Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (21 page)

Reconstructing and remembering the atomic bombs as experienced at the two ground zeros are, of course, an utterly different narrative. The insubstantial mushroom clouds disappear. Abstractions concerning material destruction and human casualties are replaced by children, women, and men with names. No one thanks God for the carnage. The emergence of popular memory about the atomic bombs took time in Japan, however. Japanese nationwide had more pressing things to think about when the war ended, like daily survival. U.S. occupation authorities censored writings, photographs, and pictorial depictions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for many years, out of fear these would provoke anti-American hostility. The first compilation of photographs from the two ground zeros was not published in Japan until August 1952, after the occupation ended, and the first famous Japanese photographers did not visit the two cities to photograph scarred survivors until 1960. The earliest intimate drawings by
hibakusha
of what they had experienced at ground zero and could not erase from memory were not promoted and publicized until 1970, a quarter century after the bombings
.

It is fatuous, no matter what the specific topic, to speak of “Japan”
or “the Japanese” or Japanese culture or society as if these were homogenous and all of a piece; and this applies to how the atomic bombs are remembered. There is no monolithic way of remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus the plurals (“Hiroshimas” and “Nagasakis”) in the title of the essay that follows, which first appeared in a special anniversary issue on the bombs in the journal
Diplomatic History
in 1995
.

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H
ara Mieko, who was a youngster in Hiroshima when the city was bombed, later wrote of herself that “the Mieko of today is completely different from the Mieko of the past.”
¹
Most
hibakusha
experienced this fracturing of identity, and for Japan as a whole the very meaning of time was altered by the atomic bombings of August 6 and 9, 1945.

Such a profound sense of disjuncture was, of course, not peculiar to Japan. For much of the world, the Holocaust in Europe and the nuclear genocide of Hiroshima/Nagasaki signified the closure of “modernity” as it had been known and dreamed about until then and the advent of a new world of terrible and awesome potentialities. In Japan, however, the situation was unique in two ways. Only the Japanese actually had experienced nuclear destruction. And in the years immediately following, only they were not allowed to publicly engage the nature and meaning of this new world. Beginning in mid-September 1945, U.S. authorities in occupied Japan censored virtually all discussion of the bombs.

Such censorship reflected both the general U.S. policy of secrecy concerning nuclear matters and, on a different plane, the broad agenda of media control pursued as part of U.S. occupation policy in defeated Japan itself. Where Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically were concerned, the rationale for censorship within Japan was essentially twofold. American occupation authorities feared that unrestrained discussion of the effects of the bombs might incite “public unrest” against them (the most elastic and all-encompassing rationale of censors everywhere). More specifically,
statements by Japanese politicians and the print media early in September conveyed the impression that the Allied policy of publicizing Japanese war atrocities and conducting war-crimes trials might confront a Japanese countercampaign that called attention to the allies' own atrocious policies, most graphically exemplified by the nuclear destruction of the two essentially civilian targets.
²

Such a hypothetical countercampaign was plausible. Shigemitsu Mamoru, a once and future foreign minister (and future convicted war criminal in the interim), authored an early internal memorandum explicitly proposing that the Japanese use the atomic bombs as counterpropaganda to Allied accusations of Japanese war crimes. Hatoyama Ichir
ō
, an ambitious conservative politician who aspired to the premiership (the occupation-period purge disrupted his timetable, but he did serve as prime minister from the end of 1954 to 1956), rashly voiced similar opinions in public.
³
In the opening weeks of occupation, the D
ō
mei news agency and leading newspapers, such as the
Asahi
, also naively attempted to balance the record of war behavior in this manner. With the advantage of hindsight, however, it can be said that the censorship of Japanese discussion of the bombs and their human consequences was misguided, perhaps counterproductive, certainly disdainful of the needs of the survivors themselves.

Between August 6 and 9, when the bombs were dropped, and mid-September, when censorship was imposed by the U.S. occupation force, Japanese responses to the new weapon actually were varied and provocative. Until the American victors established their presence in defeated Japan, of course, the media was censored by Japan's own imperial government. Thus, the historian faces a biased public record both before and after the occupation commenced. Still, it is possible to re-create a kaleidoscope of responses beyond the overwhelming sense of horror and shock experienced by those who suffered the bombings directly, and apart from the political notion of playing Allied atrocities against Japanese ones.

Initially, rage was one such response. In Hiroshima immediately after the bombing, for example, survivors came upon
uninjured American POWs (they had been confined in underground cells) and beat them to death.
⁴
In a makeshift Hiroshima medical facility, the rumor spread that Japan had retaliated by bombing the United States with its own secret weapon, causing comparable atrocious death and suffering—and the Japanese survivors, it was reported, were pleased. The government and media naturally condemned the new weapon as evidence of the enemy's barbaric and demonic nature. Early in September, before occupation censorship was imposed, the
Asahi
ran a vivid article about the hatred of Americans visible in the eyes of Hiroshima survivors. Later, in one of the countless unnoticed individual tragedies of the occupation period, a Nisei soldier affiliated with the U.S. force visited relatives in Hiroshima, where his parents came from, and was so shattered by their hostility to him as an American “murderer” that he committed suicide soon afterward in his quarters in Tokyo.
⁵

Perhaps surprisingly, however, at least at first glance, hatred against the Americans did not become a dominant sentiment in the weeks, months, and years that followed. The destructiveness of the bombs was so awesome that many Japanese initially regarded them—much like the calamitous losing war itself—almost as if they were a natural disaster. Then, as the man-made nature of the disaster sank in, what riveted attention was the realization that science and technology suddenly had leapt to hitherto unimagined levels. Such attitudes soon became conspicuous even in the two bombed cities themselves (although the Americans still took care to assign British and Australian forces to oversee local occupation administration in Hiroshima). Certainly they were prevalent throughout defeated Japan as a whole, where rage dissipated quickly in the face of the urgent challenges of recovery—and, indeed, simple daily survival.

The Japanese identified the new weapon as a nuclear bomb within a matter of days. Their own scientists had investigated the possibility of developing such weapons after Pearl Harbor and had concluded that doing so was technically feasible but practically impossible
for many decades to come.
⁶
Nishina Yoshio, an eminent physicist who had studied with Niels Bohr and supervised some of the wartime research on the military application of nuclear fission, was sent to Hiroshima right after the attack and immediately recognized that these long-term projections had been naive. (Nishina died of cancer in 1951, and it is popularly believed that his illness resulted from his exposure to residual radiation in Hiroshima.)

By August 15, when Japan capitulated, it was widely known throughout the country that a weapon of entirely new dimensions had devastated the two cities. The emperor himself, in his careful, self-serving address of this date announcing acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, took care to emphasize this. “The enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs to kill and maim extremely large numbers of the innocent,” Hirohito informed his subjects, “and the heavy casualties are beyond measure; if the war were continued, it would lead not only to the downfall of our nation but also to the destruction of all human civilization.”
⁷
Japan's capitulation, in the official imperial rendering, thus became a magnanimous act that saved humanity itself from possible annihilation.

By the time the first contingent of U.S. occupation forces actually arrived in Japan at the very end of August, popular responses to the defeat and unconditional surrender had begun to assume complex configurations politically. The bombs quickly became a symbol of America's material might and scientific prowess—and this symbol was all the more stunning because it contrasted so sharply with Japan's relative material backwardness. While the Americans had been perfecting nuclear weapons, Japan's militaristic government had been exhorting the emperor's loyal subjects to take up bamboo spears and fight to the bitter end to defend the homeland. A year after the surrender, Kat
ō
Etsur
ō
, a famous cartoonist, perfectly captured this dichotomy in the opening pages of a little book of illustrations chronicling the first year of occupation. An exhausted Japanese man and woman lay on the ground on August 15, fire buckets discarded beside them, contemplating the absurdity of pitting bamboo spears and little pails against atomic bombs.
⁸

Kat
ō
's juxtaposition of atomic bombs against bamboo spears captured a widespread and politically explosive sentiment. In sum, it amounted to this: Japan's ideologues and military spokesmen had deceived the people and led the country into a hopeless war against a vastly superior United States. Personally, they obviously were fools (thus there was not much popular Japanese hand-wringing about the showcase Tokyo war-crimes trials). More generally, one clearly could not trust military appeals or military solutions in the future (thus the “no-war clause” of the new 1947 Japanese constitution, originally drafted by the Americans, found strong support among ordinary Japanese).
⁹

The popular antimilitary sentiment that has influenced so much of postwar Japanese politics has its genesis in such visceral feelings. The “fifteen-year war” in general was devastating for Japan. Close to 3 million Japanese soldiers, sailors, and civilians were killed between the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and Japan's surrender in 1945, and a total of sixty-six cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were bombed. In the end, misery and humiliation were the only conspicuous legacies of the so-called holy war.
¹⁰
The atomic bombs quickly came to exemplify this tragic absurdity.

In these various ways, a complex symbolic field already had begun to resonate around the bomb by the time the victorious Americans arrived. The horror of a war brought home with unimagined destructiveness was one aspect of this, Japan's own backwardness another, the immense potentiality of science yet another. The Japanese did not place a negative construction on “science” in this context, but on the contrary singled out deficiency in science and technology as an obvious explanation for their defeat and an immediately accessible means by which the country could be rebuilt.

Scarcely a day passed between Japan's capitulation and the imposition of censorship by the Americans in mid-September that did not see a statement by the government or press about the urgent necessity of promoting science. On August 16, in his first broadcast
after being named prime minister, Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko declared that “science and technology” had been Japan's biggest shortcoming in the war. A day later, the outgoing minister of education thanked schoolchildren for their wartime efforts and urged them to dedicate themselves to elevating Japan's “science power and spiritual power” to the highest possible levels. On August 19, the press reported that under the new minister of education, Maeda Tamon, the postwar school system would place “emphasis on basic science.” “We lost to the enemy's science,” the
Asahi
declared bluntly in a August 20 article, going on to observe that “this was made clear by a single bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” The article was headlined “Toward a Country Built on Science.”
¹¹
In the years that followed, improving science education remained one of the country's foremost priorities.

In Japan, as elsewhere, the bomb thus became Janus: simultaneously a symbol of the terror of nuclear war and the promise of science. More than in other countries, however, the peculiar circumstances of the nuclear bombings, unconditional surrender, and, later, the new pacifist constitution created a postwar milieu in which “building a nation of science” almost invariably was coupled with an emotional emphasis on “peace” maintained through nonmilitary pursuits. Economically, the long-term consequences of this development were spectacular. Japan's emergence as an economic superpower by the 1980s resulted in considerable part from the fact that, after the surrender, the vast majority of talented Japanese scientists, businessmen, and bureaucrats devoted themselves to promoting
civilian
applications of science. Unlike the United States, where many scientists and engineers found the sweetest problems and most lucrative funding in weapons-related research, in Japan such work carried a social stigma.
¹²

The immediate sanguine linkage between the tragedy of Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the promise of a “country built on science” had ramifications beyond just the material promotion of science and technology. Science itself became equated with the development of more “rational” modes of thinking in general. The
disastrous folly of the lost war, that is, was attributed to a weakness in critical thought and “conceptual ability” throughout Japanese society. From this perspective, it was only a short but momentous step into linking promotion of science to promotion of democracy in postwar Japan, on the grounds that scientific progress was possible only in a “rational” environment that encouraged genuinely free inquiry and expression. In this manner, a seemingly technological response to defeat contained within itself a political logic that contributed greatly to support for casting off the shackles of the imperial state and instituting progressive reforms.
¹³