TOKYO, Aug. 6, 2020—Over the past many years to today, the 75th anniversary of the U.S. dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima that killed more than ¼ million Japanese citizens, Japan has been playing a defensive role of promoting a nuclear arms-free world through storytelling of the horrific scenes the bomb caused – hundreds of times the magnitude of the Beirut explosion — but never pointed fingers at the United States.
This needs to change and the world must prod the United States for reasons about why it ignited the bomb on Hiroshima instead of accepting long outstanding explanations to end Japan’s aggressions and end the war because the number of Hibakusha – the victims of the bomb, many over their 80s still haunted by leukemia and other ailments, will be gone soon. That would mean the world is going to be left only with photos and videos and books to learn, bereft of live human voice stories of the horror.
As the Hibakusha population shrinks fast, speeches and stories about the hell that unfolded after the flash of the bomb at 8:15 a.m., Aug. 6, 1945 that are exchanged among Hiroshima people at the Peace Memorial Park today sounded rather hollow to me and were like discolored old photos.
This year again, sadly, speeches spoken at the Memorial Park were mostly about nuclear arms’ dangers and inhumanity and calls for a total ban. Many newspapers today posted the Hiroshima memorial as the top article but some carried Tokyo’s corona virus resurgence as top. By the time their evening editions are distributed Aug. 7, the papers’s editors and the Japanese public would bury Hiroshima deep in the back of their heads.
That Hiroshima – and the Nagasaki bombing Aug. 9 – atrocities should never be repeated is a universal message that should be shared not only by the Japanese as victims but also by the United States as the developer and executioner of the most ignominious of weapons. Stories about the dangers, history and policies of nuclear arms development should be told to the world from the victor’s perspectives, including racial biases of American policymakers about Japanese, how Washington planned to deploy the bomb in other areas, and so on.
Former President Barack Obama, who visited the 2016 Hiroshima anniversary, did not offer apologies but presumably wanted to do so as he embraced Hibakusha and called for a nuclear arms free world.
In 2019, Pope Francis made his first visit to Japan denouncing the ‘unspeakable horror’ of the bomb.
In an op-ed page, the Los Angeles Time said, ‘The accepted wisdom in the United States for the last 75 years has been that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later was the only way to end the World War II without an invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American and perhaps millions of Japanese lives. Not only did the bombs end the war, the logic goes, they did so in the most humane way possible.
But ‘(T)he overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it.’
‘The fateful decision to inaugurate the nuclear age fundamentally changed the course of modern history, and it continues to threaten our survival. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock warns us, the world is now closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since 1947,’ the newspaper said.
It’s long overdue that Japanese politicians take up what the United States did to Hiroshima 75 years ago – in close collaboration with their American counterparts – to achieve nuclear arsenal reductions by sharing the experiences of both the victims and the victor and eventually make a nuclear arms free world at a time when nations around the world are precariously headed in wrong directions like Trump’s ‘America First.’
The American views of atomic weapons are almost the opposite of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims’ suffering. While the victims’ annual storytelling tours to American cities over the intervening years did have effects in winning hearts and minds of people to ban nuclear weapons, most see them as posing limited dangers as long as they are not dropped in their backyards.
In 1958, Count Basie and his orchestra released ‘The Atomic Mr. Basie’ album from Capitol Records that used a photo of an atomic bomb-detonated white mushroom cloud on its cover. It was acclaimed as one of his best albums. The thumping rhythms of the Basie band must have made the listeners’ adrenalin levels soaring to the album’s cover photo.
That was 62 years ago. But the American public opinion seems to be shifting more to the use of nuclear arms after Trump was elected. In August 2017, Stanford University scholar Scott Sagan wrote ‘a majority of Americans prioritize protecting U.S. troops and achieving American war aims, even when doing so would result in the use of nuclear weapons and the deaths of millions of civilians in another country.’
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