The word Hiroshima has stood in for both Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the last 70 years. The two appear synonymous in the minds of many historians and many people, but the two “bombs” (if one could dare to be so colloquial) were very different and have specific different effects regarding nuclear weapons in the world today. The last atomic bomb was the first plutonium bomb. The uranium-type, Hiroshima bomb was not even tested during the Manhattan Project. The “Gadget”, code name for the bomb that was tested in the New Mexican desert on 16 July 1945, was a plutonium-type explosive. In extensive trials leading up to the production of the plutonium at Hanford in Washington State, the bulbous bomb-shaped prototype was dropped from planes many times over a test range in California, and on practise runs over Japanese cities. What would be known as “Fat Man” was first simply called “the pumpkin”. And that plutonium component that was thus tested and developed would become the prototype for the plutonium trigger. Rocky Flats, part of the government-run nuclear weapons assembly line, 12 miles north-west of Denver, Colorado, manufactured some 70,000 plutonium triggers or pits for use in all US nuclear weapons. One could say at the centre of every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal is a Nagasaki-type bomb – the atomic trigger for a larger hydrogen explosive – that exists today as standard.
Nagasaki still resides, in the present moment, in the US nuclear stockpile. In every silo, on every submarine, in the bomb bays of airplanes poised for deployment, every second of every day, a Nagasaki bomb lies in wait as a trigger mechanism for devices that would level entire cities, creating firestorms of a 50-mile radius, leaving radioactive death and decay for millennia.
It may be various cultures’ obsession with the first of all things being the most important. It may be the chronicling of Hiroshima by John Hersey that took precedence in the postwar mind (Hersey Citation1946). It may be that the world was so shaken on the morning of 7 August 1945, that 9 August became a decades-old afterthought. Or, maybe it was how these two reality-shattering tragedies were memorialized that held one to the forefront of collective memory, causing erasure or second-thought status to the other. Still, if we are to truly “re-imagine Hiroshima”, Nagasaki must stand alongside it in memory and discourse.
Nagasaki 11:02
On 9 August, a plutonium bomb reduced Nagasaki to a radioactive wasteland. In November 1945, in the bombed-out ruin of the Urakami Cathedral, a mass was held for the repose of the victims of the atomic bomb. The cathedral ruins stood for some 13 years after the bombing. Many people in Nagasaki City saw the relevance of the cathedral ruins to speak to the world of the significance and urgency for nuclear disarmament and world peace. However many parishioners regarded the ground upon which the cathedral was built to be sacred, the ground upon which so much suffering of their ancestors had occurred, the secret preservation of their faith, these tragic occurrences were significant enough to make the argument for a new cathedral to be built in its place.
“The broken remains of factories, the scorched out stumps of trees, the crumbling carcass of the Cathedral – all of these are important subjects for research. It is our responsibility to humanity to carefully record the details of this destruction” (Nagasaki Nichi Nichi Shimbun on 8 October 1945 Takahara Citation2010, 87).
In 1955, Nagasaki Mayor Tagawa Tsutomu travelled to the United States. Following his visit, there was a sudden change of opinion and purpose. The mayor had originally fought to keep the atomic relic. Yet upon his return from the US he had a considerable change of heart, and argued that the decision rested with the Church population. Some hibakusha believe there was pressure from abroad to bring down the ruin, its meaning too momentous. It is hard to know what precipitated his abrupt departure from a previously strongly held position, because a fire in 1958 at Nagasaki City Hall destroyed the town records (Takahara Citation2010, 89). If there was evidence pointing towards US pressure to demolish the cathedral ruin, it was lost.
Nagasaki today
At the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, the upstairs is light and bright with windows and water features and installations of paper cranes. Downstairs are the relics and records of the atomic blast. At 11:02 AM daily, there is a sad electronic song piped throughout the building to signal the time, 70 years ago on a hot August day, when hell was visited upon Nagasaki.
My friend Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old, hiding in a shelter, when the plutonium bomb exploded, making a radioactive ruin of Nagasaki and taking the lives of her mother, sister and brother and many tens of thousands of others, mostly noncombatants, other children and other mothers.
Ten years after the bombing, Shimohira san’s surviving sister met her death on the tracks of an oncoming train. Ten years of depression and disease had been too much and so, as Shimohira san put it, her sister found the courage to die. One in four atomic bomb survivors experienced a similar fate, unable to carry on in the charnel ground, the atomic wasteland.
Some atomic bomb survivors found the courage to die. Some found the courage to live, like Shimohira san, who tells her story to thousands of young people visiting Nagasaki on their school-sponsored pilgrimages. I’ve been with her on such occasions, when the students file into a meeting room, looking slightly bored or tired. Then they listen, and most are transformed by the force of nature that is Sakue Shimohira. On one occasion, I heard her say: “There were so many bones that lay on the ground, their whiteness shone in the night sky. Be aware, then, that when you are walking here you are walking on the bones of loved ones….”
When we hear first hand the testimony of atomic bomb survivors, the nuclear issue can become personal to us. Although these accounts can be terrifying and dreadfully sad, our emotional responses to hearing such stories are signs of our shared humanity and ability to love. And our love extends to an ability to remember, and in remembering we work to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. Once the living voices of hibakusha are gone, how will we be helped in our remembrance?
In Nagasaki, we lost the greatest atomic relic ever known. The one that said We are no different than you. Christ on the cross, a radioactive crucifixion for all the world to see, might have problematized nuclear weapons use in the way a municipal building in Hiroshima cannot. Any bombed-out temple or place of worship would hold the same import to people of compassion everywhere, but a bombed-out Catholic cathedral would have held special relevance for the victor nation that sought to demonize the “exotic” Japanese while at the same time upholding “Christian” principles fighting The Good War. They even called the first nuclear test “Trinity”.
Unfortunately, we will never truly know why Nagasaki chose the route of a Romanesque figure pointing with one hand towards the sky from where the atomic bomb dropped, and the other horizontally suggesting some vague idea of “peace”. The bronze statue made by Japanese artist Kitamura Seibo has been the subject of considerable controversy. Nagasaki resident and Japanese language scholar Brian Burke-Gaffney puts it this way:
The figure is touted as an East–West hybrid, but you don’t need a degree in art history to recognize it for what it is: a clumsy approximation of a Greco–Roman deity. At the time of construction, only three years had passed since the Treaty of San Francisco and Japan’s escape from the doghouse after World War II, and the people of this country were busy rebuilding their lives, looking to the United States for both material assistance and socio-cultural models. Going along with the rhetoric that the atomic bombings had been necessary to end the war was probably Japan’s natural choice under these circumstances. But the Peace Statue seems glaringly incongruent, paying tribute to the civilization that deliberately dropped atomic bombs on two cities populated mostly by noncombatants. (http://railwayrider-nagasakiperspectives.blogspot.com/2011/07/thoughts-on-peace-statue.html)
Sadly, this same incongruence plays politically today. The very nation that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki now “protects” Japan from the threat of more black rain under its nuclear umbrella, thereby distorting Japanese policy in nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament matters at the United Nations and elsewhere.
What if the bombed-out cathedral still stood as a place for visitors to reflect upon the evil that humanity is capable of meting out on one another, and with nuclear weapons, onto every living being, including the future itself? With radical and instantaneous mass destruction – omnicide – and the slow death of genetic integrity through radioactive contamination: we have created the technology to destroy our world so thoroughly, so completely, that we not only threaten all life, but the promise of continuity. We threaten the future itself.
The editor’s provocation to “Re-imagine Hiroshima” may well be noble and timely, though it must engage us in re-imagining Nagasaki too. Nagasaki, different but akin to Hiroshima, has its own memories, suffering, stories, and hibakusha. Our task should be to take these shards of memory and use them to ignite action to do more than imagine a world without nuclear weapons, but to make that world a reality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
References
- Hersey, J. 1946. “Hiroshima.” The New Yorker, August 31.
- Takahara, I. and K. Yokote. 2010. Nagasaki Urakami Cathedral, 1945-1958: An Atomic Bomb Relic Lost. Translated by Brian Burke-Gaffney. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.