single bomb from a single plane, and the weaponizing of radiation. It took the Japanese imperial government about four days to conclude that Truman’s comments about the weapon being an atomic bomb were actually true, and by then Nagasaki had also been attacked with an atomic bomb. Given what we know now about nuclear weapons, it is easy to imagine that any government faced with the threat of nuclear bombardment would feel compelled to surrender. However, the actual government faced with this actual decision did not know what we now know. The facts facing them were these: you have lost most of a city to an enemy attack, and the enemy has claimed that unlike all of the previous sixty-seven cities you have lost to attack, this one was destroyed with a new secret super-weapon. The threat here is that what had been already happening would essentially continue: the destruction



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of Japan’s cities and slaughter of its civilian population. In that sense, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not constitute a fundamental change of circumstances. What did present such a fundamental change was the declaration of war on Japan by the Soviet Union on August 9, the day of the Nagasaki nuclear attack. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown, this had two key impacts: the taking of Japanese held territory by the Soviets; and the loss of the one path to negotiate peace for the Japanese, who had been using the Soviets as intermediaries to attempt to communicate with the United States.13 It is hard to base a decision to surrender on business as usual—now being accomplished with a super-weapon—while it is easy to base such a decision on an invasion by a traditional enemy clearly bent on acquiring territory. Historians debate the nuanced details of what documents show and how much can be inferred from their analysis. But with the idea that the nuclear attacks saved lives, I prefer to pivot from the debates over causality estimates of an imagined invasion vs. fatalities from an actual attack. What I would like to point out is that this logic of weighing assumed casualties as a legitimate tactic when considering the use of weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations has never been considered legitimate outside of discussions of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine any proposed military action by any government in which its leaders made the case that using chemical weapons at the beginning of the war was justified because less people would probably die than if the war was conducted without weapons of mass destruction. This would be considered barbaric. Weapons of mass destruction are banned by international agreement. Even though they are still used, as they have been in Syria and Iraq, the bans on the use of these weapons do not have exceptions that sanction their use when “more lives might be lost” without them. They are banned. Their use, especially against a civilian population, is considered illegal and immoral. Why, then, is this discourse acceptable when talking about the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Apologists for the only direct use of nuclear weapons against civilians seem to feel that such actions are justifiable if they can convincingly argue that more people would have died if some alternative action had been taken. Does this logic hold in considering the future use of nuclear weapons against civilians? Would it hold when considering any other use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians? Or was it just this one time? Arguing that the nuclear attacks resulted in less casualties than if an alternate course had been taken, such as an invasion of the Japanese home islands, is completely beside the point. The use of weapons of mass destruction against a civilian population is either moral or it is not. It does not become moral simply because you do some hypothetical math.

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NUCLEAR WEAPONS SHOULD NEVER BE USED AGAIN, EXCEPT FOR THOSE OTHER 2000 WEAPONS When joining in commemorations or symposia in Hiroshima one often hears the invocation that what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki should never happen again, and that we must be vigilant that nuclear weapons are never used again. Since my research area is on the non-epidemiological effects of global radiation exposures, this always sounds odd to me. There have been over two thousand nuclear weapons detonated since 1945, including all tests of thermonuclear weapons.14 The first nuclear test after the Second World War happened less than a year after the attack on Hiroshima. The Bravo test, mentioned above, caused widespread illness and early deaths to many Marshallese. Millions of people have been exposed to radiation from nuclear weapon testing; many have lost their homes, many remain living and raising families in radiologically contaminated towns and villages, and many have suffered illness and early deaths.15 It is true that no other people have suffered direct nuclear attack besides the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, nuclear weapons have killed and irradiated many people outside of those cities. Most notable among these was Aikichi Kuboyama, the radioman of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (the Lucky Dragon), a Japanese tuna fishing boat that was heavily irradiated under the Bravo fallout cloud. When the Daigo Fukuryu Maru returned to port in Japan three weeks later the entire crew was hospitalized with radiation sickness. Kuboyama died about six months later from radiologically induced illnesses.16 Kuboyama’s tragic death stands out because it happened in a developed country with a rapt press. Every test site has such victims, typically only remembered in the local community and not by the outside world. Some nuclear test sites had hundreds of atmospheric tests, repeatedly depositing fallout radiation across the area, often from weapons thousands of times bigger than the bombs used in 1945. While these victims did not suffer the combined effects of blast, heat, and radiation, they were sickened and sometimes killed nonetheless. Blinkering ourselves off from acknowledging and honoring the memory of those nuclear victims perpetuates the idea that nuclear weapons have not been used since Nagasaki. HIROSHIMA’S PAST FADING AND HIROSHIMA’S FUTURE UNCLEAR For many years, there has been anxiety in Hiroshima and Nagasaki about the passing of the hibakusha generation. How can the lived experience of direct



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nuclear attack that only these people have endured be passed forward into history in a way that can remain vital? For decades, steps have been taken to mitigate this anxiety. My academic home, the Hiroshima Peace Institute, was born out of this same anxiety almost twenty years ago; the need to establish deep institutions focused on peace that would endure beyond this eventual transition. Currently the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is engaged in a project where young people in Hiroshima learn, or “inherit,” the story of a specific hibakusha, so that the story will live on intact beyond the life of the original storyteller, and can be heard in an interpersonal manner rather than simply read or viewed on video. These young people are called A-bomb Legacy Successors.17 Contributing to this sense of transition in an unexpected way is the recent historic visit to Hiroshima of then U.S. President Barack Obama. Obama’s visit galvanized Hiroshima, even though less than one hundred people actually saw or met Obama during his brief visit. Thousands were jammed into the streets of downtown Hiroshima, although kept several blocks back from the park by security forces. However, even without being able to access the event, or hear Obama’s words personally, the mood among the huge crowds was euphoric, and the visit is remembered almost exclusively with pride and fondness. But in some ways, Obama’s visit has ruptured a central narrative told here about Hiroshima’s destiny. One of the deepest narratives in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the two cities have a role to play in the abolition of nuclear weapons. When you visit these two towns you will often learn that people here don’t “blame” the United States, or desire an apology. Indeed, this point was frequently commented upon during the extensive international press coverage of Obama’s visit: the people of Hiroshima did not want an apology.18 Rather than focusing on blame or anger, goes the narrative, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki want to achieve peace. Specifically, they want to work for the abolition of nuclear weapons. How will this abolition come about? Through bearing witness. The essential narrative goes like this: if the leaders of the nuclear weapon states would come to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and see for themselves what happened here, and if they were to meet hibakusha and to listen to their stories, this would be so powerful that it would compel them to take nuclear abolition seriously. I have heard this said countless times at seminars, symposia, and conferences here in Hiroshima. It is close to gospel. In May of 2016 the head of a major nuclear armed nation did visit Hiroshima. He did see the Peace Park. He did meet with and listen to hibakusha (not for long of course). While Obama was clearly cognizant of the historical significance of his visit, there is no evidence that it moved him to reconsider

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the U.S. commitment to nuclear weaponry. In fact, Obama had at that time recently committed the United States to $1 trillion in spending to modernize the American nuclear arsenal over the coming thirty years.19 I didn’t think about this until I next heard the familiar narrative spoken on August 6, 2016, three months after Obama’s visit. Then, as is tradition, this narrative accompanied many public events here in Hiroshima. This time, when I heard it said, it struck me—didn’t that just happen? Except for the compelling nuclear abolition part? I mentioned this to a friend of mine who works on these issues, and his reply was that such an effect would take time, Obama would not just change on the spot. Of course, a short time later he was out of office, and unable to directly affect U.S. military policy. It may be that Obama was changed deeply by his visit, but if he comes to support nuclear abolition, it will be when he has no power. He can join the long line of Americans whose experience with nuclear weaponry led them to criticize U.S. nuclear policy once they no were longer able to effect it directly. One is reminded of Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech in which he warned the American people: beware of this monster I’ve been feeding.20 In many ways, Obama’s visit marked this long-feared transition in Hiroshima. The culture that existed, and thrived, in the aftermath of the horror of nuclear attack, was to change now. HI-ROSHIMON When we look at Hiroshima we see many different things depending on who we are and from where we look. Politicians can look at Hiroshima and see their own vulnerability without nuclear weapons to deter such an attack. Humanists can look and see the horror of warfare and the cruelty of militarism. Americans can look and see the triumphal nature of their science, engineering, and military capacity. Victims of the early twentieth century Japanese empire can look and see the mechanism of their own liberation. People who live here can see the loss of their loved ones and ancestors, but also the home and community where their normal lives occur day after day—where their children and grandchildren have grown up. Hiroshima has become an increasingly popular destination in this age of dark tourism. In 2006, the travel guide book company The Lonely Planet named Hiroshima to its list of top two hundred cities to visit.21 While there was a significant dip in tourism to Hiroshima, and all of Japan, in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, numbers have begun to steadily climb again.22 As an American living in Hiroshima, I often encounter foreign travelers around town. When I was younger and more frequently lurking in



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expat bars, I would often talk with them at the end of their day, when they were looking for dinner and a drink. Visitors to Hiroshima typically take two days here, one for the Peace Park and museum, and one to visit the nearby island of Miyajima, which hosts a 1,300-year-old shrine that is also a World Heritage site. What became the typical experience for me was to hear how moving and distressing their visit to the park and museum were—often this would be the first time visitors would really grasp what happened here in August 1945—but also how disconcerting it seemed to then head into the business district and nightlife area and find that everyone was just having a good time and carrying on. The Hiroshima in the park and the museum was what they had come to see. Emotionally moved, the normalcy of the city itself was then disarming. Clearly these visitors did not wish all of the residents of Hiroshima be in a state of slight shock and mourning along with them, but the complete absence of nuclear remembrance in a late-night bar seemed incongruous to them. The Hiroshima where people lived, that was normal and not a dark site, was a different place than the Hiroshima they were holding in their minds and hearts. Different than the Hiroshima they would later describe to friends upon their return home. Which one was the real Hiroshima? I understand this tension only too well. Working in radiation-affected communities around the world, I have been that person more times than I would like to remember. One particular memory that resonates to me was the first time that I visited Semey, Kazakhstan. Semey, which was known as Semipalatinsk during the era of Soviet nuclear testing, is the largest city downwind from the Polygon, the former Soviet test site. Along the Irtysh River in central Semey is a monument to those who suffered from the decades of nuclear testing. My research colleague Mick Broderick from Murdoch University in Australia and I made a special trip into town to see this monument. It was a bright day and the sun reflected off the powerful and tall monument. We set up a camera and video camera to capture images of the site, and video of the park. However, soon after we began rolling the film we heard singing. We looked down a path in the park and there, to our amazement, was a wedding party walking along and singing. A bride and groom in full regalia, and their accompanying friends and family. As they sang they came right up to the monument and spoiled our pictures. They stood there for a few minutes, singing and joking. There to the side, somehow, we had not noticed it even as we had focused our cameras, was a man with doves in cages. He took one of the doves and gave it to the newlyweds. They sang a song and released the dove into the air. We just watched with amazement. Slowly the group meandered away. Well, we thought, that was inappropriate. We are trying to film here. We re-started our cameras and then, again, we heard singing in the distance.

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There was another wedding party. They repeated the route of the first group, walking up to the monument and singing and laughing. Another dove was produced and dispersed—they were returning to the handler who clearly had a nice business going for himself. During the next hour five wedding parties came and went. We were to learn that this was a common thing for Kazakh newlyweds, to sing and take pictures in front of a prominent part of the local city. They were at home there. We were the ones trying to overlay our imagined Semey onto their real Semey. But our imagined Semey was a little bit real too. How many Semeys were there? Too many to count. Whenever I would hear a visitor to Hiroshima talk about how strange it felt for no one else to be feeling sorrow after their sojourn to the park, I often thought about this day in Semey, and about how easy it was to be all of the people in the story. Then I would head home. My route would take me through the peace park, where I would walk along the river to my neighborhood and listen to the young people play guitars and sing love songs in their hometown. NOTES 1. Mick Broderick, “Topographies of Trauma: Dark Tourism, World Heritage and Hiroshima,” Intersections: gender and sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 24 (June 2010), accessed June 14, 2017, http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/broderick.htm. 2.  Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 23–64. 3.  In this essay, I make the historical mistake of using the word “Hiroshima” to refer to both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as discussed in Kathleen Sullivan, “Re-imaging Nagasaki: The Last Shall be First,” in Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War, eds. N. A. J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs (London: Routledge Press, 2018), forthcoming. 4. UNESCO, “Hiroshima Peace Memorial,” accessed May 3, 2017, http://whc .unesco.org/en/list/775. 5.  Andrew J. Rotter, Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1. 6. Honkawa Elementary School, accessed May 3, 2017, http://www.honkawa-e .edu.city.hiroshima.jp. 7. Naomi Shono, “Mute Reminders of Hiroshima’s Atomic Bombing,” Japan Quarterly 40.3 (Jul 1993): 267. 8.  Robert Jacobs, “Seeing Children Hidden behind the Clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” in War and Childhood in the Age of the World Wars, eds. Mischa Honeck and James Marten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), forthcoming. 9.  Robert Jacobs, “The Bravo Test and the Death and Life of the Global Ecosystem in the Early Anthropocene,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 13.29.1 (July 20, 2015), accessed June 14, 2017, http://japanfocus.org/-Robert-Jacobs/4343/article.html.



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10.  Steven Starr, “Launch Ready Nuclear Weapons: A Threat to All Nations and Peoples,” Physicians for Social Responsibility, accessed May, 2017, http://www.psr .org/nuclear-weapons/launch-ready-nuclear-weapons.pdf. 11.  Justin McCurry, “Hiroshima to Open Up its Horrors to Barack Obama during Historic Visit,” Guardian, May 13, 2016, accessed May 3, 2017, https://www.the guardian.com/world/2016/may/13/hiroshima-open-horrors-barack-obama-historic -visit-japan. 12.  “Text of Statements by Truman, Stimson on Development of Atomic Bomb,” New York Times, August 7, 1945, 4. 13.  Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 14. Arms Control Association, “The Nuclear Testing Tally,” accessed May 3, 2017, https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally. 15.  Robert Jacobs, “The Radiation That Makes People Invisible: A Global Hibakusha Perspective,” Asia-Pacific Journal 12:13 (August 4, 2014), accessed May 3, 2017, http://japanfocus.org/-Robert-Jacobs/4157. 16.  Jacobs, “The Bravo Test.” 17.  Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, “Come and Listen to a Talk by an Abomb Legacy Successor,” accessed May 3, 2017, http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/ hpcf/english/information/H27_successor/index.html. 18. Magdalena Osumi and Daisuke Kikuchi, “Japanese Hail Obama Visit, Say Apology Not Needed,” The Japan Times, last modified May 11, 2016, http://www .japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/05/11/national/japanese-hail-hiroshima-visit-say -apology-not-needed/. 19.  Jon D. Wolfshtal, Jeffery Lewis, and Marc Quint, The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad: US Strategic Nuclear Modernization over the Next 30 Years (Monterey, CA: The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2014). 20. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Speech” (January 17, 1961), accessed May 3, 2017, https://eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/farewell_ address/1961_01_17_Press_Release.pdf. 21.  Tessa Holland, “Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima Make Lonely Planet’s top 200 Cities Guide,” The Japan Times, April 5, 2006, accessed May 3, 2007. http://www.japan times.co.jp/news/2006/04/05/national/tokyo-kyoto-hiroshima-make-lonely-planets -top-200-cities-guide/. 22.  Hiroshima Prefectural Tourism Division, accessed May 3, 2017, http://www .pref.hiroshima.lg.jp.e.bq.hp.transer.com/soshiki/78/27doukou.html.

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Index

Abe, Shinzō, ix, x, 53, 60, 61, 89, 103–4 Abe, Tojiro, 157 Abe, Tomoji, 155, 162 Above and Beyond, 27 Agnew, Harold, 5, 31 Akiba, Tadatoshi, xi Akio, Nishikori, 122 Akira, Komatsu, 89 Albury, Don, 12, 31 Alperovitz, Gar, xiii American Legion and Air Force Association, 34–36 American Museum of Atomic Energy, 169; American Museum of Science and Energy, 169, 170, 174 Anders, Günther, 25, 26, 158 Apol, Laura, 67 Araki, Takeshi, 33 Arnold, Henry “Hap,” 3 Article 9, ix, 52, 53, 54–62 atomic bomb: destruction of, xvi, 8, 11, 12, 75, 85, 97, 117, 119, 128, 145, 187, 188–89, 190–91, 192; dropping of, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 22; literature about, x, xiii, xiv, xv, 65, 66, 69, 77, 135–49, 154, 155, 162– 65; justification of and apologists for, 1, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23–24, 28, 29, 35, 36–37, 38, 190, 191;

Manhattan Project, 106, 167–81; memorialization, xi, xii, xiii, 24–25, 35, 52, 58, 59, 65, 68, 83, 89, 92, 95, 111, 117, 136, 161, 168, 169–73, 176, 177, 180; protests against, x, xi, 26, 36, 37, 59, 192; seventieth anniversary of, ix, xi, 135; strategic use of, xii, 1, 11, 12, 31, 102, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112, 153, 173, 190; testing of, 106, 110–11, 189 atomic bomb children’s literature, xiv, 65–67, 69; Sasaki, Sadako, xiv, xv, 65, 66–67; Tatsuharu, Kodama, xiii, 66, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76 Atomic Bomb Dome (Genbaku Dome), xii, 68, 87, 91–92, 93, 98, 117–18, 135, 161, 185, 186–87, 188 Atomic Energy Commission, 108, 172, 187, 189 Atomic Heritage Foundation, 168, 176, 179, 180 Australian War Memorial, 90, 98 Beahan, Kermit, 12, 21–22 Beauvoir, Simone de, 158 Beehan, Thomas, 168 Beer, Lawrence W., 57, 60 Beser, Jacob “Jake,” 3–4, 6, 8, 10, 19, 28–31

221

222

Black Eggs, xiii, xv, 137–39, 147, 165 Blute, Peter, 34 Bock, Fred, 31 Bock’s Car, 11, 12, 22, 29, 31 Bradbury, Norris E., 169 Bravo device, 189, 192 British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (BCOF), 84, 87, 93, 95, 97 Brokaw, Tom, xiii, 172 Brown, Robert, 37 Buck, Pearl, 158 Buruma, Ian, 120 Bush, George W., 105 Byrnes, James F., 107 Caron, George “Bob,” 5, 7, 8, 12, 19 Carter, Jimmy, 10, 33 Casals, Pablo, 26 Cenotaph, 68, 117, 118, 185 Chick, Allan, 93, 95, 97–98 Children’s Memorial, 117, 185 Churchill, Winston, 106–7 Clarke, Hugh V., 97–98 Clinton, Bill, 104–5 Clinton, Hillary, 105 Cochran, Thad, 34 Coerr, Eleanor, xv, 66, 67, 78 Collins, Canon John, 162 Collins, Diana, 162 Confederate Air Force (CAF), 33 Constitution Research Committee, 56 Cousins, Norman, 23 Crowley, James, 128 Crowley, Sandra, Daigo Fukuru Maru (the Lucky Dragon), 192 dark tourism, 68, 164, 186, 187, 194 De Hart, Al “Pappy,” 10 Death in Life, 120 digital visualisation, xii, 89, 91 Dornan, Reade, 67, 77 Dougherty, Edward A, x, 138 Dower, John, 68, 75

Index

Duck and Cover, 173 Duzenbury, Wyatt, 18, 19 Earnest, Joh, ix Eatherly, Claude, 6, 24–27, 38 Edwards, Ralph, 23 Eichmann, Adolf, 14 Einstein, Albert, 106, 170, 172 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 154, 194 Enola Gay, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 16, 20, 22, 26, 28, 29, 34, 35, 36, 176, 187 Ent, John, 2 Evans, Gareth, 129 Fading Lights: Australian POWS and BCOF Troops in Japan 1945–52, 88–98 Ferebee, Major, 6, 8, 12, 20–21, 27–28, 32, 34–35 the Flame of Peace, 117, 185 Flynn, Joe, 97 Foley, Malcolm, 68 Foot, Michael, 162 Forest, Kurt Jean, 164 Forrestal, James, 107 Fukui, Yoshiro, 124 Fukuoka POW Camp NO. 14, 93 Genbaku Dome, 91–92, 98, 117 General Headquarters of Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, 55 Geneva Disarmament Conference, 1932, 111 Gernstein, Joanne, 35 Gerster, Robin, 92 Godzilla, 85 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 104 Great Artiste, 6, 9–12, 22 Green Legacy Hiroshima, 129 Greenbrier Hotel, 173 Groueff, Stephane, 168, 177 Group of Seven foreign ministers, x Guidry, Paul, 26



Index 223

Hadashi no Gen/Barefoot Gen, xiii, 68, 69, 146 Hague Draft Rules of Air Warfare 1922–1923, 111 Hamai, Shinzo, 155, 157 Harwit, Martin, 34–35 Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi, 191 Hatoyama, Ichirō, 153 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, 29 Hersey, John, 154; Hiroshima, 154 Henie, Sonja, 10 Heyman, I. Michael, 35–36 hibaku jumoku, 118, 126, 128–29 hibakusha, ix, x, xiii, xiv, xv, 21, 25, 30, 31, 47, 58, 59, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 83, 87, 89, 91, 95, 98, 101–2, 113, 119, 122, 129, 135, 158, 159, 160, 162, 165, 192–93; censorship of, 138, 153; Kurihara, Sadako, x, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 74, 136, 137–39, 140, 143, 147, 149; Ogura, Keiko, x, xi, 135, 137; outsiderness, 145, 146, 186; as poet, 135–49; as public intellectuals, 135, 147, 149; second-generation, x, 72, 84, 129; Tōge, Sankichi, xiv, 136, 137, 141, 142, 148 Hiroshima: atomic bombing of, ix, xvi, 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 15, 28, 29, 36, 52, 89, 101, 102, 106, 107, 183, 189, 190, 191, 192; cenotaph, 117–18; Children’s Peace Monument, 117–18; destruction of, xv, xvi, 7, 11, 19, 20, 23, 25, 27, 33, 58, 68, 73, 74, 75, 119, 122, 136, 140, 175, 187; the Flame of Peace, 118; memorialisation of, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 22, 23, 24, 26, 30, 31, 38, 52, 57, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 83, 90, 91, 125, 135, 136, 138, 140, 147, 154, 155, 185, 193, 194; Peace Memorial Museum, xii, 117–18, 178, 179, 185, 195; Peace Memorial Park, xi, 65, 68, 117–18, 125, 126, 129, 161, 188,

193, 195; reconstruction of, xi, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129, 188, 194 Hiroshima Maidens, 23–25 Hiroshima no Pika, 69 Hiroshima no Uta, 69 Hiroshima: A Tragedy Never to be Repeated, 69 History News Network, 1 Holmes, Sherlock, 84, 86–88 Honkawa Elementary School, 187, 188; Honkawa Elementary School Peace Museum, 187 Hosenbo Temple, 127 Ibuse, Masuji, 165 Ihara, Toyoichi, 89 Inamori, Kazuo, 59 Indian Communist Party, 28 Inokuchi, Takeshi, x Irokawa, Daikichi, 51 Jackman, Hugh, 84 Japan Airlines, 59 Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, 59 Japanese Constitution, ix, 51, 52, 54, 55–58, 60–61 Japanese Self-Defense Forces, 60 Jarvis, Jonathan, 178 Jeppson, Morris “Dick,” 5–6, 12, 19–20, 32 Jeppson, Molly, 32 Jernigan, Norris, 17 Jinping, Xi, 103 Johns Hopkins University, 4 Johnson, Chalmers, 55, 57 Johnson, Jack, 97–98 Jong-un, Kim, 105 Juniper, Andrew, 128 Junod, Marcel, 157 Kamm, Oliver, 1, 37 Kanji, Yamasaki, 117

224

Index

Kawabata, Yasunari, 154, 157 Kawanami Brothers Shipping Company, 85, 89 Keene, Donald, 120, 155 Kellogg-Briand Pact, 111 Kelly, Cynthia, 168 Kennan, George F., 107 Kenzō, Tange, 125 Kim, Jae-Eun, 125 Kita, Isao, 122 Korean People’s Army, 104 Kosaka, Zentaro, 33 Kristeva, Julia, 74 Kuboyama, Aikichi, 191 Kurihara, Sadako, x, xii, xiv, xv, xvi, viii, 74, 136 Kusunose, Tsunei, 124–25 Kyocera, 59 Lansdale, John, 2, 3 Lantern Ceremony, xii, 125 Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, 19 Lees-McRae College, 20 the Legislation for Peace and Security, 53, 61 Leahy, William D., 180 LeMay, Curtis, 11, 14, 27, 106, 109 Lennon, John, 68 Lewis, Robert, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 23–24 Lifton, Robert Jay, xii, 15, 27, 120, 124, 145, 147, Linenthal, Edward, 173 Little Boy, 6, 10, 107, 171 Long, Bill, 10 Los Alamos, 3, 4, 31, 167, 168, 169, 172, 177, 178, 180; Historical Society of, 178 Lowther, William, 14 Lukas, J. Anthony, 28 MacArthur, Douglas, 55, 56, 62, 108, 109, 120, 154 Makito, Yurita, 67, 77, 140 Manhattan Project, 102

Manhattan Project National Historical Park, xiii, 167, 178–80; Foundation Document, 175–76 Manhattan, 180 Marquardt, George, 8, 22 Marshall Islands, 24, 189 Matsui, Kazumi, ix Matsumoto, Jōji, 56 Meiji Constitution, 51, 52, 55, 56, 60, 62 McGrath-Kerr, Peter, 97–98 McCloy, John, 108 McKellen, Ian, 86 McNamara, Robert, 14 McNeil, Travis, 33 Miller, Jennifer M., 59 Minami no Kaze no Monogatari, xiv, 69 Mitchell, Greg, 15, 27, 34 Mitsubishi, 89, 93, 95 Miyajima, 195 Morimoto, Junko, 72 Morris, Edita, 153, 155; memoirs, 157, 161; The Flowers of Hiroshima, 155, 159–60, 162–64; The Seeds of Hiroshima, 160, 162 Morris, Ira, 155, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164 Morris, Ivan, 155, 156, 157, 165 Muste, A. J., 26 Nagaoka, Hiroyoshi, 70 Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, 95 Nagasaki Peace Museum, 95 Nagasaki Peace Park, 95 Nagasaki, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 11, 12, 21, 22, 29, 30, 31, 36, 38, 52, 57, 58, 65, 68, 69, 83, 84, 85, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 107, 110, 112, 113, 145, 149, 153, 154, 157, 169, 175, 176, 178, 179, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193 Nagasawa, Yasushi, 66, 71, 72, 75 Nagashi, Toto, xii Nakazawa, Keiji, xiii, 68, 146



National Museum of U.S. Navy, 11 National Park Service, 167, 174, 175, 178, 180 National Veterans Day Award, 37 Necessary Evil, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 22, 31 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 28 Nelson, Richard “Junior,” 9, 18 New Mexico, 107, 167, 169, 172, 177 Nihon Gaishi, 128 Nobukazu, Nakagoshi, 125 Norstad, Lauris, 2 North Korea, ix, xi, 60 The National Atomic Testing Museum, 170, 171, 172, 174, 176; missile testing and development, xi, 104, 105, 108–9; threat of nuclear crisis, 101–2, 104, 112–13 North Texas State University, 24 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 104 O’Connell, Jack, 85 O’Hare, Bernard V, 32 Obama, Barack, ix, 105, 167, 190, 193, 194 Obo, Makoto, 66, 74, 75 Ogawa, Ayako, 157 Ogura, Kaoru, 155 Ogura, Keiko, x, xi, 135, 155 Olivi, Frederick, 12, 23 Onbashira Festival, 123 Oobo, Teruaki, 21 Oppenheimer, Robert J., 4, 180 Ore wa Mite, 68 Orimen, Shigeko, 70–73, 76 Orimen, Shigeru, 66, 68, 70–73, 76–78 Oshio, Hikojiro, 124 Ōta, Yōko, 124 Pacifism, 55, 57 Palmer, David, 89 Parker, Eleanor, 27 Parsons, William “Deak,” 3–6, 8 Pauling, Linus, 158

Index 225

PEN, Japan Chapter, 154 Pence, Mike, 102–3 Perlman, Michael, xi Perry, Matthew C., 121 Pika-don, 71, 73, 135 polygon, 195 popular culture, 84, 121, 170, 172; film, 22, 27, 28, 29, 31, 83, 84, 85, 88, 91, 93 post-war censorship, xiv, 66, 69, 72, 138, 145, 147, 153–54 POWs, 84, 86, 88, 89, 95, 97, 98, 111, 155 public intellectuals, 135, 145–47, 148, 149 Rai Sanyo Shiseki Museum, 128 Ramsey, Norman, 3, 4 Reagan, Ronald, 19, 103, 104 Red Cross, 129, 157 Rhee, Syng-man, 108 Rhodes, Richard, 168, 180 Rochman, Hazel, 74, 75 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 106 Rose, Charlie, 37 Rothe, Anne, 68 Rusk, Dean, 108 Russell, Bertrand, 26, 158 Sanada, Hiroyuki, 84 Sanger, David, 35–36 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 158 Save America’s Treasures, 168, 173 Schlictmann, Klaus, 56 Seidensticker, Edward, 155 Semey, 195 Semipalatinsk, 195 Serizawa, Dr. Daisuke, 86 Setsuko, Tsuneoka, 61 Shaw, Sam, 179 Shidehara, Kijurō, 56, 58, 62 Shiga, Kenji, 179 Shinichi, Tetsutani, 66, 70, 74–76 Shintō, 119–20, 121, 126, 128

226

Index

Shirakami Shrine, 126 Shukkien garden, 126 Shumard, Robert, 8, 19 Silberman, Marc, 73 Sinatra, Frank, 32 Slaughterhouse Five, 31 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 34, 179 Smithsonian, 34, 36, 68, 176, 179, 181 Spaatz, Carl “Tooey,” 10 Spitzer, Abe, 5, 9–10, 11, 22–23 Spitzer, Murray, 23 Spock, Dr. Benjamin, 163 Stalin, Joseph, 107 Stenz, William, 66 Stiborik, Joe, 4, 5, 10, 19 Stimson, Henry, 107 Strahairn, David, 86 Suzuki, Kantarō, 11 Sweeney, Charles, 12–12, 22–23, 31, 35 Takahashi, Akihiro, 33–34, 36, 121 Tamahoko Maru, 97 Tanabe, Koichiro, 154, 157, 158, 160, 161 Tanimoto, Kiyoshi, 23 Tanimoto, Koko, 24 Taylor, Robert, 27 Tella, Falcón y, 54 Terkel, Studs, 13, 37 The Wolverine, 84 Thomas, Norman, 26 Tibbets, Andrea Quattrehomme, 38 Tibbets, Kia, 38 Tibbets, Paul, xvi, 1–6, 10, 11, 12–16, 27, 28, 29, 33, 34–38 Tillerson, Rex, 102–3 Tokyo’s National Diet Library, 55 Travels in Atomic Sunshine, 92 Treat, John Whittier, x, xiv, 2, 68, 70, 75, 77, 137 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, 58

Truman, Harry, 11–12, 15, 16, 34, 107, 190 Trump, Donald, xi, 59, 60, 102, 103 U.S. Department of Energy, 167 U.S. Forces in Japan, 61 U.S. Military Supply Mission, 28 U.S.-Korea nuclear crisis, 101–2, 105, 113, 190–91 Umezaki, Mr. Tamiki, 86–87 UN Security Council, 103, 104, 108 Unbroken, 85 USS Arizona Memorial, x USS Carl Vinson, 103 USS Missouri, 12 USS Nimitz, 103 Van Kirk, Theodore “Dutch,” 3–4, 5, 8–10, 12, 15–18, 20, 28, 32, 34–35 Van Warrebey, Glenn, 21, 24 Vatan, Florence, 73 Veterans of Foreign Wars, 26 Von Suttner, Bertha, 163 Vonnegut, Kurt, 31–32 wabi sabi, 127, 128 Waco Veterans Hospital, 26 Watanabe, Ken, 86 Watanabe, Sonoko, 125 Waters, Mary Yukari, 121 Watkins, Bob, 97 Wayne, John, 32 Western Military Academy, Illinois, 1 Westman, Karin, 77 Wiener, Jon, 169, 170, 178 Yanagawa, Yoshiko, 119 Yarborough, Ralph, 25–26 Yashida, Ichirō, 84 Yoshida, Shigeru, 58 Zamperini, Louis, 85 Zemin, Jiang, 105 Zwigenborg, Ran, 118, 125

About the Editors and Contributors

Cassandra Atherton is an award-winning scholar, prose poet, and critic, and one of Australia’s leading experts on contemporary public intellectuals in academe. She was a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University, Tokyo in 2014 and a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University in 2016. She has published nine books and has been invited to edit six special editions of leading refereed journals in her specializations. Cassandra has judged and convened the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and was recently awarded a VicArts grant and an Australia Council Grant to write on the atomic bomb and the Hiroshima Maidens. Monica Braw, has a PhD in Japanese History from Lunds University, Sweden, was former correspondent in Tokyo for national daily Svenska Dagbladet, and is author of works on Japan published in Swedish, English, Japanese, German, French and Finnish, including The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (M.E. Sharpe 1991/ Ken’etsu by Jiji Tsushinsha 1988 and 2011) and fiction, including Hiroshimas överlevare/ Wir sind die Angst der Welt (Fischer Taschenbuch 1984 and 2016). She has a forthcoming biography of Edita Morris, titled Edita Morris: The Earth Is Our Home (2018). Braw is recipient of the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun for spreading knowledge about Japan in Sweden. Mick Broderick is Associate Professor of Media Analysis and Asia Research Centre Fellow at Murdoch University. His major publications include Reconstructing Strangelove (2017), editions of the reference book Nuclear Movies (1988, 1991), and as editor or co-editor: Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (1996, 1999, 2014), Interrogating Trauma (2010) and Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives (2011). 227

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About the Editors and Contributors

His curated exhibitions of cold war material culture artifacts, Half Lives (2004–2005), Atomicalia (2009–2014) and (with Bo Jacobs) Nuke York, New York (2011–2012), have been installed at museums and galleries in Australia, Japan, Canada, and the Unites States. Broderick’s recent screen credits as either producer or executive producer include the digital installations Exhale (2008), Hiroshima Traces (2012), short dramas Fugue (2009), Excursion (2013) and Off the Map (2014); the documentary short Rwanda: Hope for the Future (2011), and the 3D short Inside the Dome (2015). His co-curated multiscreen hyper-visualisation exhibition (with Stuart Bender) Fading Lights: Australian POWs and BCOF Troops in Japan 1945–52 was installed at the John Curtin Gallery in August 2015. Adam Broinowski is a visiting fellow and recent ARC DECRA postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Culture, History and Language at the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University. His recent research project, “Contaminated Life: ‘Hibakusha’ in Japan in the Nuclear Age” (DE130101746), engaged the social and cultural responses to energy and security politics after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. His research areas include contemporary history of Japan and East Asia, visual politics in performance, film, and media, and critical international relations of the Asia-Pacific. His monograph Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body during the Cold War and After was published with Bloomsbury Academic in 2016. Adam holds a PhD from the School of Philosophical and Historical Studies and Centre for Ideas, University of Melbourne, and was research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University and the University of Tokyo. Robert Jacobs is a professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and Hiroshima City University. He is a historian of nuclear technologies and radiation technopolitics. Jacobs is the author of The Dragon’s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (2010) (also available in a Japanese translation published by Gaifusha in 2013), and the editor of Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb (2010). He is the co-editor of Images of Rupture in Civilization Between East and West: The Iconography of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in Eastern European Arts and Media (2016), and On Hiroshima Becoming History (forthcoming, 2017). He co-edited a special issue of the journal Critical Military Studies “Re-Imagining Hiroshima” (summer 2015). Jacobs has published and lectured widely on nuclear issues around the world. Peter Kuznick, Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, is author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists



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As Political Activists in 1930s America (University of Chicago Press), coauthor with Akira Kimura of Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japanese and American Perspectives (Horitsu Bunkasha, 2010), co-author with Yuki Tanaka of Genpatsu to hiroshima–genshiryoku heiwa riyo no shinso (Nuclear Power and Hiroshima: The Truth Behind the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Power (Iwanami, 2011), and co-editor with James Gilbert of Rethinking Cold War Culture (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990). A New York native, he received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1984. In 1995, he founded American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute. That year, on the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings, his institute co-hosted a major exhibit with the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which displayed many of the artifacts that were originally supposed to be part of the Smithsonian’s ill-fated Enola Gay exhibit. He and filmmaker Oliver Stone co-authored the twelve-part Showtime documentary film series and book both titled The Untold History of the United States (2012–2013). Kuznick regularly provides commentary for all the major U.S. and international media, giving almost two hundred interviews last year alone, and has begun his fourth three-year term as Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. David Lowe holds a Chair in Contemporary History at Deakin University, and researches cultural dimensions of the history of modern international relations and politics. He has written extensively on the rise of the international student as a phenomenon in the history of international relations. His recent work includes publications on remembering the Cold War and post-war independence (forthcoming), and he is currently working on the history of Australia’s foreign aid since 1945. Alyson Miller teaches Literature and Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University. Her research focuses on literature of extremities, with particular attention to explorations of scandal, gender, feminism, and dystopian Young Adult fiction. Alyson’s critical and creative work has been published in national and international journals, alongside two books: a literary monograph, titled Haunted by Words: Scandalous Texts, and a collection of prose poems, Dream Animals. A recent publication on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Hiroshima A-bomb is forthcoming. Glenn Moore combines working for the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) with teaching at La Trobe University. He previously taught history at the Australian National University, the University of Western Australia, and Melbourne University. He has written on sport and labor history, Japanese animal welfare, and history teaching pedagogy.

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Carolyn S. Stevens is Professor of Japanese Studies and Director of the Japanese Studies Centre at Monash University. Trained in social anthropology, she teaches and conducts research on contemporary issues in Japan. Recent major publications include Sound, Space and Sociality in Modern Japan (2013), Disability in Japan (2014), and The Beatles in Japan (forthcoming in 2017). Stevens is also an associate of the Asian Law Centre at the Melbourne Law School, and the editor in chief of the interdisciplinary journal Japanese Studies.