The White Peril 白禍

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. I should have old permalinks redirected shortly, but for now all the old posts are at least imported. You can search for a key phrase below if you'd like to hunt one down.

Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: japan

Tokyo fire-bombing anniversary

My energy has been diverted elsewhere, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, before the date expired around the globe, that yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the fire-bombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 people during World War II. Atsushi and I watched the hour-long NHK special over the weekend. Information about the sequence of events is, to my knowledge, covered well here. I believe war is essentially a fact of human nature, and I'm thankful daily that I've spent my entire life in powerful, dynamic societies with bad-ass armed forces staffed by volunteers. I also, naturally, am glad we did what we needed to do to win World War II.

But winning a war against a ruthless opponent requires ruthless tactics:

The Superforts returned in force at the end of the month, flying at altitudes that insured immunity from attacks by Japanese defenders. Although their high altitude provided a shield for the bombers, it also decreased the accuracy and impact of their bomb runs. To correct this deficiency, Major-General Curtis Lemay (newly appointed commander of the American Bomber Command) ordered a dramatic change in tactics. The bomber runs would be made at night, at low altitude and deliver a mixture of high explosive and incendiary bombs. The objective was to turn the closely-packed, wooden homes and buildings prevalent in the Japanese cities into raging infernos and ultimately into the most destructive of all weapons - the firestorm.

The Allies had first encountered the phenomenon of the firestorm when the British bombed the German city of Hamburg in August of 1943. The night raid ignited numerous fires that soon united into one uncontrollable mass of flame, so hot it generated its own self-sustaining, gale-force winds and literally sucked the oxygen out of the air, suffocating its victims. Lemay hoped to use this force to level the cities of Japan. Tokyo would be the first test.

A successful incendiary raid required ideal weather that included dry air and significant wind. Weather reports predicted these conditions over Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945. A force of 334 B-29s was unleashed - each plane stripped of ammunition for its machine guns to allow it to carry more fire-bombs. The lead attackers arrived over the city just after dark and were followed by a procession of death that lasted until dawn. The fires started by the initial raiders could be seen from 150 miles away. The results were devastating: almost 17 square miles of the city were reduced to ashes. Estimates of the number killed range between 80,000 and 200,000, a higher death toll than that produced by the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima or Nagasaki six months later.

Those who've studied the reconstruction of Japan after the war will recognize Lemay as a key figure--it's worth noting that, while he was willing to go to extreme lengths to fight the Japanese, he was also there to get their country going again--by structuring the SDF!--after they surrendered. That doesn't necessarily make him a nice person, but, unfortunately, you don't win wars by being nice.

Journalist David McNeill ran a piece yesterday asking why the Japanese don't pay much attention to the anniversary of the Tokyo firebombing. In it, he raises and then glides over that issue. He finishes with a quotation from one of the survivors:

�Youngsters do not understand the horror of war,� agrees Mrs. Suzuki Ikuko. �When the Iraq War started I couldn�t watch it on TV. It was too painful. But my grandson said he though it was cool. He said it was like a videogame.�

I agree that Mrs. Suzuki is entirely justified, having lived through an incendiary raid that leveled part of her city, in shying away from war footage. But ending the discussion here implies that her example is generalizable--that the only possible reactions to the carnage of war are raw sensitivity or complete insensitivity. Both postures are sometimes necessary: we don't want soldiers flying off the handle and murdering civilians out of revenge or frustration, and we do want them shoving aside their finer feelings to go after enemy combatants however they must.

But most situations are murkier. The calculations that led to the bombing of Tokyo 60 years ago included the fact that one of the city's primary industrial sectors was located next to a residential district. Perhaps if the Japanese had put all their factories in isolated, easy-to-target rural areas and bussed their workers in from a safe distance, the US would have had the choice of taking out the facilities without hurting women and children. But for obvious reasons, the Japanese didn't build that way, and we didn't bomb that way. Furthermore, it's an exaggeration to say that every last Japanese citizen worshipped the emperor as a god, but it's not an exaggeration to say that Japan was working as one big machine to maintain the war effort. Fears about what would happen if we had to invade the Japanese mainland were well-grounded. We'll never know whether incinerating 100,000 civilians saved, in some direct way, more from dying in combat; but we do know that breaking Japan's will required that we demonstrate as unpleasantly as possible that we could hurt them bad. It was a war. May all who died rest in peace, and may we continue to look for non-deadly ways to address conflict without flinching from the deadly ones when we need them.

Which brings me to one last thing: I'm sure McNeill was overjoyed to have a link between the Tokyo fire-bombing and the Iraq invasion provided for him so he didn't have to force it himself. (Usually, I try to avoid reading the feelings of writers, but the slant in his article is not exactly hidden.) But it doesn't work the way I'm guessing he thinks it does. America has put lots and lots and lots of energy into making its bombs work more precisely and efficiently. Much of that comes of non-humanitarian considerations--we don't want to waste personnel, material, and materiel. But we also don't like wrecking people's lives for the hell of it and will avoid doing so where we can. And pre-invasion Iraq was not a racially homogeneous nation that mostly supported its half-divinized leader. And we haven't wiped out a 100,000-person section of a city.

I don't think it's exploitative to use yesterday's anniversary to raise questions about whether we could have won with fewer civilian casualties. Self-criticism is good.* But the implication that goes "Tokyo fire-bombing barbaric" = "Subsequent wars barbaric" = "Iraq invasion barbaric" is cheap.

Added on 12 March: Joel at Far Outliers did something I elected not to do here: he posted parallel (so to speak) information about Dresden, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. He's right--you can't really see the significance of the bombing of Tokyo without having a handle on the way the war was going in general. By the way, I hope I made it clear above that I think the fire-bombing of Tokyo was justified. While I don't believe it's wussy to ask whether an air raid that killed 100,000 people was really necessary, investigating the question requires more than just saying, "Women and children died? A barbarism!" And even if you do accept it as iffy, it says nothing about the Iraq invasion.
* McNeill may not be American, but I'm assuming he's from a country that's part of the coalition in Iraq.

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

Posted by Sean on 2005-03-10 10:53:17

| 26 Comments

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. I should have old permalinks redirected shortly, but for now all the old posts are at least imported. You can search for a key phrase below if you'd like to hunt one down.

Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: japan

Hiroshima bombing anniversary

Tomorrow morning is the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. I can't really think of anything better to say about the attack itself than what I said last year. I'm not big on self-quoting, but if you don't feel like clicking through:

When I think of people immediately after the bombings, their faces obliterated by heat, expending their little remaining energy to bow in gratitude for the water volunteers brought to their lips (one of the most famous A-bomb memorials is inscribed with 水, the character for "water," because that's what so many victims cried out for), my heart aches. The same when...you know, bodies of water feature very prominently in Japanese literature, as they do the world over, as sources of refreshment and sustenance. Imagining people set afire, stampeding into rivers and lakes to cool themselves, only to find the water boiling hot, makes me cry. As an American who places the highest value on individuals, I wish we hadn't had to cause such suffering to anyone at all who wasn't irredeemably evil.

But we did have to. Emperor Hirohito was ready to surrender, but he had military leaders who were plotting to intercept his proclamation, and no one on the American side could be sure how long rank-and-file Japanese soldiers and citizens would keep fighting. That there were other, more unsavory motivations for dropping the atom bomb (such as scientific curiosity about its effects) is hard to dispute. There probably isn't any such thing as a guileless decision during wartime, for that matter. I wish the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs a peaceful eternal rest as much as anyone. But I'm glad America did what it took to win.

I do think that, given the political controversies over Japan's attitudes toward its wartime conduct, there are one or two additional general points that might be made. Dean links to a post by Riding Sun about the history textbook debate that presents a good overview of the teaching content and the back-and-forth of the debate. Something that's worth bearing in mind, though, is this: the teachers' unions, especially the Japan Teachers' Union, are leftist. While their rank-and-file members tend to be not so extreme as the labor leadership, the average public school teacher is hardly a raving nationalist. When it's the teachers who express political views, you often get stories like this one.

It's those teachers through whom whatever is said in the textbook is mediated in the classroom. Among the Japanese friends with whom I frequently have frank political discussions, many (including Atsushi) say that their teachers tended to skip the chapters in their history books about the period after the Russo-Japanese War. I mean, you figure, it would have been discussed at the end of the year, and it shouldn't be hard to pace the class so that it runs out of time before uncomfortable subjects come up. I'm not sure how cram schools treat World War II; it seems unlikely that the entrance exams contain many questions about the period. The Japanese way of dealing with awkwardness is to ignore it, after all.

I certainly do not condone this. A balanced view of one's culture must include the bad with the good, and the way a civilization becomes world-class is by doing extreme things on a grand scale, so there's going to be plenty of bad to discuss. That's no less true of Japan than of any other country, including the former colonial powers of the West. I think, however, that when only the nationalist textbooks are discussed, there's a danger of leaving the impression that millions of students across Japan are actually sitting in rows being harangued: "How did our troops get into Manchuria, class?" "By advancing into it, Sensei!" The missing part of that picture is that the lefties in the JTU favored the hard-pacifist line pretty uncritically for years--including not only acceptance of responsibility for wrong-doing doing the occupation of Asia but also the advocating of monetary restitution for individual Asian war victims. I'm not happy to see ultra-nationalists clamoring to swing the pendulum all the way to the opposite side, but it's not as if they'd just awakened one morning and decided to do so unprovoked. Unfortunately, people with more moderate views and a pride in their country tempered by realism tend to keep silent when the topic comes up in public.

Added on 6 August: I edited the above a bit for clarity--I'd originally not planned to post it before this morning, but I clicked on the button before I realized what I was doing.

While I'm at it, one more point about liberal arts education: it isn't the goal of the Japanese educational system. While I'm happy to join Riding Sun in saying that's a problem, I don't think that the nature of the problem is that the Japanese public education machine is aiming for an American-style liberal arts system and misfiring because the far right is getting in the way. Just about everyone wants to tell the students what to think--not just the nationalists but also the teachers' unions and the Ministry of Education. (Well, now it's the Ministry of [deep breath] Culture, Education, Sports, Science and Technology. Plans to have a partridge in a pear tree added remain unconfirmed as I post this, perhaps because they're already under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.) There are education researchers and policy makers who favor a liberal arts curriculum as we would understand it, but the majority only disagree on what the students should be fed, not whether they should be force-fed ideas at all. The education establishment has mouthed things about liberal arts models because of the US occupation after the war, but like everything else that gets imported, they have been transformed according to the perceived needs of Japanese society.

Added at 7 a.m.: Okay, one more thought. This is a passage from the end of Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, written soon after the end of the war:

What the United States cannot do--what no outside nation could do--is to create by fiat a free, democratic Japan. It has never worked in any dominated country. No foreigner can decree, for a people who have not his own habits and assumptions, a manner of life after his own image. The Japanese cannot be legislated into accepting the authority of elected persons and ignoring 'proper station' as it is set up in their hierarchical system. They cannot be legislated into adopting the free and easy human contacts to which we are accustomed in the United States, the imperative demand to be independent, the passion each individual has to choose his own mate, his own job, the house he will live in and the obligations he will assume. The Japanese themselves, however, are quite articulate about changes in this direction which they regard as necessary. Their public men have said since V-J-Day that Japan must encourage its men and women to live their own lives and to trust their own consciences. They do not say so, of course, but any Japanese understands that they are questioning the role of 'shame' (haji) in Japan, and that they hope for a new growth of freedom among their countrymen: freedom from fear of the criticism and ostracism of 'the world.'

Benedict has taken a drubbing in succeeding decades, often justifiably, for her generalizations about the rigidity of Japanese society, which were excessive even then. But she was right about a great deal, too. We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki because we had to, but once Japan knew it had been crushed, it responded as it always does by adapting. Like any living civilization, Japan is a work in progress, but the overall progression over the last 60 years has been toward more liberty, and it has mostly been the Japanese themselves who have accomplished that.

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

Posted by Sean on 2005-08-05 09:55:21

| 0 Comments

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. I should have old permalinks redirected shortly, but for now all the old posts are at least imported. You can search for a key phrase below if you'd like to hunt one down.

Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: japan

Nagasaki bombing anniversary

The anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing gets less attention, I think, in the Western media than that of the Hiroshima bombing, which precedes it. The speeches on 9 August tend to contain harsher soundbites, though. Part of that is that the mayor of Nagasaki is outspoken about nuclear disarmament; given that he's not responsible for defending the nation, he can afford to be. A few months ago, he stated that the US has not made serious efforts toward nuclear disarmament. His sentiments were, as always, echoed by speakers today:

A representative of the survivors of the bombing, [Ms.] Fumie Sakamoto (74), read the "Peace Pledge," calling for the abolishment of nuclear weapons: "I have managed to live 60 years since that day; no one else must be allowed to taste this kind of suffering."

Prime Minister Koizumi also made the usual bland statements in support of worldwide nuclear disarmament. However, with due respect to Ms. Sakamoto and her fellow survivors' truly awesome fortitude, it is simply not possible for rich nations not to arm themselves with the best offensive and defensive military technology available.

Well, I guess it would be possible in the short term, but it would also be foolish. Practically the entirety of world history consists of the building up of material and intellectual riches by imaginative and hard-working peoples, followed by attempts by other peoples to grab those resources by force. Life is strife, unless we want to return to subsistence farming in isolated hamlets. The best way any free country can honor its war dead in deed is to allow its citizens to better their lives without impediment and to protect them, unwaveringly, when when others go after the fruits of their labor.

Added on 10 August: I saw this a week or so ago and forgot to mention it when posting on 6 August: Romeo Mike likes to take pictures of stupid-lefty political posters and stapled-up handbills around town. Last week, there was one about Hiroshima in the middle of this post.

I can't tell whether the pattern on the woman's obi is supposed to be origami doves of peace or, you know, lotuses of enlightenment or something. I can say that the first time I read the main message of "No more US wars / Abolish all nuclear weapons / Troops home from Iraq now," I thought, For crying out loud, is that a flippin' haiku? Please tell me they didn't...oh, sweet Amaterasu, they couldn't have.... Luckily, they hadn't--I was faked out by that five-syllable first line. That was where the relief ended, of course. (You have to read the "What will socialism look like?" one, too, which pushes the time-dishonored line that real socialism would lead to paradise on Earth; the problem is that no one's done it right yet. And at the risk of cramming too many topics in here, you might want to read RM's thoughts on the push for same-sex marriage in Australia, which appears to be prey to the same problems as it is in the States: disagreement among advocacy groups about both strategies and goals, contempt for dissenting gays and thoughtful opponents. The sun never sets on lefty stupidity.)

Added on 11 August: I don't want to beat this topic to death, but Michael and Daily Pundit have noted the way reports about the bombings land in La-la Land non-reality. Michael questions a Globe and Mail headline, and Bill Quick--well, if you want to know why I never cite The Japan Times here, it's because I don't read it. Check this out:

The U.S. actions arose not from any rage but from cool, calculated thinking. The intent was to deliver a crippling psychological blow to Japan by obliterating two of its important cities. No warning was given to the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before unleashing the nuclear holocaust.

...

Before dropping the second bomb, shouldn't the U.S. have given Japan a reasonable and firm deadline to surrender? In rushing into a second nuclear attack before Japan could grasp the strategic significance of the first bombing, Truman achieved little more than showing that a tested implosion-type bomb worked.

No warning? A reasonable and firm deadline? You'd think we were talking about that employee in cubicle A7 who never submits his paperwork on time.

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

Posted by Sean on 2005-08-09 10:37:19

| 4 Comments

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. I should have old permalinks redirected shortly, but for now all the old posts are at least imported. You can search for a key phrase below if you'd like to hunt one down.

Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: japan

空爆 (Hiroshima)

There are always, in the week before the anniversaries of the atom bombings, articles run about the decreasing numbers of survivors and the effort to keep their stories alive. One such piece was an AP story picked up by the Yomiuri on-line (not sure whether it ran in the print edition:

Monday's anniversary comes just a month after Fumio Kyuma was forced to quit as defense minister for seeming to implying that the bombing was inevitable, because otherwise Japan would have gone on fighting and would have lost territory to a Soviet invasion.

Not so, says Steven Leeper, the first American to head the Hiroshima Peace and Culture Foundation. "Historically, that's not correct," he said in an interview, "And it's unbelievable that he said it."

Leeper shares the view of most Japanese: that Japan had already lost the war and that the bombing of Hiroshima, and of Nagasaki three days later, was wrong and unnecessary.

"Everybody knows on the left and the right that Japan was finished at the time the bomb was dropped," Leeper said.

Historically, the American justification was that the bombing ended the war and limited the number of U.S. military and Japanese civilian lives that would have been lost in a land invasion.

The Japanese perspective argues that Japan was already working on negotiating a peace treaty, as well as a surrender, and that the U.S. dropped the bomb to test its destructive power and to intimidate the Soviet Union.

I love Japan and am glad that we're allies today. But sixty-odd years ago, our grandfathers were enemies. It was the responsiblity of ours to crush theirs. I'm glad they did it conclusively. One hopes that no civilized society has to resort to nuclear warfare again, but it's a mistake to prettify history for the sake of expedient would-be humanitarianism.

I've never seen it disputed that Japan had already lost the war by August, in the sense that it clearly wasn't going to win. Whether it was "finished," however, is another matter. The government was hedging over the Potsdam Declaration. There was vocal opposition to surrender from some military leaders--even after both bombings, they tried to prevent the emperor's surrender proclamation from being broadcast--who wanted to make good on previous promises to resist an invasion of the mainland by any means necessary. The Japanese people's meek acceptance of occupation and immediate dedication of energy to rebuiding a peacetime economy seems inevitable now, but only because we know that's how it happened.

And as for sending a minatory message to the Soviets, that does indeed appear to have been a factor, but I can't see why it's evidence of moral turpitude. Japan had mindedly inserted itself into an international conflict, betting that the United States and British Commonwealth would not have the resources to fight effectively in both Pacific and European theaters. It turned out to be a bad bet of global dimensions. What would be done with Japan after its surrender would affect the post-war balance of power, and our military leaders would have been nuts not to factor that in when deciding how to attack it.

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

Posted by Sean on 2007-08-05 21:01:55

| 7 Comments

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. I should have old permalinks redirected shortly, but for now all the old posts are at least imported. You can search for a key phrase below if you'd like to hunt one down.

Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: japan

過ちは (Nagasaki)

The anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing is today just after 11 o'clock.

安らかに眠って下さい
過ちは
繰返しませぬから

Sleep in peace,
For the mistake
is one we will not repeat.

That's the inscription on the stone under the memorial arch in Hiroshima. A man broke in and chipped away the word mistake (過ち) a few years ago, maintaining that Japan had nothing to regret. (The we is intended to refer to all of humanity; however, because the sentence in Japanese has no explicit subject, it can be interpreted as meaning that the Japanese themselves are apologizing for entering the war that brought on the bombing.) I'm not sure whether it's been reinscribed, though I assume it has been; the last time I visited was ages ago.

On 6 August Cathy Young linked to this post about the Hiroshima bombing. It's well written and worth reading. She also cites some comments appended to an Oliver Kamm piece in The Guardian defending the bombings. The first sentence of the first one appeals to the authority of Noam Chomsky; they go (further) downhill from there.

No one can deny that a lot of children and pregnant women and old grandfathers died in the atom bombings. But we are talking about action taken nearly four years into a declared war that had engulfed a good deal of the planet and had already claimed millions of innocent lives. The time for peace, love, and understanding would come, but the first order of business was to demonstrate with finality that there was no point in continuing to fight. And the only reliable way to do that was to send a clear message: We can destroy your land and people utterly if you force us to. No peaceable people wants to run about sending such a message except under extreme circumstances. The Pacific War was an extreme circumstance. Taking the position that it was the Americans (and British and Australians and Canadians) who were demonstrating contempt for individual human lives—-vis-à-vis the early-Showa Japanese, no less--is so morally bankrupt as to defy comprehension. That we all fervently hope that the atom bombings never have to be repeated does not, sadly, make Hiroshima and Nagasaki a mistake.

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

Posted by Sean on 2007-08-08 22:45:15

| 5 Comments

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. I should have old permalinks redirected shortly, but for now all the old posts are at least imported. You can search for a key phrase below if you'd like to hunt one down.

Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: japan

ドイツ人の感性は、日本人と似ている

It's already 6 August in Japan; that makes it the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. One Japanese man thinks the Germans are insufficiently aware of how awful the U.S. was to Japan at the end of the war. No, really:

Before the anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, Japanese former president of a company, now residing in Hamburg, Shigemi Kawakatsu (79) completed the manuscript of a book that includes the German translation of his friends' accounts of their experience of the bombing and a compilation of the bombing victims' drawings. The book is called The Hell of Atomic Bombing: Sketches of Hell by Those Who Are Living Proof of the Hiroshima A-Bombing; Tracing the Fates of the Bombing Victims (A4; 200 pp).

...

"I want to sear the hell of the atomic bombings into the reader's vision," [Kawakatsu said, explaining why] he incorporated approximately two hundred drawings of the bombing made by citizens and preserved in the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. The poet Sankichi Tooge's piece about the bombing is also included. Kawakatsu said, "The sensitivities of the Germans are similar to those of the Japanese. They are sure to understand the cruelty of the bombing."

Kawakatsu was motivated by a close friend, a bombing survivor who didn't write about his experiences until a few years ago:

Kawakatsu put himself into [his friend] Okada's place, translating how the black ran fell on him as he fled from the violent fires, how he saw people drifting around like ghosts crying out, "Water...water," and how he collapsed from exhaustion and slept among charred corpses.

The accounts of the atomic bombings are, indeed, horrific; but I fail to be convinced that the lesson to be drawn from them is that the Germans and Japanese should feel a heightened sense of kinship over their shared suffering. In this context, a sentence like "The sensitivities of the Germans are similar to those of the Japanese" strikes me as chilling rather than touching. No one expects Japan (or Germany) to spend the rest of civilized eternity groveling for forgiveness because of the war; but it does seem reasonable to expect it not to strike a flat, uncomplicated victim pose. Kawakatsu is not some kind of official spokesperson for Japan--I realize that--but his attitude is, in many ways, representative. How often do you hear Japanese people who undertake war-related documentary projects of this magnitude publicly expressing the hope that Unit 731 or the Nanking Massacre will never be repeated?

Added on 11 August: Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse posted yesterday at Pajamas Media:

The stories of survivors are harrowing — flames everywhere, people walking by whose flesh had been ripped off their bodies by heat and the blast, the inability to find loved ones. All the ghastliness of Dante’s Hell and a Gothic horror novel rolled into one. We pity them and ache for what they went through that horrible day.

But once –just once– I would like to hear the horror stories of the men and women of Pearl Harbor as counterpoint to the suffering of the Japanese and a reminder of who started the war and how they did it. I want to hear from those who can tell equally horrific tales of death and destruction. How Japanese aircraft strafed our men with machine gun fire while they were swimming for their lives through flaming oil spills, the result of a surprise attack against a nation with whom they were at peace. Or how the hundreds of men trapped in the USS Arizona slowly suffocated over 10 days as divers frantically tried to cut through the superstructure and rescue their comrades.

Perhaps we might even ask surviving POWs to bear witness to their ordeal in Japanese prison camps — surely as brutal, inhuman, and gruesome an atrocity as has ever been inflicted on enemy soldiers.

While we’re at it, I am sure there are thousands of witnesses who would want to testify about how the Japanese army raped its way across Asia. This little discussed aspect of the war is a non-event for the most part in Japanese histories. But the millions of women who suffered unspeakable mistreatment by the Japanese army deserve a hearing whenever the tragedy of Hiroshima is remembered.

Yes, no more Hiroshimas. But to take the atomic bombing of Japan totally out of context and use it to highlight one nation or one city’s suffering is morally offensive. The war with Japan, with its racial overtones on both sides as well as the undeniable cruelty and barbarity by the Japanese military, should have been ended the second it was possible to do so. Anything less makes the moral arguments surrounding the use of the atomic bomb an exercise in sophistry.

I already linked Moran's piece on another post, but because a lot of the people who land here come through searches about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or the Tokyo firebombings, I think it's important to have it available here, too.

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

Posted by Sean on 2008-08-05 15:07:05

| 0 Comments

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. I should have old permalinks redirected shortly, but for now all the old posts are at least imported. You can search for a key phrase below if you'd like to hunt one down.

Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: japan

核なき世界

My, reporters can be uncritical. The Asahi reports that this year, the mayor of Nagasaki will cite the opinions of prominent Americans in calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons:

In calling for peace at the memorial ceremony, Taue will discuss proposals by Kissinger and three other key U.S. figures who, concerned by nuclear proliferation, have done an about-turn and called for the abolition of the (world's) "deadliest weapons."

"In the United States, the largest nuclear power, those who formerly led nuclear policies are speaking out (against such weapons)," Taue says. "I have decided to take it up so I can more strongly appeal to the United States for what Nagasaki has long sought."

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world's only cities to experience atomic bombing, are trying to press the nuclear powers more aggressively for action to eliminate their arsenals.

Okay, fine. But then there's this:

The Bush administration has refused to ratify the CTBT.

But the two men vying to replace him have both made clear they have different goals.

"We'll make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy," Democratic Sen. Barack Obama said July 16.

Earlier on May 27, Republican Sen. John McCain said former President Ronald Reagan's dream of seeing nuclear weapons banished from the Earth "is my dream, too."

You remember Ronald Reagan, right? He helped hasten the collapse of the U.S.S.R. by dramatically cutting back the U.S. defense program.

I mean, yeah, sure, a world without nuclear weapons was Reagan's dream. I'm sure it's McCain's. It's mine, too. We all have plenty of dreams. But reality is where we live, and the McCain speech referred to by the Asahi reporters does not indicate that the mayors can expect much from him:

Our highest priority must be to reduce the danger that nuclear weapons will ever be used. Such weapons, while still important to deter an attack with weapons of mass destruction against us and our allies, represent the most abhorrent and indiscriminate form of warfare known to man. We do, quite literally, possess the means to destroy all of mankind. We must seek to do all we can to ensure that nuclear weapons will never again be used.

While working closely with allies who rely on our nuclear umbrella for their security, I would ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff to engage in a comprehensive review of all aspects of our nuclear strategy and policy. I would keep an open mind on all responsible proposals. At the same time, we must continue to deploy a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent, robust missile defenses and superior conventional forces that are capable of defending the United States and our allies. But I will seek to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal to the lowest number possible consistent with our security requirements and global commitments. Today we deploy thousands of nuclear warheads. It is my hope to move as rapidly as possible to a significantly smaller force.

I'm sure Obama recognizes this, too, BTW--I'm just not focusing on him because no one tried to demonstrate that he was a nuclear abolitionist by comparing him with Ronald Reagan. Sheesh.

The fact is that nuclear weapons now exist, and we need to maintain them as one of our options in case we again encounter an enemy that's like, well, the Japanese Empire.

Yes, Japan knew that it could no longer win the war by August; but it had flouted the Potsdam Declaration and continued to figure that, if it held out, it would be allowed to retain some of the territories it occupied (and perhaps avoid being occupied itself). Who knows how many more Allied personnel would have died if it had come down to a ground invasion? Japan is now a peaceable society; back then it was not.

The anniversaries are a good opportunity to think about the unprecedented destruction the bombings caused and the agonizing ethical and moral decisions that led up to them. Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered horribly--but that doesn't make Japan the victim in the war; nor does it make complete nuclear disarmament practicable.

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

Posted by Sean on 2008-08-07 22:37:18

| 0 Comments

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. I should have old permalinks redirected shortly, but for now all the old posts are at least imported. You can search for a key phrase below if you'd like to hunt one down.

Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: japan

滅び

9 August is now over in Japan; mayor of Nagasaki Tomihisa Taue gave the expected speech on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing:

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Dr. Takashi Nagai, a physician who dedicated himself to caring for victims of the bombing. Nagasaki mayor Tomihisa Taue cited Nagai's words in his peace address: "In war there is neither victory nor defeat. What there is is only destruction." He also addressed the world: "Without the abolition of nuclear weapons, there is no future for humankind." As he did last year, he sought from the Japanese government leadership toward the abolition of nuclear weapons and the codification in law of the three principles of non-nuclearization.

The three principles are that Japan will not (1) possess, (2) create, or (3) import nuclear armaments.

I know I harp on this every year, but the fact--in this case as in so many others--is that suffering does not necessarily confer wisdom. The image of Japanese people as innocent burn victims and saintly doctors running about trying to alleviate suffering is not inaccurate in and of itself, but it does lack context. By the time of the Nagasaki bombing, the Japanese Empire had executed its plan of overrunning as much of East and Southeast Asia as it could get its hands on, figuring that if and when it lost the war, it could expect to bargain to retain at least some of its occupied territories. It rejected the Potsdam Declaration, even when it was clear that it could not possibly win the Pacific War. It tried to see whether it could leverage itself a more advantageous deal by approaching Moscow. It balked at surrendering even after the Hiroshima bombing. The suicidal belligerence of the Japanese in combat was well known, as was their egregious treatment of conquered peoples and prisoners of war, so a ground invasion promised to expend even more men and resources on a war that the Japanese knew they had already lost. Japan in 1945 was an extremely tenacious enemy that warranted an extreme response; that it is now peaceably integrated into the world economy as an industrial and consumer powerhouse does not change that.

Added on 11 August: Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse posted yesterday at Pajamas Media:

The stories of survivors are harrowing — flames everywhere, people walking by whose flesh had been ripped off their bodies by heat and the blast, the inability to find loved ones. All the ghastliness of Dante’s Hell and a Gothic horror novel rolled into one. We pity them and ache for what they went through that horrible day.

But once –just once– I would like to hear the horror stories of the men and women of Pearl Harbor as counterpoint to the suffering of the Japanese and a reminder of who started the war and how they did it. I want to hear from those who can tell equally horrific tales of death and destruction. How Japanese aircraft strafed our men with machine gun fire while they were swimming for their lives through flaming oil spills, the result of a surprise attack against a nation with whom they were at peace. Or how the hundreds of men trapped in the USS Arizona slowly suffocated over 10 days as divers frantically tried to cut through the superstructure and rescue their comrades.

Perhaps we might even ask surviving POWs to bear witness to their ordeal in Japanese prison camps — surely as brutal, inhuman, and gruesome an atrocity as has ever been inflicted on enemy soldiers.

While we’re at it, I am sure there are thousands of witnesses who would want to testify about how the Japanese army raped its way across Asia. This little discussed aspect of the war is a non-event for the most part in Japanese histories. But the millions of women who suffered unspeakable mistreatment by the Japanese army deserve a hearing whenever the tragedy of Hiroshima is remembered.

Yes, no more Hiroshimas. But to take the atomic bombing of Japan totally out of context and use it to highlight one nation or one city’s suffering is morally offensive. The war with Japan, with its racial overtones on both sides as well as the undeniable cruelty and barbarity by the Japanese military, should have been ended the second it was possible to do so. Anything less makes the moral arguments surrounding the use of the atomic bomb an exercise in sophistry.

Yes. He also has much more background about the decision to use the atom bombs.

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

Posted by Sean on 2008-08-09 13:10:32

| 2 Comments

Not Found

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here. I should have old permalinks redirected shortly, but for now all the old posts are at least imported. You can search for a key phrase below if you'd like to hunt one down.

Trackbacks >>>>>>> Categories: japan

作戦

You've already been told to watch this, haven't you? I think Jon Stewart's often very funny, but on this particular topic, what Bill Whittle says in response to his statements--which are not only not funny but positively monstrous--cannot be repeated enough. Note that, unless I missed it, he was able to make his case without even mentioning Unit 731 or anything else about the kempeitai, either. He also doesn't mention, regarding the charge that America was just trying to show the Soviet Union who's boss, that it was Japan that had decided it was a good idea to start playing the Soviets off the United States in the first place. (I'm not saying his argument is therefore flawed, only that he hasn't exhausted the material he could have used to support it.)

I adore Japan. I happily took a degree in Japanese literature, and I loved every minute of the eleven years I lived in Tokyo; while I'm very happy to be home, there are many things I miss about it. I work in an all-Japanese office (except for me, obviously). I'm glad we're strategic and military partners now.

But now is not then. War with an implacable enemy requires tough choices, and I'm glad our grandfathers made saving their own people the top priority.

Added later: Whittle also has a blog post with quite a few good comments, including one by Connie du Toit that recommends an episode from the documentary The World at War, which you may remember from when it was broadcast on television.

All Related Posts (on one page) | Some Related Posts:

Posted by Sean on 2009-05-03 17:48:22

| 0 Comments