A Reflection on Nagasaki and Hiroshima - Fr Michel Siegel

From http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/~mseigel/

A good deal of time has passed since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The so-called baby-boom generation, born after the war, are now grandparents. For more than fifty per cent of the world today, Nagasaki and Hiroshima are events that happened not only before they were born, but before their parents were born. We have all grown up acquainted with the fact of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we may be im danger of forgetting. Last Wednesday, the anniversary of Hiroshima, I paged through the Age, the Herald-Sun and The Australian to see how much coverage would be given to this anniversary of the bomb. I was extremely disappointed. Neither the Herald-Sun nor The Australian made any reference to the fact that the day was the anniversary of Hiroshima. The Age had one article—and that was a commentary that actually justified the bombing.

My own first encounter with a bomb victim was a woman in my first parish in Tokyo. She was just outside Hiroshima at the time of the bomb. She was unhurt by it. But her sister was in the city and she went in to the city to look for her sister. As she saw the condition of people, she became desperate in her quest for her sister. She ignored and even literally pushed aside all others regardless of the degree of their suffering. Her behaviour of that day has left her with an image of herself as a cruel and heartless woman. Perhaps she was on that day—but she was faced with a situation that no human being should have to face.

Many years ago I read an estimate that in Hiroshima, 80% of the medical personnel died in the first one 6000th of a second. I am not sure if it is the hopelessness of facing such devastation without medical personnel or the suddenness of it all that most affected me, but I have never forgotten that statistic. I have no idea how accurate it is. It is obviously an estimate, not an actual measurement. But it is equally as obvious that something very akin to that statistic must be true.

The story of Barefoot Gen recounts an experience that seems to have been shared by a good number of people: a person is talking with a friend or acquaintance; a momentary flash of white light causes them to blink; when they open their eyes the friend has disappeared; then comes the blast force and the surviving person must struggle for their own lives but the inexplicable disappearance of the person they were talking to leaves them in a state of mental consternation for some time. This happened wherever people were talking in a situation where one was protected from the radiation and the other exposed to it, in close enough proximity to the epicenter for the radiation to instantaneously reduce the exposed person to a shadow.

I have heard the experience of the grandmother of a friend who, on her way to work that morning, walked under an underpass. When she entered the underpass, the city was intact and normal. When she came out it was gone. She does not mention a white flash or the blast. I don’t know if she was aware of these. Significantly, too, she does not use any expression like “a smoking ruin” to describe Hiroshima after the bomb. She simply says it was gone.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the greatest tragedies that humanity has experienced. If we include natural disasters, the destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius, in three days killed roughly double the number killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Hiroshima and Nagasaki pale into insignificance against the Black Death, and against the potato famine in Ireland, and many other tragedies of human history.

Other human acts of inhumanity also vastly overshadow the dropping of the atom bombs, certainly in terms of the numbers killed, and probably also in the degree of heartlessness and inhumanity. I refer to such events as the conflicts in Rwanda and Zaire (now the Congo) in the mid-nineties, the Holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, the massacres and the spread of disease associated with the spread of colonialism, etc. The bombing of Dresden and the fire bombing of Tokyo are often cited as having been on a par with Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Even as far back as the first century, the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 involved more deaths than Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined.

But there are things that make Hiroshima and Nagasaki quite different from these other incidents. One is the time-scale. In no other of these incidents do we speak in terms of thousands of a second. The sudden and instantaneous nature of the destruction was something totally new to human experience. So too is the duration of the damage. In the other incidents, insofar as they can be counted, the tally of victims can be finalized. Not so with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many doctors involved with bomb survivors say that the radiation causes genetic damage that will be passed on from generation to generation to generation. If this is the case, the count will never be complete. Anyone who lives in Japan will know many people who face an increased risk of cancer because their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

One thing that staggered me in Japan was to meet a person who had survived both bombs and to learn that there are in fact quite a number of such people. Hiroshima was then, as it is now, a place where people from Nagasaki go to look for work. There were many people in Hiroshima from Nagasaki. After the bombing of Hiroshima, it was still possible for them to walk to a railway station in a neighbouring town and travel back to Nagasaki. Many did so, and got there in time for the next bomb.

Many of the other incidents of inhumanity were carried out in the heat of battle (although what should be made of that is difficult to say), but the decision about Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made at a great distance from the battle in a setting that should have enabled dispassionate decision-making. It was also made with the opposition of such important military leaders as Churchill, Macarthur and Eisenhower.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima are also unique (except to some degree for Dresden and Tokyo) also in the distance from which those who carried out the destruction were able to do so. Even the people most directly involved, the crew of the bombers, after a brief survey of what they had done, were out of sight of the target in minutes and returned to the safety and comfort of their bases in a few hours.

Perhaps the most frightening characteristic of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, however, is the fact that the bombs used were small compared to the ones that have now been developed. Any future use of nuclear weapons is likely to overshadow Hiroshima and Nagasaki every bit as much as Hiroshima and Nagasaki overshadow the damage of the conventional weapons of that time.


A Human Experience
I first went to Japan in 1973 and when I went there, I shared the prejudices toward Japan that others Australians of my generation held. I think that there were two things in my first years in Japan that provoked me to change my attitude. One was the very simple fact that I experienced so many Japanese, including former soldiers, as good people. The other was that I came to learn of the way that Japanese had experienced the war. My first encounter in this respect was with one of my language teachers at language school. He had been a kamikaze pilot during the war. As he took off on his suicide mission, his plane had malfunctioned and his mission was aborted. He had to wait two days for the plane to be repaired and during that two days the war ended. As I talked with him, I realized that he had gone to war with much the same attitude of serving his country as my own father had when he was marched off with the Australian army to Tobruk. And I realized that for many individual Japanese soldiers, the war was much the same as it had been for most Australian soldiers—simply a way of serving their country. For ordinary Japanese civilians, the suffering that they went through was the same for them as that suffering would have been for anyone else. I learned to understand that no matter what responsibility Japan might have for the war and for atrocities in the war, each person’s experience of the war was precisely that—the human experience of an individual person whose tragedy and trauma was unchanged by questions of politics or war responsibility.

Japanese War Atrocities
There is no doubt that there were war atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese. The most serious of these were carried out in Asia, particularly on the Asian mainland. A former soldier who had been in Manchuria has told me that the ethos among the Japanese soldiers was such that going out on an expedition, they would feel it a humiliation if they came back without have killed anyone, so they would round up some civilians and kill them just to avoid that humiliation. The Nanking massacre, while there is room for debate about the numbers killed, did really happen, as did the brutality towards prisoners of war. These were real atrocities carried out by the Japanese. They do not justify the atom bombs nor are they diminished by the fact of the bombs.

Background to the War
It is worth considering why the whole situation emerged the way it did. There has been a lot of historical research into that and there are many questions still being debated. For myself, I have felt a personal need to reconcile all that I heard of the brutality of the Japanese with my direct experience of so many Japanese as good, kind, and conscientious people.

A Flaw in the Constitution
An important factor in the background of all that happened was the fact that there was a flaw in the Japanese constitution of the time. This constitution had been drawn up by Ito Hirofumi, one of the most important Meiji Era prime ministers, and was adopted in 1889. The flaw was that it made the military independent of the government. Fearful of being colonized, the rulers of Japan saw the need for a strong military and modeled the Japanese constitution on the Prussian one to assure that strong military. Therefore, the military was not placed under the government but directly under the emperor—which meant that the military was, in fact, independent. Ito Hirofumi must have been one of the first to regret this because within a few years the military had, in spite of his direct opposition, used its independence to undertake activities on the Korean peninsula that would directly bring about the Sino-Japanese War. This independence of the military would mar Japanese society until defeat in the war swept away that constitution. Almost all the military activities in China in the 1930s were carried out exclusively on the initiative of the military and in some cases in actual opposition to the express wishes of the government.

A Sense of Threat
There are many ways to talk about the background to the war, but I would like to focus on one particular aspect—namely a sense of threat. There had been for many decades a sense among the Japanese of being under threat from the West. This goes back to the 1830s when ships of various European countries, but most particularly of Russia, the United States and England, began appearing off Japanese shores. At the beginning of the 1840s, news of the Opium War sent a chill up and down the spine of many Japanese. It seemed to give warning of the kind of people who were beginning to encroach on their domain. The forced opening of Japan in 1854 gave the Japanese a sense of their own vulnerability. Ongoing Western expansionism, including Russian expansion eastward, US expansion westward (as far as the Philippines!) and European colonialism all contributed to giving Japan a sense of being surrounded and hemmed in. The rejection at the Paris Peace Conference of a proposal from Japan for a declaration that all races are equal, along with perceived unfairness in a number of negotiations in the decade after the First World War, increased Japan’s sense of isolatedness and its sense that, as a non-Caucasian nation, it could never expect equal or fair treatment from Caucasian nations.

Russia was considered the biggest threat, and the sense of threat strengthened the arguments of those who favoured a strong military and advocated the establishment of buffer states on the Korean Peninsula and in Manchuria. Favouring such an approach became the politically correct viewpoint. Further, playing on this sense of threat was a means to power for the military and a means to wealth for the big companies, the zaibatsu, particularly the arms producers who had close connections to the military.

Victories in the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War had boosted Japanese self-confidence and as the perception of the West’s uncompromising racism and colonialism strengthened, in addition to a sense of threat Japan also acquired a sense of mission. Japan would be the liberator of Asia. The ultra-nationalist spokesperson Tokutomi Soho described Japan’s cause in the war as just, arguing that a) Japan was fighting for its own survival, b) Japan was fighting to liberate Asia, and c) Japan was fighting to establish a new world order.

Lessons—What are the Causes of War?
I think that the process of lead up to the war has much to say to us about what kind of things give rise to war and what must be done to preserve peace. I do not have time to go into these in detail and will mention only a few.

One serious characteristic of the situation in Japan was the collusion between the arms industry and the military. The lesson to be learnt is that when arms producers have an influence over political decision making, or when political decision makers have interests in arms production, then conflicts of interest emerge that can stand in direct opposition to the requirements of peace. This is clearly a characteristic of our day as well as of Japan at that time. It seems to me one of the factors that most obstruct the workings of democracy.

Another aspect is just how a sense of threat among the people could be cultivated and expanded through education and media, to incite the populace and also how idealism could be used to further incite. This is not a characteristic only of the Japanese. I think that we have seen a very similar phenomenon in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Australia and Japan, since the 9.11 terrorist incident. We certainly see how a sense of being under threat can affect a people. We also see appeals to idealism in talk of bringing democracy and respect for human rights to Afghanistan and Iraq. We also, I might add, see conflicts of interest where political decision makers have interests in both oil and arms production.

Peace Education
Some of my own views have changed since September 11. I formerly thought that the way to make people desire peace was to teach the awfulness of war and the wonderfulness of peace so that people would choose the latter over the former. Now, I think that to simply teach the awfulness of war to people who feel themselves threatened will simply motivate them to seek a preemptive strike that will keep the awfulness at a distance rather than waiting for it to come them. We need a form of peace education that makes people aware of their own sense of threat and of how it can be manipulated—a form of peace education that makes them less vulnerable to having their fears and their idealism exploited.

The time allotted for my presentation is running out and I wish to make one more point before I conclude. 60 years ago, Japan and Australia were enemies. Today, they are allies and friends—bonded not just by common interests but also by a large number of personal individual friendships. Both are countries allied with the United States and they are the main allies of the United States in the Asia Pacific region. They are undoubtedly the two countries through which the US most exerts its influence in the region. Both are linked to the United States because of various historical ties, but also because both experience a sense of threat in face of Asia and feel the need for American support. Both have supported the US led War on Terror and supported the invasion of Iraq—in spite of the fact that in both countries the vast majority of the population opposed that invasion.

There are many questions to be raised about that whole process: Is terrorism best dealt with through this War against Terrorism? Are our relations with Asia best handled by strengthening our ties with the US? What priorities should we have independently of the United States? The list could be continued. I think there is a need for sommon reflection on these issues. If two heads are better than one, then the perspective of two countries is better than the perspective of one. I think that there is need for more communication and cooperation between Australia and Japan at the level of civil society, especially in regard to action for peace. Further I think there is a need for common research and deliberation on these issues at, for example, an academic level and between churches. Nothing will affect the future of our countries more that how we resolve these issues and sharing reflection and cooperating in action seem crucially important. Thank you.