There
are good reasons for writing a book about the atom bombing of Nagasaki
and its agonizing aftermath. Most people have heard of Hiroshima.
The second bomb — dropped by an Irish-American pilot almost exactly
above the largest Catholic church in Asia, which killed more than 70,000
civilians on the day and more in the long term — is less well known.
Susan
Southard’s harrowing descriptions give us some idea of what it must
have been like for people who were unlucky enough not to be killed
instantly: “A woman who covered her eyes from the flash lowered her
hands to find that the skin of her face had melted into her palms”; “Hundreds
of field workers and others staggered by, moaning and crying. Some were
missing body parts, and others were so badly burned that even though
they were naked, Yoshida couldn’t tell if they were men or women. He saw
one person whose eyeballs hung down his face, the sockets empty.”
Gen.
Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, which had
developed the atom bomb, testified before the United States Senate that
death from high-dose radiation was “without undue suffering,” and indeed
“a very pleasant way to die.”
Many survivors died later, always very unpleasantly, of radiation sickness. Their hair would fall out, they would be covered in purple spots, their skin would rot.
And those who survived the first wave of sickness after the war had a
much higher than average chance of dying of leukemia or other cancers
even decades later.
What made things worse for Japanese doctors who tried to ease the suffering of atom-bomb victims is that information about the bomb and its effects was censored by the American administration occupying Japan until the early 1950s. Even
as readers here were shocked in 1946 by John Hersey’s description of
the Hiroshima bomb in The New Yorker, the ensuing book was banned in
Japan. Films and photographs of
the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as medical data, were
confiscated by American authorities.
The
strength of Southard’s book is that her account is remarkably free of
abstractions. She is a theater director, albeit one with an M.F.A. in
creative writing, and her interest in the story began in 1986, when she
was hired as a translator for one of her subjects who was on a speaking
tour in the United States. Instead of statistics, she concentrates, like
Hersey, on the fates of individuals. We read about Wada Koichi, an
18-year-old student worker for the municipal streetcar company, as well
as a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Nagano Etsuko, another teenage girl
named Do-oh Mineko, a 13-year-old boy named Yoshida Katsuji, and several
others.
They
were so badly disfigured by the blast that it not only took them years
to recover some kind of health, but they were also hesitant to reveal
themselves in public. Children would cry or run away from them, thinking
they were monsters. Younger survivors were often bullied at school.
Atom-bomb victims (hibakusha) found it hard to find marriage partners,
because people were afraid of passing genetic diseases to their
offspring.
The
only reason we know about the people described by Southard is that all
of them overcame their deep embarrassment and “came out,” as it were, as
kataribe, or “storytellers” about the atom bomb, reminding people of
the horrors of nuclear war by speaking in public, at schools,
conferences and peace gatherings all over the world.
Without excusing Japanese wartime behavior, Southard writes with compassion about Japanese victims, and measured indignation about postwar American evasions and hypocrisy. Although
her lack of theory and abstraction is a blessing, she might have
analyzed the politics of discrimination, as well as the nuclear issue in
Japan, a bit more closely.
Hibakusha
were not just ostracized because of their grotesque scars. It so
happened that the epicenter of the bomb was over an area called Urakami,
which was inhabited not only by a large number of Christians, but also
by traditional outcasts, or burakumin, the people who did jobs that were
polluted in Buddhist eyes: jobs that had to do with death, like those
in the meat or leather industries.
As
a consequence, the borderlines between hibakusha and burakumin became
blurred. Christians, too, although not outcasts, had been persecuted,
even after religious freedom was granted in the late 19th century,
because of their suspected lack of patriotism. It was often assumed that
they would be more loyal to the Vatican than to the Japanese emperor.
The
subjects of Southard’s book did not see their suffering in this light.
But there is something evangelical about the kataribe’s mission of
peace. Wada, Do-oh, Yoshida and the others found a meaning in their
lives by spreading the word about the evil of nuclear bombs. World peace
became something like a religious mantra. One has to feel sympathy for
this. Their suffering ought not to be forgotten, and neither should the
horrendous effects of such cruel and destructive weapons. What could be
unleashed on cities today would be immensely more devastating than the
bombs that obliterated much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nonetheless,
preaching world peace and expressing moral condemnation of nuclear
bombs as an absolute evil are not a sufficient response to the dangers
facing mankind. For even though the kataribe of Nagasaki, and their
sympathetic American interlocutor, are driven by human rather than
political concerns, the peace movement they promote was politicized from
the beginning.
Southard
mentions Nagasaki Peace Park, for example, with its many monuments to
world peace. The park was established in 1955. Many of the monuments
donated by foreign countries were from such places as the Soviet Union,
Poland, Cuba, the People’s Republic of China and East Germany. The peace
movement was at least partly a propaganda tool in the Cold War. That killing a massive number of civilians with a radiating bomb is an act of barbarism is hard to refute. Whether the world would have been a safer place on the terms of the Soviet Union and its satellites is less clear.
Domestically,
too, Japanese antinuclear and peace organizations were manipulated by
political interests, conservative as well as leftist. Right-wing
nationalists like to cancel out the history of Japanese atrocities
(which they often deny anyway) by claiming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were far worse. Left-wing pacifism has often been just as anti-American,
but from the opposite political perspective.
Since
Southard set out to concentrate on individual lives, rather than
politics, one cannot really blame her for dodging these complications,
but when she does mention them she can be oddly off beam.
In
1990, Motoshima Hiroshi, the Christian mayor of Nagasaki, was shot in
the back by a right-wing extremist for publicly holding the Japanese
emperor partly responsible for the war. Southard explains that Motoshima
“broke a cultural taboo.”
In
fact, Motoshima was courageously challenging a right-wing political
goal, which is to strengthen the imperial institution, and undo some of
the postwar liberal reforms, including pacifism. Southard says these
reforms were “forced on Japan by an occupying nation,” which is also
what right-wing nationalists claim, I think wrongly. Most Japanese were
happy to enjoy their new freedoms. They didn’t have to be forced, for
they cooperated quite willingly with the Americans who helped instigate
them.
Still, the merits of Southard’s book are clear.
It was bad enough for the Americans to have killed so many people, and
then hide the gruesome facts for many years after the war. To forget
about the massacre now would be an added insult to the victims. Southard has helped to make sure that this will not happen yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment