Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (26 page)

It is in this broader milieu of
internal
degradation coupled with staggering defeat that the conquering Americans emerge as unexpectedly positive figures. Even old Mrs. Saeki, a quiet figure of strength and comfort throughout the diary, whose daughter-in-law and three sons all had been killed, concludes after friendly young American officers visit the hospital that “Amerika-san is kind. I think they are very nice.” This is an astonishing comment, and yet in the extraordinary environment that Dr. Hachiya portrays, it does not really surprise us.

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In various ways, Dr. Hachiya's deceptively simple account of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath thus reveals a world of many layers of complexity. His diary is not merely an unusually intimate record of nuclear death and destruction. It is now clearer in retrospect that it also provides an unusually broad window on the psychology and social pathology of defeat. Beyond all this, however—and this is what ultimately gives
Hiroshima Diary
its enduring quality—it is a chronicle about coming alive, about cherishing life after tasting the bitterest kinds of death.

On several occasions Dr. Hachiya makes clear that he was as passionate a patriot as anyone, ready to throw down his life and die for the country if and when the emperor called on him to do so. At one point he quotes with understanding and even approval a fanatic fight-to-the-bitter-end entry from the diary of a close friend whose young son has just been killed in the bombing. But the destruction of Hiroshima, the loss of all his possessions, the near loss of his own life, the daily spectacle of war-wrought misery and death in the hospital all lead Dr. Hachiya, and many around him, to repudiate ultranationalism and war and linger instead on the preciousness of personal relationships and private blessings.

Tucked away in the diary, sometimes almost as passing thoughts, are lines that speak more or less directly to this. “How hard for a man to die,” Dr. Hachiya muses while lying in bed eight days after the bomb, “whose life has once before been miraculously spared. On the day of the
pika
I gave no thought to my life, but today I wanted to live and death became a spectacle of terror.” Three weeks later, he reflects again on “how precious” small things are—thoughts sparked, in this instance, by the destruction of an old plaque with calligraphy quoting words of wisdom from the Chinese classics. “When I was filled with faith in the certainty of victory and when I was working with thoughts only for the emperor,” he confides on this occasion, “nothing was precious.” It seemed entirely appropriate to sacrifice everything for the country.
Now, however, “things had changed. Since the
pika
we had all become desperate and our fight was the fight of defeat even if we had to fight on stones. Our homes and our precious family possessions were no longer meaningless, but now they were gone. . . . I felt lonesome and alone because I no longer had even a home.”

Old Mrs. Saeki, widowed and bereft of all her children, expresses similar sentiments when recounting where she was when the bomb fell. All was darkness, she recalls, and she thought she had died. What a joy to find she was still alive! This is the sentiment that keeps Dr. Hachiya's small group in the hospital going; and it is, indeed, the sentiment that ennobles the greatest Japanese writings on the atomic bomb experience, such as Ibuse's
Black Rain
. The overwhelming horror of man-made death is countered, placed in perspective, and ultimately transcended by evocation of the simplest activities of human intercourse and normal daily life (or, as in Ibuse's chronologically longer account, by the nurturing, cyclical rhythms of nature).

This healing process, this transcendence through the seemingly plainest of activities, occurs over and over again in the diary. Dr. Hachiya never moves away from the dead and dying, but he simultaneously creates an alternative, life-affirming world by recognizing the wonder of what in other circumstances would be taken for granted. Fruit and vegetables become treasures—someone brings peaches, and on another day there are tomatoes, or grapes. One day the ragged contingent in the ruined hospital room dines on the river fish
ayu
. Obtaining sugar is a cause for celebration. Cigarettes bring near ecstasy. Baths are recorded, and so is the happy discovery of a clean and intact toilet. Restoration of electricity is a signal event, as is the first arrival of mail and the first newspaper. A good bowel movement is deeply satisfying. This was no small matter when others were passing blood, an ominous sign of the radiation sickness. Still, the small group in the hospital managed to buoy their spirits with seemingly endless repartee involving toilet jokes.

In Japan as a whole, the broader social and cultural literature
of these weeks and months reveals similar preoccupations. There they are linked to what in the Japanese idiom would be called “transcending
kyodatsu
”—that is, moving beyond the immediate trauma of the defeat. Taking heart, regaining hope, recovering a taste for life—this was all a familiar part of becoming psychologically whole again. And what this ultimately involved was a restoration of personal connections and pursuits that the war had all but obliterated. From this perspective—and
Hiroshima Diary
is a representative example of this way of thinking—the atomic bombs were the ultimate symbol of the horror of war itself. In the Japanese context, this meant that they were simultaneously a symbol of the folly of superpatriotism as well as the fatuousness of those who sought to mobilize people for military crusades in the name of the state.

In this sense, Dr. Hachiya's chronicle can also be read as an account of returning to an essentially private world—a world of intensely human and personal connections. Friendship is cherished. So are family relations. Every individual life is precious. Work—in this instance, scientific and medical work—is redemptive. One works to heal, to construct, and not to harm. One thinks of the former enemy not in terms of past horrors but rather terms of personal acquaintance and, later, professional collaboration.

There is both modesty and dignity here. And, of course, pathos—because now, a half century later, we know things Dr. Hachiya could not anticipate. The richness of his deceptively simple chronicle is such that each reader surely will come away with different lasting impressions, different moments or images that stay in the mind.

I find myself thinking of one such moment: when, on the last day of August, old Mrs. Saeki chides Dr. Hachiya for working so long at his microscope, trying to understand the strange and terrible symptoms that radiation sickness had caused in his patients. He has forgotten to eat lunch, she reminds him, and smoked too much, and is harming his body. This is the passage.

We know, of course, that the answer was no. What the atomic bomb did could never be undone. Our only hope is to face it squarely and learn from Hiroshima.

Commemorating the past is in good part triggered by numerology in our modern mass cultures, as certain magic anniversary numbers induce intense spasms of attention. There are, of course, annual spasms. December 7 is the key such date in the United States where World War II is concerned; in Japan, the end of the war on August 15 (Japan time) annually prompts a more reflective and critical media attentiveness to the war and its legacies. The big anniversary numbers, in any case, are five, ten, twenty-five, fifty, and one hundred. At fifty, one can still locate some survivors to interview. At one hundred, no one is left
.

In 1994 and 1995, the impending fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War gave rise to an unusually harsh dispute over how to treat this milestone in the public arena in the United States. Controversy centered on plans for a major exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum featuring the
Enola Gay,
the B-29 bomber that dropped the Hiroshima bomb. Initial support for such an exhibit came from air force enthusiasts and aerospace lobbyists; early working scripts by the museum's curators and advisers were widely distributed for outside comment; and an uproar ensued when critics accused the authors of these early drafts of attempting to besmirch recollection of the heroic mission that brought a horrendous war to an end
.

In retrospect, it was naive to imagine that serious treatment of the
dropping of the first atomic bomb would be possible in a public space in the United States. As the exhibition's initial enthusiasts saw it, the anniversary would be an occasion for celebration—for retelling the story of a stupendous mobilization of scientific and technological expertise (building the great bombers as well as the atomic bomb) and a heroic strategic mission (using the bomb to end the war). The museum's early draft plans, in their eyes, subverted such patriotic remembrance in numerous ways—by introducing controversies over whether it was necessary to use the bombs, for example, and by carrying the projected treatment beyond the
Enola Gay
and mushroom cloud to look, first, at Japanese casualties at ground zero; and, second, at the nuclear arms race that followed as one legacy of this watershed moment. The heroic narrative, as the critics saw it, was being sabotaged by a complicated, ambiguous, tragic narrative that would lead the visiting public to question the decision to use the atomic bombs or, at the very least, restrain their applause
.

As this controversy unfolded, I was particularly taken by the difficulty of doing “public history” in the United States in the balanced and self-critical way we usually argue that other countries (like Japan) should do public history. I was struck, that is, by the political and institutional constraints under which museums like the Smithsonian operate. This was conveyed in brusque language in a resolution introduced in the Senate in September 1994 (Resolution 257) that condemned the Air and Space Museum's script for being “revisionist and offensive to many World War II veterans,” and went on to observe that federal law stipulates that “the valor and sacrificial service of the men and women of the Armed Forces shall be portrayed as an inspiration to the present and future generations of America.” The resolution began by describing “the role of the
Enola Gay”
as “momentous in helping to bring World War II to a merciful end, which resulted in saving the lives of Americans and Japanese.
”

The exhibition that eventually materialized did conclude with a small number of displays about the destruction at ground zero. Compared to what might have been, however, this gelded presentation was an insult to the thoughtful individuals who visit museums to learn and are perfectly capable of handling complexity. There was an obverse side to all this, of course, in the vigorous and often fact-filled exchanges that the
patriotic attack on the original plans provoked; this was a serendipitous contribution to public education. Still, one sobering lesson of the
Enola Gay
controversy was the realization that one cannot expect great publicly funded institutions like the Smithsonian to turn future attention to America's other controversial wars, such as Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. What sort of inspiration could one expect to find here
?
^*

The short piece that follows appeared as an op-ed essay in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
in June 1995
.

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I
had an unusual experience shortly after the Smithsonian Institution surrendered unconditionally to critics in late January and abandoned its plans for a major exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum on the use of the atomic bomb to end World War II. I was, to coin a phrase, “disinvited” from giving two public, off-campus talks, both of which had been roughly framed in terms of “thinking about the bomb.”

The disinvitations were conveyed in a genteel manner, of course. I remained welcome, my erstwhile sponsors explained. I should just come prepared to focus on a different aspect of American-Japanese relations. The bombs that the United States dropped on Japan simply had become “too controversial” a topic.

Thus, in ways that have gone virtually unreported by the mass media, the dispute over the Smithsonian's exhibit has emerged as a case study of the many levels at which censorship can operate
in an ostensibly democratic society—ranging from overt political repression (epitomized by Congressional pressure to change the Smithsonian exhibit and threats to cut the institution's appropriations) to subtle forms of self-censorship.

Confounded by a vitriolic campaign against “revisionist” interpretations of a “good war” by conservative forces both inside and outside government, the nation's premier institution of public history did more than just jettison its plans for a serious retrospective look at the use and consequences of the atomic bomb. The Smithsonian also indefinitely postponed plans for an exhibition on an even more controversial moment in recent American history: the Vietnam War. In addition, it announced that the current exhibition on “Science in American Life” (at its National Museum of American History) would be revised, in yet unspecified ways, to modify critical mention of negative by-products and consequences of twentieth-century science. In the latter instance, the Smithsonian is responding to criticism by professional scientific societies.

Not content with these victories, the Smithsonian's critics have demanded that heads roll. Curators have been placed under intense political scrutiny. Congress has held hostile hearings on the planning for the original
Enola Gay
exhibit. The director of the National Air and Space Museum recently resigned under pressure, and it is an open secret that morale among members of the Smithsonian's professional staff has been shattered. In this new McCarthyism, the catchall indictment is no longer “Communism” but rather “political correctness” or even just plain “revisionism.” Few people in the media or among the general public seem to find the enforcement of a purely celebratory national history alarming.