August 6th

The first use of the atomic bomb was the unleashing the beast that would forever change the face of warfare.


It is at this point that many begin.


Japan emerged into the twentieth century with new ideas and technology borrowed from the West but still clung to ideologies as ancient as the land itself. That Hirohito, the one hundred and twenty-fourth emperor of Japan and origin of the Showa dynasty, was a god and that Japan should expand were the seeds of Japan's ruin. A military government emerged in the late twenties and would continue until the defeat of Japan in 1945.


Japan defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. It annexed Korea in 1910. I had the pleasure of speaking with a Korean gentleman who served as a translator during the Korean War. He, like other men of his generation, remember being forced to change their names from Korean ones to Japanese ones. The Korean language (much like the Polish language during the Cold War) was forbidden. Shintoism was instituted as the official religion despite the burgeoning growth of Christianity. Koreans were reduced to slaves at home and abroad.


Japan invaded China in the thirties. The most infamous incident of this invasion was the rape of Nanking in which even pregnant women were butchered. These atrocities differed only slightly wherever the Japanese army went- the Philippines, Indonesia and various islands in the South Pacific. The treatment of POWs was particularly brutal. The killing of Australian nurses and wounded violated the very sense of human decency and is a crime for which there has been little reconciliation.


Yet, these facts are absent from contemporary Japanese opinion:

While many Americans believe the bombs were necessary to bring a speedy end to the war, Inazuka, like many Japanese, argues the attacks -- at least the one on Nagasaki -- were unwarranted because Japan was on the verge of surrender.

"Hiroshima was completely destroyed, which should have been sufficient," Inazuka said. "We need to strictly verify why they were dropped on the two cities."

Wrong.

The Japanese rejected the terms of the Potsdam Declaration leading to the final decision to use the bomb against Hiroshima, just one of the chosen sites for the atomic bomb. After Hiroshima was bombed, the military government still pressed for war. It wasn't until Nagasaki was bombed and the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria that the Japanese realised they were beaten.

And so Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so far the only recipients of a nuclear payload, have been pinpoints of the anti-nuclear movement. Understandable given the firestorm that razed both cities to the ground but still short-sighted:

While the tone of the Hiroshima ceremony has always been one that stressed the need to end all wars and to ensure that no more nuclear bombs should fall, it has always lacked any context for the events of August 6, 1945. The responsibility for the suffering of the Japanese people in 1945 (after spending more than a decade inflicting suffering on others with impunity and without a drop of remorse) is not an American legacy but a Japanese one. The Japanese may have suffered as their empire collapsed in defeat in 1945, but, like their Nazi allies, they have no right to collectively think of themselves as victims of that war...

The other troubling context to this event is the emphasis on banning nuclear weapons as the end all of contemporary foreign policy — a message reinforced by United Nations General-Secretary Ban Ki Moon, who cited President Obama’s support for this cause in his remarks at Hiroshima. The notion that nuclear weapons themselves are a threat to the world and must be banned is the sort of piety we expect to be mouthed at Hiroshima, but it betrays a lack of both historical and contemporary understanding of strategic realities. These weapons may be terrible, but the plain truth is that their existence kept the peace between the rival superpowers during the Cold War. America’s nuclear arsenal ensured the freedom of Western Europe as well as that of Japan after World War II.

Exactly. Missing from modern Japanese opinion regarding atomic bombs is how Japan's military government dragged its own people toward destruction. Its crimes are no mentioned. Where is the regret for Pearl Harbour or the use of Koreans as slaves? Also missing is the terrifying reality that rogue states like North Korea would have no compunction of using such a weapon.

If there must be regret, let it be regret that a weapon of mass destruction was unleashed because men could not agree to peace.