Why a visit to Hiroshima is more complicated than you might think
This week, Barack Obama became the first serving American President to visit Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bomb to be dropped on a city on 6 August 1945 – a weapon used, of course, by the Americans. A lot of the media coverage mentioned that Obama did not apologise for the bombing, but that would have been wholly inappropriate and quite wrong.
It is easy – and indeed totally right – to be horrified by the death and destruction that was wreaked that day and the deaths and injuries that followed up to this day. But what most media reports failed to highlight was Japan’s culpability for this event and the country’s continued failure to acknowledge the role it played in the Second World War.
In October 1998, I was a member of a trade union delegation to Japan that visited Tokyo and Kyoto. Afterwards I stayed on in the country for a few more days on my own because I wanted to go to Hiroshima. I spent a whole day in the city and some three hours at the Peace Memorial Museum.
Of course, I was horrified by the photographs and films that I viewed and the statistics for death and injury that were displayed. But I was also disturbed by the account presented in the displays, all of which were in English as well as Japanese. The whole emphasis of the narrative up to the dropping of the bomb was one of the Japanese as innocent victims rather than as ruthless aggressors.
In effect, the Second World War did not begin with German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 or German invasion of Poland in 1939, but with Japanese occupation of Manchuria in China in 1931. What the Chinese understandably call ‘the rape of Nanjing’ by Japanese soldiers in December 1937-January 1938 was played down at the museum with the figures for Chinese deaths being disputed.
Then, when it came in the museum’s description of the start of the war between Japan and the USA in December 1941, this occurrence was represented as some kind of accidental outbreak of hostilities rather than an unprovoked and undeclared attack on Pearl Harbor with the substantial loss of American lives.
The museum gives little attention to the well-substantiated fears at the time that an American land invasion of mainland Japan would have resulted in months of further war and hundred of thousands of further American (and Japanese) deaths. All the evidence of Japanese resistance on island after island made it clear that the Japanese would have fought long and bitterly with massive further casualties and only the clear demonstration of the effect of the atomic bomb prevented this scenario.
In some ways, the most memorable thing I saw in Hiroshima was not in the Peace Memorial Museum; it was in one of the nearby parks; it was a monument to the Korean victims and survivors of the bombing. The English label explains that, of the roughly 200,000 people who were killed that day, some 20,000 were Korean. What were they doing in a Japanese city? Well, Japan had ruthlessly occupied Korea since 1910 and forced Koreans into both military and civilian service in the war effort.
The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 but it took until 1970 for this monument to the Korean victims to be erected. Could it be that the Japanese valued Japanese lives above Korean lives?
What I am describing here is part of a much bigger picture: the failure of so much of Japanese society even today to acknowledge their culpability for what happened in the Pacific theatre of war. School text books present a whitewashed version of the Japanese role in the war and some Japanese politicians still attend ceremonies at the burial site of Japanese war criminals.
This is in stark contrast to the situation in post-war Germany where, to their credit, Germans have acknowledged the horrors of Nazism and freely discuss and debate all aspects of Germany’s actions in the war.
May 28th, 2016 at 9:56 pm
Whilst I totally agree that Japan has not fully acknowledged or faced up to it’s culpability in the war, the fact that Japan and Germany committed many war crimes does not justify the American and British tactic of indiscriminate killing of civilians by either blanket fire bombing or nuclear bombing of cities. In my opinion these actions were terrible crimes and the criminal actions of other nations is no justification for behaving in a similar way.
Also, it is by no means clear that the use of nuclear bombs hastened the end of the war.
“The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.”
— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
“The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons … The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
— Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950
“The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”
— Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945
“The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment … It was a mistake to ever drop it … [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it …”
— Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr., 1964
Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his memoir The White House Years:
In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur’s reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: “…the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face ‘prompt and utter destruction.’ MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General’s advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary.”