Hiroshima

   In Hiroshima we ride one of the old street cars from the main train station along a wide street with old paving stones until we almost reach the river, with the so-called A-bomb dome on one side and the peace park on the other.  The museum is at the far end of the park. 

   We work our way through the crowds in the museum.  A series of panels along the wall narrates the history of Hiroshima, a central part of which involves the military units that were based there, and how they were deployed to Russia and China when Japan's wars with those nations “broke out.”  The panels do not say anything about who started these wars, and why, and what happened after the surrender of Nanking.  

   A video installation describes the course of the Second World War, or parts of it.  It ends by saying that the American government decided to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it had to justify to the American public the enormous expenditure that had been made to develop these weapons.  I watch the ending twice to see if it really did say that.  And it did. 

   Exhibits display glass bottles, ceramic cups, metal forks and spoons, all melted and fused together by the heat of the explosion.  The scorched remnants of a child’s school uniform.  The famous granite steps that bear the shadow of a person incinerated in the blast.  Or is it a model of the steps?  It’s too crowded to read the placard.  Either way, we get the point.  And if we didn’t, there are the gruesome wax models of people walking in numbed horror with their arms outstretched, their flesh sagging and dripping from their bones. 

   Video installations chronicle the cold war arms race, subsequent efforts to limit the spread and reduce the number of nuclear weapons, and the thousands that still remain.  And finally, on the way out of the museum, there are books in which you are invited to record your impressions of all of this.  The first entry I see is from an American woman, whose entry begins, “I am so very, very ashamed.” 

   Yes, what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is gruesome and terrible.  But the fate of the man incinerated on the granite steps was no worse than that of the girl who was raped to death in Nanking.  Or of the marine medic on Guadalcanal who responded to the cry of the wounded Japanese, who waited for the medic to kneel down before pulling the pin on his last grenade.  The Japanese chose war and chose how they would fight it.  And in so doing they made Truman’s choice for him.  As awful as the atomic bombings were, the alternative was more awful than that.  It would have been, at best, the 
conventional fire-bombing of every city in Japan – like Tokyo, and Dresden before that.  As with the Germans, who were handing out rifles to boys and old men long after their defeat was certain, the Japanese would surrender not merely to defeat, but only to a defeat so crushing, so obliterating, that it extinguished the will to fight at all.  

   I leave sobered and sad.  But not the least ashamed.