What most of Japan forgot
Some survivors of Hiroshima opposed nuclear power, but their countrymen largely accepted its risks until now.
By Peter S. Canellos
The office of the Japan Confederation of A-bomb and H-bomb Sufferers is in a quiet storefront amid the blossoming modern city of Hiroshima. There, elderly people with blue hair and genial expressions snack on tea and crackers amid posters of utter desolation and books with titles like Chernobyl.
For 65 years, the survivors of the world's first nuclear attack have sought to lend deeper meaning to the loss of their loved ones by making their city the epicenter of the antinuclear movement - a story as much as a place.
Now there is a new chapter, as post-earthquake Japan prepares to grapple with a question: How could a nation devoted to its past, which has processed and emerged from a devastating defeat, allow itself to again become a nuclear cautionary tale?
For those who identify themselves as "sufferers" of the atomic attack - the term survivor, for some, conveys disrespect for the dead - the answer isn't a mystery, but rather a failure to learn from experience.
All Japanese bore wounds from their country's defeat in World War II - those firebombed in Tokyo, those traumatized in battle, those who endured occupation and reconstruction. But those who witnessed the atomic-bomb attacks in 1945 were a separate group, sometimes at odds with their generation.
They had witnessed a fundamentally different kind of war, and their injuries went beyond the burns and ugly scars on their faces and bodies. For most, the scariest part of the experience was the radiation brought down by the "black rain" that coated all who were outdoors with a poison that would never leave them.
For those victims, the attack never ended. It wasn't just a matter of overcoming the horror of witnessing their city reduced to ash, of watching the skin melt off those who were near the explosion, of smelling the dead bodies. Radiation poisoning marked the rest of their lives.
Girls were deemed unmarriageable. Some chose not to have children. Those who were pregnant had children with lifelong health problems. Most saw plunges in their white-blood counts. For some, it meant death; for others, a series of near-death illnesses.
"I was declared dead three times," Sunao Tsuboi, the cochair of the sufferers' organization, said last month.
The crushing fatigue, the constant illness, made survivors of the Hiroshima bombing not merely antiwar, but antinuclear. The rest of the nation went along, but only as far as the lessons of the bombing comported with Japan's postwar strategy of "embracing defeat" and repositioning itself in the world.
Thus the country more or less endorsed the survivors' view that the Japanese government went badly awry in the 1940s - that Japanese militarism put the country on a path to ruin.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum unsparingly examines how the military used Hiroshima as part of its war machine. It shows how citizens fell in line. Photographs show a lantern parade celebrating the notorious Nanking raid, in which thousands of Chinese were slaughtered, and Japanese women learning to bayonet American invaders.
"We do not want to hide anything," said Keiko Ogura, a 73-year-old survivor who gives tours of the museum. "It's important for young Japanese people to learn what our ancestors did - the reality of the war."
But this posture, while brave in a place ruined by an American bomb, is nonetheless consistent with postwar Japanese politics: Japan and the United States are now close allies, and acknowledging Japan's culpability is a natural outgrowth of the friendship.
And while Japan sits under the American nuclear umbrella, Japan itself does not have nuclear weapons. So when Hiroshima survivors campaign for global disarmament, the Japanese people stand in broad agreement.
But nuclear power is another matter. While some Hiroshima survivors campaigned against it - and continued to voice concerns up to the moment of the earthquake - most of Japanese society tuned them out. As recently as three weeks ago, Ogura stood before a group of high school students at Chugoku Shimbun, the Hiroshima newspaper, and discussed whether the lessons of Hiroshima extended to nuclear power.
"It is different," a 17-year-old student said.
Indeed, nuclear power, like bullet trains and other exemplars of technological advancement, is part of Japan's very modernity - its ability to solve age-old problems, such as a lack of energy resources, with diligence and advanced learning.
To that end, Hiroshima - with its Adidas and Brooks Brothers stores, and Starbucks attendants touting sakura (cherry) lattes - is a symbol of Japanese resurgence. "They said nothing would grow here for 75 years," Ogura said, surveying the bustling city around her.
She and her country are justly proud that the will to rebuild endured so powerfully in the Japanese character. But the will to remember may have faltered.