Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Hiroshima, then Nagaski. August 6, then 9. Every anniversary gives fresh opportunity for reflection, discussion, and current political posturing.

  This year I was in Seoul on August 6 and for the few weeks leading up to it. Since late July the huge box-office hit movie “Gunhamdo” (“Battleship Island,” or “Hashima”) has been showing in theaters, depicting Japanese wartime treatment of Korean laborers. The movie has a scene depicting the atomic mushroom cloud rising above Nagasaki, not far from Gunhamdo. When I saw the movie I wasn’t sure what to make of that scene, so I asked several Korean acquaintances what they thought the scene meant. The prevailing interpretation was that the Korean laborers viewing the atomic blast from nearby Gunhamdo were thinking of the Koreans in Nagasaki who would have been killed by the blast. That wasn’t one of the options I had considered, but neither am I Korean.

  On August 6 itself I also asked Korean acquaintances what they thought of in association with that date. All of them drew a blank. More than August 6 or August 9, it is August 15 that Koreans particularly remember as the day of Korea’s liberation from Japan, when Japan surrendered in the wake of the atomic bombings. It seems that the Korean view of the atomic bombings is that they were important insofar as they facilitated the end of Japan’s deeply resented 35-year colonization of Korea. Moreover, the main tragedies of the bombings were the deaths of Koreans in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of whom were there not by their own choice.

  The Japanese view of the bombings is of course much, much different: Japan suffered the only atomic bombings in history, and the horror of those events must never be repeated. A nuclear-armament-free world is thus imperative. Period. That is, unless Japan must somehow develop deterrent capabilities in light of North Korea’s developing nuclear arsenal.

   Discussions in the U.S. about the moral, military, and political rationales for the bombings continue to this day. To distill the debates to an oversimplified generalization,  the prevailing U.S. view seems to be that Truman’s decision was the least horrible option available at the time. Dropping the bombs certainly saved a host of U.S.-American lives that would have ended in an invasion. Many will differ from that generalization in one way or another, but I suggest that statement best characterizes how many U.S.-Americans come down on the matter in the end.

   So what do these various viewpoints tell us about Korean, Japanese, and U.S.-American moral, historical, and political sensibilities? All of us hate suffering and destruction, especially when they are unjustly inflicted on people like us. All of us tend to evaluate historical events in connection with how they promote the status and well-being of our own countries. How events fit into the metanarrative of our countries’ most noble aspirations also plays an important role in how we view such monumental events as those of August 6 and August 9, 1945.

  Learning what others think, and why, has a broadening effect on our otherwise unwittingly self-serving viewpoints. That does not mean we just take the most generalized position we can come up with. It does mean that what such events mean for all of history, including the implications for what steps to take henceforth, should override simply what best serves my kind of people. The God of all the earth expects no less of us.