Views from Two Ground Zeros
Press Action
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hoshikawa10122004/
By Jun Hoshikawa
The Americans are at last beginning to notice how badly the Bush administration has damaged their reputations worldwide, earned over decades if not centuries by so much effort and goodwill. It is as tragic to them as to us outside who have admired American values and acquired many American friends.
Make no mistake. The anti-Americanism is on a steep rise, not only in the Islamic world, but also in surprising places like Japan. And it’s all because of the way Bush & Co. has mishandled their War on Terror after 9-11.
In March 2003, on the eve of Anglo-American invasion into Iraq, I was struck by an article in one of the major weeklies in Japan. In it, an old woman, mother of a popular illustrator of children’s books, said to her son: “Americans can do such arrogant things because we have allowed them to get away with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Yes, she meant those two nuclear bombs and the utter devastation we suffered. Nearly 200,000 died in respective explosions on August 6th and 9th, 1945, around the two Ground Zeros, followed by countless additional deaths and disease from radioactivity later. The toll continues to this day.
She is no radical, nor particularly liberal; just an ordinary person who has lived long enough to gain a historical perspective. As the overwhelming majority of Japanese do, she knows what we did as a small Empire was terrible before and during the WWII, and is very happy to live now in a democracy. She probably has, like so many of us, maintained general good feelings toward Americans.
Yet, she remembers.
Born in 1952, I didn’t experience WWII firsthand, but grew up hearing numerous war stories, including those about the A-bombs. Actually, nobody in Japan really knew what the nuclear bombs and their effects were for quite a while, because the GHQ, the post-war occupation authority led by General Douglas MacArthur, didn’t permit facts related to the two bombings go public until 1949. The ban on publication of scientific papers on A-bombs was only lifted in 1951.
By then Hiroshima and Nagasaki were kind of distant rumors described simply as hells on earth. Their realities only hit home again when 23 Japanese fishermen out in the Pacific, together with some 20,000 native islanders in the area, were exposed to an American Hydrogen bomb experiment in the Marshalls in 1954. Twelve of the fishermen have died of radiation disease since. Imagine the toll for Marshall Islanders who bore the total of 87 such experiments.
In the summer of 1955, the first World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs was convened in Hiroshima. This was Japan’s rather belated awakening to the nuclear nightmares. Ever since, the shared national sentiments against nuclear weapons have been very strong, although in terms of nuclear power generation the public opinion is sharply split with more than 50 nuclear power stations gradually spreading along the archipelago.
Yet virtually no antagonism had been directed to America or the Americans explicitly in terms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The old woman’s passing comment in print may have been predictive. The matter is very complex. No one blamed America for the nuclear massacres, not because we were fools. No one blamed America for the genocides, because we knew we did our own wrongs to other peoples in Asia, to the opponents in the war, and even to the fellow Japanese. No one blamed America for dropping two A-bombs, because we knew somehow those hells ended other hells of war and military imperialism we ourselves couldn’t stop.
But above all, no one in Japan blamed America for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because the Americans we came to know after the war were champions of liberal democratic values who more or less walked the talk and emanated genuine goodwill. We have forgiven you as you have forgiven us. We embraced defeat, as the leading historian on US-Japan post-war relationship John W. Dower puts it...to an extent.
In short, it has taken a moral reservation of heroic proportions on the part of post-war Japanese citizens, especially of surviving A-bomb victims, not to direct their anger and resentment toward Americans. Instead they, we, have focused on how to create a world never again threatened or actually devastated by such nuclear catastrophes. Hence, we said “No More Hiroshima and Nagasaki!” instead of “Nuke America!”
Not that we could nor we wanted to, but the latter thought never entered in our public discourse, as though it were forbidden. As post-WWII Germany has been admirably successful in clearing their collective consciousness of the Nazi influences, I think Japan did a similarly good job of clearing our collective psyche of vengeance born out of the two Ground Zeros. Again, to an extent.
When America began to shed her 20th century good face in the wake of Dubya’s occupancy of the White House, and then simply threw it off after the tragedies of 9-11 to devolve into the cowboy unilateralism of “You are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” many in Japan began to wonder, too. Maybe we were like Indians in the Far West; so bad and inhuman (also yellow), experimental subjects of two types of newly developed atomic bombs in 1945 as a show of absolute power over the Russians, and over the entire world.
It has been historically proven that the dropping of two A-bombs were not essential for Japan’s surrender. Maybe the Neocons weren’t satisfied, and they meant to move the Frontier much further westward to Israel, their favorite outpost, fighting new Indians in the form of Palestinians, Arabs, Islamic fundamentalists, or Iraqi insurgents, you name it. The crooked reasoning and naked self-interest of Bush’s America seem to have revived, to the eyes of so many, a hidden face of ugly Washechu, “stealer of fats,” as Native Americans used to call the white men.
Then it was only natural for people like the old woman to wonder if we Japanese should have made just a bit more fuss about the first two nuclear devastations in human history. We know that the Americans are terrified of being subjected to nuclear blasts themselves, but a surprising majority of them don’t actually know how Hiroshima and Nagasaki were. You shut yourself up, and we dared not tell.
Perhaps, the old woman was saying, “We were too polite, and that wouldn’t help the world after all.”
I have stood at the two Ground Zeros. They are one of the most sacred sites I’ve ever visited. They are time-space portals across which you are thrown into another dimension where there is no more war, simply because we can afford no more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis. They were meant to be the first and the last such Ground Zeros. The views from them are not at all tinted by rage of returning menace. They are profoundly and resolutely of making peace.
Article 9 of the post-war Japanese Constitution was our declaration of interdependence born out of these views. However, the old woman hints that we may have been a little too lazy, too timid, in asserting them. More of us agree.
To be sure, we will never replay Kamikaze attacks into your skyscrapers or explode belt-bombs in your public transports. But we will, as friends, visit you more with stories and pictures to intimately share the reality of being under American war machines, including nuclear bombs. Then you may better understand that wars are ultimately not sensible nor effective means to achieve peace, even in fighting terrorism.
Otherwise, who knows? Someday, in Japan too, the fundamentalist factions could gain enough momentum in favor of retaliation in one way or the other. The last thing we hope is for a nationalistic government deciding to nuclear-arm itself to make up for the long suppressed ill pride.
Meanwhile, we say in the Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, widely believed to have been one of the best American gifts which the same Americans now want to eliminate in the hope of employing us as foot soldiers in your perennial global war:
"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized."
*This article first appeared at TruthOut.org.
Jun Hoshikawa is a Japanese author and book translator with some 65 titles published. He is a senior editor at TUP, Translators United for Peace, an independent media project dedicated to translate and distribute via the Internet peace-relevant foreign articles in Japanese. TUP received the 2004 Citizen Media Award from the Japan Congress of Journalists.