By the Well of Remembering and Forgetting

The anniversary of Hiroshima was yesterday in Japan, today in the States.  Those of you Stateside  might wonder what it's like to be an American in Japan on August 6th.  Are there demonstrating outside of  Hirsohima itself?  It is better to stay at home and avoid the accusatory stares?  Do out Japanese friends want to be sure that we, personally condemn what the U.S. did?   Well, it's a lot like this.

I remember rolling into Hiroshima on a bullet train several years ago and hearing the announcement: "The next shop is Hiroshima..Hiroshima...Hiroshima."   The very name itself was to me an accusation.  The city meant nothing but the misery and destruction that happened in 1945.    I glanced about nervously, expecting grimly polite disapproval.  No.  People scurried to grab their bags and get out of the train as usual.  The station looked like any other in Japan, and if For some reason I hadn't caught the name I would have thought nothing unusual about either the place or people. 

And so it is on August 6th all over Japan.  Yes, there are news reports of memorial ceremonies held in Hiroshima itself, but one might as well look for Confederate insurgents in Atlanta on the anniversaries of its burning than discontent in Japan.

Joichi Ito, at 38, a bit younger than I am, commemorates Hiroshima in an article titled "An Anniversary to Forget."

WHEN people ask my thoughts on the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I always feel uncomfortable. As a Japanese, I know how I'm supposed to respond: with sadness, regret and perhaps anger. But invariably I try to dodge the issue, or to reply as neutrally as possible.

That's because, at bottom, the bombings don't really matter to me or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation. My peers and I have little hatred or blame in our hearts for the Americans; the horrors of that war and its nuclear evils feel distant, even foreign. Instead, the bombs are simply the flashpoint marking the discontinuity that characterized the cultural world we grew up in.

It's hard to imagine the changes the Japanese of 1945 underwent.  What was it like to be occupied by such a hated enemy, and how were the wounds, if not healed, at least salved?

My great-grandmother and my grandmother faced the occupiers alone, having ordered the children to hide. The Japanese had been warned that the invading barbarians would rape and pillage. My great-grandmother, a battle-scarred early feminist, hissed, "Get your filthy barbarian shoes off of my floor!" The interpreter refused to interpret. The officer in command insisted. Upon hearing the translation from the red-faced interpreter, the officer sat on the floor and removed his boots, instructing his men to do the same. He apologized to my great-grandmother and grandmother.

It was a startling tipping-point experience for them, as the last bit of brainwashing that began with "we won't lose the war" and ended with "the barbarians will rape and kill you" collapsed.

I'd like to think this is a salient feature of the American soldier--the basic decency displayed by most when they were in a position to show it.  But we should not forget that when it came to battle, American forces could be as savage as any, as this Telegraph article shows.

Prof Aldrich found several examples confirming what became an American policy in some parts of the Pacific theatre not to take prisoners of war.

He quotes the diaries of Charles Lindbergh, the American aviation pioneer, who toured the Far East visiting United States units. On one occasion he commented to a group of senior officers that very few Japanese seemed to be taken prisoner.

"Oh, we could take more if we wanted to," one of the officers replied. "But our boys don't like to take prisoners.

"It doesn't encourage the rest to surrender when they hear of their buddies being marched out on the flying field and machine-guns turned loose on them."

Although Lindbergh was sympathetic to the Nazis and was suspected of deliberately portraying his fellow countrymen in a very negative light, his allegations are supported by other American diarists, who report that the US marines, in particular, did not take many prisoners. Prof Aldrich also discovered new diaries showing that American generals worried about the abuse of human remains by their troops.

They were particularly concerned that the skulls of dead Japanese soldiers were often displayed as gruesome mascots by some units, while US marines made a speciality of collecting ears.

Australian troops are also shown not to like taking prisoners. Prof Aldrich quotes the 1943 diary of Eddie Stanton, an Australian posted to Goodenough Island off Papua New Guinea. "Japanese are still being shot all over the place," he wrote. "The necessity for capturing them has ceased to worry anyone. Nippo soldiers are just so much machine-gun practice. Too many of our soldiers are tied up guarding them."

      But  yet, context is everything.

The book also features the memoir of a New Zealand soldier working with a Fijian regiment who came across the bodies of two native women, pegged out on an earthen mound.

They had been "raped to death" by Japanese soldiers. Then they found a dead American soldier who had stakes driven through each shoulder and his hands cut off. "As we moved away again, one of my corporals said to me: "No more prisoners, turaga[sir]." I agreed with him.''

In light of this, modern day Japan and its friendship with America is a miracle.  Let us not overlook the importance of forgetting the old animosities even as we remember the tragedies that they drove us to.