Two Waltzes Towards Civilisation: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[Apologies for the Great Hiatus, and even further apologies for returning with this piece.]

CONTENT/TRIGGER WARNING: This is a post about the atomic bomb museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Major triggers include child death, radiation-induced disability, nuclear war, and...basically, it's about nuclear war, please exercise caution when reading.

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The stench of a city drowned in flames, a parade of puppets in the rain.

- Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (2011)

I picked the object up and hefted it one-handed. It was mottled in colour, birled and twisted like something dug out of the ground in raw form; flat if bubbly on one side, lumpy on others, ranging in tone from ochre to red to blister-black. It could have been iron ore. It weighed, at a guess, about nine lb. It was roughly spherical.

There was a sign next to it in Japanese, English, and Korean which affirmed that it was safe to touch.

Once upon a time this had been the roof tile of an urban house, and the little girl's pink pinafore in the case next to it had not had any holes or scorch marks in the cloth, and the saké cups in the case to its right had not been fused together by a bomb whose heat, at the moment of detonation, was equal to the surface temperature of the Sun.

Today I was in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, as I had been in the Nagasaki A-Bomb Museum two days ago, trying very hard not to throw up after reading the explanatory label on the case with the fingernails.

There, in Hiroshima, in the first moments of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)

There are significant differences between the way the two cities memorialise their catastrophes, of course. Hiroshima's museum is large, loud, aboveground, and fronted by an enormous fountain; Nagasaki's is smaller, darker, and underground. To enter the Nagasaki museum, you must walk down a curving circular walkway. The walls are strung with what looks like a continuous sequence of human spinal columns. It's only when you look closely that you realise each 'vertebra' is a tiny paper crane, no bigger than my thumbnail: thousands of them packed densely on their strings. Both museums have reconstructions or dioramas of the destruction. At Nagasaki, there is a replica of the south side of Urakami Cathedral, along with a twisted fire tower and a water tank with its legs so buckled beneath it that it looks like one of the Martians from The War of the Worlds. At Hiroshima, a passage of crumbled brickwork leads into a diorama of three mannequins (a woman and two children), latex 'skin' hanging off their hands, dressed in ragged clothes, slouching against a backdrop of flaming ruins.

While the structure of the cathedral in the Nagasaki museum may be a replica, its statues are not. The faces of Maria-sama (the Virgin Mary), St. John, St. Peter, and assorted angels are scorched or streaked with black from flash-burns. On some of the carved heads, the stone is peeling in onion-skin layers or has bubbled due to the intense heat of the blast.

I cannot describe how unnerving it is to stand in front of a statue of Mary and realise that those carved stone eyes watched the H-bomb fall.

This, then, was the human dignity of the A-bomb survivors: that they did not commit suicide when they could easily have done so.

- Oe Kenzaburo, Hiroshima Notes (1969)

Both cities recovered from the bombings, physically at least, with a remarkable quickness. They're both now noisy, lively, thriving places, but their centres of memory are viewed from different angles. Hiroshima has the Peace Park [Heiwa Kinen Koen], the international ceremonies, and the A-Bomb Dome; Nagasaki has only a small, quiet circular park with a statue and a cenotaph to mark the hypocentre of the bomb. Yet for all the grandeur of the Peace Park, Hiroshima's hypocentre is muffled - I found it quite by accident, a brick and metal plaque, in a side street. One of Nagasaki's most important memorial sites is the recostructed Urakami Cathedral. Kyushu was always Japan's most heavily Christian region, having been the first place to be contacted by Christian missionaries, and there was a thriving Christian population in Nagasaki in 1945. (The memorial museum holds a large collection of rosaries found in the wreckage of Urakami Cathedral.) Hence increased anti-American sentiment in Nagasaki postwar, proportional to Hiroshima: there was a sentiment that America, as a majority-Christian country, had broken faith with its fellow Christians in Japan.

It is the relics of individual suffering which speak the loudest: a melted desktop Buddha, a twisted pair of spectacles, a wristwatch stopped at 8.15.

- Alan Booth, The Roads to Sata (1989)

Both museums hold personal effcts of those who died: the students' uniforms, people's charred fountain pens and stopped pocketwatches. There is a horror peculiar to hese objects because of the awareness of how much is represented by such small things: every set of saké cups was a marriage, every student's identity card was a Shinto baby blessing, every desktop Buddha was a piece of daily faith. Hiroshima's museum goes beyond that to physical artifacts of suffering: its glass cases hold the fingernails, skin, hair, tongues, and excised keloid scar tissue of people who either survived for decades or died within a week.

Along with tangible objects, there are examples in both museums of the notorious 'human shadows'. There's essentially an urban legend which claims that the human-shaped shadows found on walls and stairs in both cities were the remains of people who were vapourised by the heat of the bomb (it shows up, amongst other places, in the 'Hiroshima shadow lovers' of Alan Moore's Watchmen). It's now believed that that isn't true - the 'shadows' were the result of the blast heat scorching the surrounding stone white, while the opacity of the human body preserved some parts of the wall or step in its original (darker) colour.

This isn't to say that the shadow-shapes of a human and a ladder burnt into a wall aren't disconcerting as fuck, of course.

One of the worst ones was a circular shadow on a set of stone steps: a person had been sitting outside when the bomb dropped. It was the worst, I think, because of the bathos i provoked. How terrible must it be to die in the world's first nuclear holocaust, and yet the only visible signifier of your death is a shadowy buttprint seared into a set of steps forever?

Then there were the photographs. I can only really talk about one, in Hiroshima.

A little girl, three or so years old, is lying in the back of a flatbed truck. She is wrapped in blankets and laid on a pile of burlap sacks. Her face is unburnt, but her eyes are closed and her face shows the most profound, pained resignation I have ever seen. A soldier is squatting next to her, his back to the camera: in his left hand he holds a tin cup full of water, obviously trying to persuade her to drink. 

There is nothing, materially, that the water could have done for her in any major way; she was almost certainly badly burned beneath the blankets, she was certainly irradiated, and it is equally certain that she died shortly after this photograph was taken. The only thing the water could have done for her would have been to make her death a little bit easier.

It was a beautiful day in August, a day much like this one, in fact; very much like this.

What impressed me most about both memorials, I think, is the emphasis they put on international suffering. It's no secret that Japanese history textbooks are often openly revisionist, and that the louder section of the far-right in this country likes to engage in denialism of e.g. Japanese crimes aginst humanity in Korea and occupied Manchuria. Yet both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in a phrase, Not Here For That Shit. There is a special monument in the Heiwa Kinen Koen dedicated to all of the Korean victims of the A-Bomb; there is a library in Nagasaki devoted to resources on the lives and deaths of Korean and Chinese prisoners of war. Both museums explicitly stated that the suffering experienced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was interntional in nature and both were critical of Japanese actions in the Pacific theatre. 

There was a quiet resistance to nationalist fuckery; a quiet insistence that suffering is solidarity.