黒い雨
The Asahi has an English version of the mayor of Hiroshima’s peace declaration on the anniversary of the A-bombing of that city:
In the company of hibakusha who, on this day 65 years ago, were hurled, without understanding why, into a “hell” beyond their most terrifying nightmares and yet somehow managed to survive; together with the many souls that fell victim to unwarranted death, we greet this Aug. 6 with re-energized determination that, “No one else should ever have to suffer such horror.”
Through the unwavering will of the hibakusha and other residents, with help from around Japan and the world, Hiroshima is now recognized as a beautiful city. Today, we aspire to be a “model city for the world” and even to host the Olympic Games.
…
This ceremony is honored today by the presence of government officials representing more than 70 countries as well as the representatives of many international organizations, NGOs, and citizens groups. These guests have come to join the hibakusha, their families, and the people of Hiroshima in sharing grief and prayers for a peaceful world. Nuclear-weapon states Russia, China and others have attended previously, but today, for the first time ever, we have with us the U.S. ambassador and officials from the United Kingdom and France.
Clearly, the urgency of nuclear weapons abolition is permeating our global conscience; the voice of the vast majority is becoming the pre-eminent force for change in the international community.
We’d all love a peaceful world, but as long as we’re human beings sharing it with other human beings, the best hope of approximating it is for the free, peaceful societies to have enough sheer terrible force at our disposal to make it foolhardy to launch an attack against us. The atom bombing of Hiroshima, though I doubt its mayor sees it this way, was justified for exactly that reason. Japan was an implacable enemy. While it had conclusively lost the war, it was delaying its surrender in hopes of getting concessions, and it was not as easy in the moment as it seems in hindsight to figure out just how long the Allies would have had to wait to hear from Hirohito. The hell of Hiroshima put an end to the hell that had been realized in Nanjing, Korea, and Unit 731; one hates to think of human deaths in terms of their transactional value, but sadly that’s the way war works. And it did work: Japan finally accepted that it had been well and truly beaten, and it got down to the business of creating a vibrant peacetime economy. American, Australian, and other Allied armed forces didn’t have to keep sacrificing their men. Mayor Akiba is right that we need wisdom and not luck to avoid annihilation, but in the opposite of the way he means it. The atom bombings were justified then, and free societies need nuclear armaments now.
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If we did have a peaceful world, though, what would Code Pink do with themselves? What would become of the whole Berkeley protest-industrial complex? One shudders to think.
True enough; it’s hard to imagine what new enemy they could find that would be as emotionally satisfying as the West in general and the United States specifically.
My Internet was out on 9 August, and the weekend was busy, so something else I wasn’t able to post about is that people who spend 6 August every year soulfully decrying the A-bombs as unnecessary because the Japanese had already conclusively lost the war never seem to spend 7 and 8 August decrying the Japanese for, like, not taking the earliest opportunity to surrender before another city was destroyed.
Of course not. Japan is a blameless victim. They are a beautiful, peace-loving culture and always have been. So in tune with nature! They would never …
…you know the rest, I think.
Yes, completely. BTW, did you notice the op-ed Kenzaburo Oe wrote on the Hiroshima anniversary? Yeesh.