The Wages of Guilt

by Ian Buruma

  Kurosawa Akira made a rather mawkish film, entitled Rhapsody in August, about the spiritual scars left by the A-bomb in Nagasaki. The film is a lament, not just for the bombing but for the way memory passes into history and history is swiftly forgotten. In an interview with Gabriel García Márquez, published in a Berlin newspaper, Kurosawa was asked by the writer what “this historical amnesia meant to the future of Japan and the Japanese identity.” Kurosawa answered that the Japanese didn’t like to talk openly about the bombing. “Our politicians, in particular, remain silent about it, perhaps out of fear of the Americans.” Until the United States apologizes to the Japanese people, said Kurosawa, “the drama won’t be over.”

  It is true that, during the occupation, the American authorities did not want the Japanese to dwell on the A-bomb attacks. They didn’t want the Japanese to feel victimized. In the first years after the war only scientific texts about the A-bomb were allowed to be published. As late as 1949 a film project initiated by the city of Hiroshima, to be called No More Hiroshimas, was canceled because the occupation authorities objected to scenes of “the destruction and human misery which resulted from the atom bomb.” In 1950, just one year before the end of the occupation, the title of a painting by Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi had to be changed from Atomic Bomb to August 6, 1945.

  But Kurosawa was wrong nonetheless. For few events in World War II have been described, analyzed, lamented, reenacted, re-created, depicted, and exhibited so much and so often as the bombing of Hiroshima and, to a much lesser extent, Nagasaki. The problem with Nagasaki was not just that Hiroshima came first but also that Nagasaki had more military targets than Hiroshima. The Mitsubishi factories in Nagasaki produced the bulk of Japanese armaments. There was also something else, which is not often mentioned: the Nagasaki bomb exploded right over the area where outcasts and Christians lived. And unlike in Hiroshima, much of the rest of the city was spared the worst. So discussing the bombing in detail can prove awkward and is best avoided. But novels about Hiroshima were written, if not published, almost as soon as the war was over. In 1983, a compendium of Japanese atom bomb literature was published in fifteen volumes.

  Censorship during the occupation was one reason, I suppose, for the anti-American tone of many A-bomb books and films that appeared once the occupation was over. At last the forbidden could speak its name. Another reason was the political background of filmmakers and novelists. Some had always been ardent nationalists, filled with distrust of the West, and America in particular. Others had been Marxists before the war who were forced by the military authorities to recant and pledge allegiance to the imperial cause. But even when they reverted to their former faith after the war, this did not necessarily constitute a major shift. The enemy—the greedy, materialistic, individualistic, imperialistic, racialist United States—remained the same.

  So you had films like Hiroshima, made in 1953 by Sekigawa Hideo, which ends with a scene of American tourists buying souvenir bones of the victims. Even more spiteful was a comic book that appeared in 1969 entitled In the Stream of the Black River. It is about a beautiful young woman who survived the bomb but is dying of radiation disease. Before she goes, however, she wants to have her revenge on the “white pigs.” She becomes a pansuke, a whore specializing in GIs, the lowest kind of prostitute, “drenched in the stink of disgusting foreigners.” She will give all those “warmongers who still use military bases in Japan a souvenir.” She will infect them with syphilis. That will teach them! “Why weren’t those war criminals put on trial?” she exclaims to a sympathetic policeman who took her off the streets. “Always remember how that A-bomb tortured your mother,” she tells her wide-eyed little son. This story was published in Manga Punch, a comic magazine with a circulation of millions.

  And yet, despite these diatribes, the myth of Hiroshima and its pacifist cult is based less on American wickedness than on the image of martyred innocence and visions of the apocalypse. One moment there was normal life—laughing children, young girls singing, housewives cleaning, good men working—then, in an instant, all was turned to ash. The comparison between Hiroshima and Auschwitz is based on this notion; the idea, namely, that Hiroshima, like the Holocaust, was not part of the war, not even connected with it, but “something that occurs at the end of the world …” The words are those of Ota Yoko, the novelist, who wrote about her experience as a Hiroshima survivor in City of Corpses. “We had been flattened by a force—arbitrary and violent—that wasn’t war.” It was, perhaps, “the latest cosmic phenomenon.” Ota, by the way, had been one of the many Japanese who rejoiced at the attack on Pearl Harbor. She had “felt a fresh new flame.”

  All the quasi-religious elements of the Hiroshima myth from a leftist perspective are there in Oda Makoto’s novel The Bomb. The bomb explodes on page 168, just as a sweet young Japanese woman is about to offer a bunch of flowers to a sick Malayan student in his hospital room. It is a gesture of beauty and innocence. Then “followed an unearthly roar, as though the heavens were collapsing.” A Japanese soldier, versed in European history, recalls the wrath of the gods in the Iliad.

  Every white American in Oda’s novel spouts racist filth: “ ‘All scholars are Jews,’ said Will. Those words seemed to fan Ken’s dislike of Jews, for he let out a tirade of invective. The worst people in the world were the Japs, followed by the Jews.” Hence the reader is left to conclude that the bombing of Hiroshima was a racist act. But the Japanese in Oda’s account are racist too, toward Koreans and other Asians. The only truly decent and wise characters in the story are members of a Native American tribe. They are forbidden by tribal tradition to take up arms. Their elders, sitting in the desert, can see the apocalypse coming. Is this really the end of the world? asks George, one of the tribal brothers. “ ‘The end, brother,’ Ron replied with conviction. ‘Doesn’t the world look as red as the sun—or a fireball hundreds of times brighter? The people are being burned alive, becoming charred corpses.’ ”

  This is the imagery of Buddhist hell scrolls, full of bloodied figures enveloped in bright red flames. Hara Tamiki was, like Ota Yoko, a Hiroshima survivor. He wrote a story entitled “Summer Flowers.” His vision of the end is preceded by a description of the weather, which has all the spectacular ominousness of a Hollywood epic or a Leni Riefenstahl production: “Against the darkening sky the mountains displayed an ever more brilliant green; the islands of the Inland Sea too stood out in bold relief. The waves, the calm blue waves, seemed at any moment about to rage, stirred up by the fiercest of storms.” This sets the scene for an almost Wagnerian apocalypse that ends “in the dreadfully gloomy faint green light of the medieval paintings of Buddhist hell.” In 1951, possibly depressed over the Korean War, Hara threw himself in front of a train.

  In the 1950s, the artists Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi painted a modern version of a hell scroll, entitled The Atom Bomb—Hiroshima (not the same work as August 6, 1945). I went to see it at the modern art museum in Hiroshima. The painting, on four panels, like a Japanese screen, has traditional Japanese elements, but it also contains images of the fall of man that could just as well be Christian. Dead bodies, horribly scarred or burned, literally fall from the upper end of the painting amid lightning bolts that suggest divine wrath. Rabid dogs carry dead babies in their bloody maws. Charred corpses are tied in ropes. Crows pick at mutilated bodies. A mass of faceless humanity marches on in charcoal ranks, as though on the way to purgatory.

  On the white wall displaying the Maruki painting was a sign that read “Hiroshima and modern art: ‘the heart of Hiroshima,’ the universal theme of mankind.” I looked at some of the other exhibits. It was clear that the art of Anselm Kiefer had left its mark. But while Kiefer sifted through the shards of German history and Kultur in the postwar ruins of his country, his admirers in the Hiroshima museum were preoccupied solely with the Hiroshima spirit. There was, for example, Araki Takako’s ceramic book—rather like Kiefer’s tomes of lead—entitled Atomic Bomb Bible. The scorched text was in Hebrew. The
re was also a silk-paneled screen (unlike anything by Kiefer), by Ueno Yasuo, called 6-8-1945, showing people in the throes of death, painted in red speckled with gold.

  Missing from all these works was any sense of a wider world beyond August 6, 1945. Hiroshima stood in complete isolation. This was noticed by one of the contributors to the catalogue, Kuwabara Sumio, a professor of art. He quoted the words of Kazuki Yasuo, whose harrowing paintings of Japanese POWs in Siberia were not in the Hiroshima museum. Kazuki’s works on the war are the only ones in Japan to approach Kiefer’s in depth. He was a POW in Siberia himself, but instead of indulging in self-pity, his dark, almost abstract paintings—for example, of handprints, like bloodstains on a torture cell’s walls—offer a vision of cruelty and suffering that goes beyond specific events. On his way to a Siberian POW camp, Kazuki saw a corpse soaked in blood. It was the body of a Japanese soldier whose brutal behavior had led to his lynching by an enraged Chinese mob. He compared this “red corpse” to the “black corpses” of victims of the bomb.

  “The story of the black bodies,” he said, “has been told and retold in these past twenty years. Hiroshima and Auschwitz have become the symbols of World War II, the deaths of these particular innocents symbolizing the general cruelty of war. The black corpses made the Japanese feel that they were the main victims of the war. In unison they shouted: ‘No more Hiroshimas!’ It almost seemed as though there had been no war apart from the dropping of the A-bomb. A deeper insight into the real nature of war, and the only true basis for the antiwar movement, must come, not from the black corpses, but from the red one.”

  This is true. And yet I do not think the religious metaphors and hellish visions of Hiroshima (the bombing of which, after all, was hellish) can be reduced to Japanese self-pity alone. Buddhist hell scrolls had a function which many Christians—Pietists in particular—would recognize. It was believed that the contemplation of evil would lead to salvation. Hell is transcended by staring at it. Those who succeed are lifted to a higher moral plane, from where it becomes possible, among other things, to preach the gospel of universal peace. This is a notion that most religions with universal aspirations have in common, East and West.

  It is easier, to be sure, to look at a hell that is not of your own making. Japanese can identify with the victims of Hiroshima, but it is impossible for Germans to feel victimized by Auschwitz. Japanese sins are dissolved in the sins of mankind. This allows the Japanese to take two routes at once, a national one, as unique victims of the A-bomb, and a universal one, as the apostles of the Hiroshima spirit. This, then, is how Japanese pacifists, engaged in Peace Education, define the Japanese identity. But still I wonder whether it is really so different from the position of many Germans who wish to “internalize” Auschwitz, who see Auschwitz “through the eyes of identity.” In either case, nationality has come to be based less on citizenship than on history, morality, and a religious spirit.

  The problem with this quasi-religious view of history is that it makes it hard to discuss past events in anything but nonsecular terms. Visions of absolute evil are unique, and they are beyond human explanation or even comprehension. To explain is hubristic and amoral. If this is true of Auschwitz, it is even more true of Hiroshima. The irony is that while there can be no justification for Auschwitz unless one believes in Hitler’s murderous ideology, the case for Hiroshima is at least open to debate. The A-bomb might have saved lives; it might have shortened the war. But such arguments are incompatible with the Hiroshima spirit.

  In July 1992 a United Nations Conference on Disarmament Issues was held in Hiroshima. This was the result of years of Japanese lobbying to hold this annual conference in “the world’s first atom-bombed city.” All went well, apparently, until an American Harvard professor argued that the Hiroshima bombing “ended World War II and saved a million Japanese lives.” He also added that the horror of this event had helped to prevent nuclear wars ever since, and thus in effect Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions more lives. The Japanese were outraged. Newspaper editorials fulminated against the professor for failing to understand the point of view of the victims. The Asahi Shimbun felt “disgusted once again,” and observed that “unless the United States disentangled itself from this kind of view,” it would run into a great deal of opposition from nonnuclear countries.

  But still, the Asahi went on, the conference must be counted a success, since the participants, many of whom visited Hiroshima for the first time, “had all expressed shock at the displays and relics in the Peace Memorial Museum.” They had also participated in “the singing of ‘The Prayer of Hiroshima.’ ” Only a British writer, Alan Booth, commenting on the affair in the Asahi’s English edition, pointed out that prayers, ceremonies, and uniformity of views were not what conferences were usually for.

  The point of view of the victims is jealously guarded in Hiroshima. Their essential innocence is insisted upon. Yet in the history of Japan’s foreign wars, the city of Hiroshima is far from innocent. When Japan went to war with China in 1894, the troops set off for the battlefronts from Hiroshima, and the Meiji emperor moved his headquarters there. The city grew wealthy as a result. It grew even wealthier when Japan went to war with Russia eleven years later, and Hiroshima once again became the center of military operations. As the Hiroshima Peace Reader puts it with admirable conciseness, “Hiroshima, secure in its position as a military city, became more populous and prosperous as wars and incidents occurred throughout the Meiji and Taisho periods.” At the time of the bombing, Hiroshima was the base of the Second General Headquarters of the Imperial Army (the First was in Tokyo). In short, the city was swarming with soldiers.

  One of the few literary masterpieces to emerge from the A-bomb attack, Ibuse Masuji’s novel Black Rain, is set against this background of militarism and political oppression. The book begins with a scene set on a bridge near the epicenter of the A-bomb. Moments before the blast, junior high school children were made to listen to a military harangue and sing a patriotic song. And near the end of the book, after the actual bombing has been described over and over in all its horror, the governor of Hiroshima Prefecture issues an order to fight on: “Citizens of Hiroshima—the losses may be great, but this is war!”

  The citizens of Hiroshima were indeed victims, primarily of their own military rulers. But when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an “Aggressors’ Corner” was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war. Like millions of others (60,000 children a year), they were shown the grisly relics of the A-bomb: the bottles bent out of shape by the heat, the photos of the mushroom cloud, the torn bits of clothing, the weird shadow imprinted on a doorstep by radiation, and the life-sized tableaux of horribly mangled people staggering through the rubble with their skins dripping like molten wax.

  Presumably with some prompting from their teachers, the junior high school students from Osaka wanted more than this chamber of horrors. They wanted to know what happened before. They also demanded an official recognition of the fact that some of the Korean victims of the bomb had been slave laborers. (Osaka, like Kyoto and Hiroshima, still has a large Korean population.) Both requests were denied. So a group called Peace Link was formed, from local people, many of whom were Christians, antinuclear activists, or involved with discriminated-against minorities. The group, naturally, was opposed by right-wing nationalist organizations, such as the Japan Patriotic Party, which rallied around the Peace Park, blaring patriotic songs through loudspeakers mounted on trucks. The patriots appear to have won. But according to one of the peace activists, the municipal government of Hiroshima had been against the idea of an “Aggressors’ Corner” anyway.

  One of the ironies of the affair was that the antinuclear activists regarded the A-bomb attack as a
crime, whereas one of their right-wing opponents did not. Maeda Kazuyoshi, head of the Yukoku Ishinkai (Society for Lament and National Restoration), thought the bombing had saved Japan from total destruction. But he insisted that Japan could not be held solely responsible for the war. The war, he said, had simply been part of the “flow of history.”

  I asked the director of the Peace Memorial Museum, Kawamoto Yoshitaka, why the suggestion to build an “Aggressors’ Corner” had been rejected. Kawamoto, a polite municipal bureaucrat in a blue serge suit, smiled patiently and said: “We couldn’t have such a thing here. The aggressors were in Tokyo. Our only aim is to show what happened on August 6, 1945.”

  In his conversation, Kawamoto switched back and forth from universal (“mankind,” “world peace”) to the specifically national. I sensed that he was used to explaining the Japanese national character to foreign visitors. The Japanese laugh when they feel sad, he said. The Japanese can communicate with one another without speaking. The Japanese think only from a subjective point of view. The Japanese understand the essential sadness of things (mono no aware). And so on and so forth. What about young Japanese? I asked.

  “The younger generation no longer know the art of endurance,” he said. “And they don’t understand what life was like for us. You see, they come here and tell me that Japanese also committed war crimes, but they don’t know what they are talking about. They just repeat what their left-wing teachers say.”

  It was important, he went on, to explain the past on a level that the young could understand. The young, he said, no longer read, so you have to present them with visual information. Yes, but shouldn’t they be taught about the history of the war as well as the A-bomb? Of course, he said, of course. But that was not what this museum was for. So I asked him what it was for.