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Hibakusha

Posted on August 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

Today, August 6, marks another anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. This August 6, the war between Russia and Ukraine drags on, with periodic threats of deliberate use of nuclear weapons by the Russian military or of possible nuclear disaster at the vulnerable civilian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. In the U.S., summer release of the film “Oppenheimer,” about one of the physicists who helped develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II, has also reinforced our uneasiness about the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.

A number of years ago, I had a chance to meet and to listen to a “hibakusha,” a Japanese term for survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The older woman I heard at a backyard barbecue in New Jersey was petite, exceptionally well-groomed, but nonetheless visibly scarred. She was passionate about the necessity of reducing the likelihood of further nuclear warfare.

She had been a young teenager in Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. She and her schoolmates had been conscripted to work part-time folding parachutes at a war materials factory. As allied troops closed in on Japan in 1945, even young girls were recruited for the Japanese war effort. Whether this woman had been an “innocent victim” of the carnage may therefore be somewhat open to question. However, whether nuclear weapons should ever be used again should not be open for debate.

The woman I heard has probably died by now. The number of living hibakusha is dwindling. According to the most recent count in Hiroshima, taken in 2021, the average age of survivors was 84. During a spring 2023 summit of G7 industrial nations held in Japan, some of these survivors made the effort to present their stories.

For 84-year-old Toshiko Tanaka (six at the time of the blast), one of her most vivid memories from that time was the smell of burning corpses in the days after the explosion. The authorities had started cremating the bodies of those who died. “I was traumatized,” she says. “All my friends from school died and for a very long time I couldn’t speak about what happened.”

It can be too easy for those of us not directly exposed to the horrors of nuclear warfare to become complacent about the likelihood of a recurrence. It can be hard to figure out how best to articulate opposition to nuclear proliferation, to nuclear arms races, to the sheer inhumanity and indiscriminate slaughter wrought by this sort of weaponry.

May we continue to listen to the hibakusha; may we continue to develop more effective ways to reduce the chances of creating any more.

Born After the War

Posted on August 6, 2013 | Leave a comment

Born After the War

(“Hiroshima Day”, August 6, is not much celebrated in the U.S., though I’ve been told that in Japan it is the occasion for solemn remembrances. In 2000, I had a chance to visit Hiroshima and see the A-Bomb dome, the Peace Museum, and the millions of paper cranes, symbols of peace and hope, sent there by school children from around the world. This musing was prompted by that visit.)

On its anniversary a decade ago, I gave a short commemorative presentation about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima–the first use of atomic weapons–on August 6, 1945. My audience was attentive. We all squirmed uncomfortably. After the subsequent silence, people began sharing their stories. Some older attendees had known A-bomb survivors personally. Most remembered exactly what they were doing when they got news of the bombing–like those of my generation remember the JFK and MLK assassinations, or my children remember the Challenger spaceship disaster.

I’ve sometimes felt both gifted and cheated by the timing of my appearance in 1947, when the worst of World War II damage was starting to be hidden beneath sprouting weeds and aid programs, although the aftershocks were felt in the growing belligerence among former allies that later came to be called the “Cold War.” During a 1950’s period of postwar U.S. uneasiness, hunts were carried out for Communists, domestic and foreign. Perhaps their existence would help explain why, after our recent great resounding victories, so many felt so empty.

One of my grandfathers, the Rebel one, was also born not long after a war, in 1869. His early childhood was spent in a house occupied by Union troops who’d temporarily expropriated a Southern landscape almost as desolate as postwar Hiroshima. As his brain softened with age, he sometimes relived that childhood, becoming again the scared white boy who dreaded the “n— down the road who carried a pistol for me.”

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of those of us born after wars. We are often the pampered progeny of parents determined to keep us out of harm’s way. They don’t want us to suffer through what they did. Laudable as their efforts were and are, there are downside risks. Absent at least some suffering, we are all too apt to blunder through life, expecting all obstacles to be removed, planting the seeds of the next wars by blaming each other when stubborn boulders of prejudice, ego and ideology refuse to budge without great effort.