Hiroshima

A few days ago, I found myself walking through Hiroshima, at the very spot where the US dropped the atomic bomb on the city. I was on my way to Miyajima Island, one of the most beautiful places in Japan, and Hiroshima to me was just a pit stop on the way. Since the people in group I was with (the wonderful folks from Geek Nation Tours) were planning on stopping at the Peace Memorial Museum, I went along. Of course, I knew the history of what happened in 1945, and I didn’t anticipate that visiting the area and the museum would affect me all that much. After all, I have spent more hours than it is wise researching the history of fairly horrible events and, as a result, I am fairly desensitized to them. Typically, many of the things that shock people barely register with me. So, I was reasonably confident that Hiroshima wouldn’t have any kind of emotional impact on me. As it turns out, I was very wrong.

The place where the bomb exploded is by a park where two branches of a river meet. Nearby is a lone architectural survivor of the bomb: a building known as the Atomic Bomb Dome. Since the bomb went off directly above the building, the outer wall and the columns remained standing while just about everything else around it was destroyed. There’s something eerie in seeing the skeleton still standing today. It makes the memory of the bombing that much more vivid. If at all possible, more real. It is easy to look around, see the hundreds of people walking nearby—families with kids in strollers, old grandmas going grocery shopping, folks returning home from work—and imagine them all being blown to pieces. And that’s exactly what happened 79 years ago. Tens of thousands of them were killed instantly. Those who were turned to ash immediately were the lucky ones. Tens of thousands more were killed in the following months. As the museum close to the Dome makes clear, many more people were burned and would eventually die, but not quickly. For days, and in some cases for weeks and months, they would linger in extreme suffering, since the effects of the bomb destroyed their bodies without killing them right away. The museum is a punch in the gut. It shows the tattered remains of the clothes some of the victims wore on the day of the bombing, and tells their stories: a bunch of civilians going about their lives before the bomb changed everything in one moment.

The whole thing hit me very hard. You can see it in my face in the video at the bottom of this essay. I imagine people would feel similarly when visiting the sites of the Holocaust. But there’s a big difference. Whereas the Holocaust is universally condemned (unless you happen to hang out with Nazi apologists), the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still defended by plenty of people as a military necessity. The rationale is that the Japanese government would not surrender, and that a land invasion of the country would have caused even more deaths among Japanese civilians as well as American soldiers. Of course, this is highly debated and quite a few believe the bombing was unnecessary as Japan was ready to surrender. President Eisenhower said so. President Truman’s chief military adviser argued the same.

I haven’t studied enough to know who’s right or wrong. But what I do know is that choosing to burn alive tens of thousands of civilians—from babies to elders—means that something has gone very wrong. Horrible decisions have been made long before that moment in order to end up there. And the atomic bombings were just the pinnacle of this logic. I doubt that all the civilian victims of bombings in WWII cared if they were killed by an atomic weapon or by a fire-bombing raid. Killing civilians was the norm, with every major army involved in the war doing it. The Japanese Army in WWII unleashed monstrous violence against civilians. And so did the Germans. And the Russians. And the Americans. And the British. And just about anyone else who played a significant role in the war.

The way I see it, I don’t know how the dropping of the bomb can be seen as anything other than an act of terrorism. I’m not even getting into the debate if there was a military justification or not. The answer doesn’t change the fact that murdering tens of thousands of civilians to achieve a political goal is the textbook definition of terrorism. It’d be nice to imagine that humanity can evolve to understand that meaningful solutions only come when everyone walks away from the table feeling like they can live with them. Anything short of that means we’ll keep playing the war option, with increasingly more powerful weapons. And it’s clear to anyone paying attention that the outcome of expecting wars to bring a positive solution will be a scenario where no one ‘wins.’ We can either figure out a better way to solve problems or we’ll continue unleashing terror and suffering, which in turn will justify a reaction creating more terror and suffering until the inevitable fiery end.