Seeks to Remember--and Forget : Nagasaki: Reluctant Actor in Role of Atomic Martyr

Cicadas hum furiously from the branches of a grove of cherry trees in a small, simple park that marks The Spot. About 1,800 feet overhead, on a hot morning like this one 44 summers ago, history visited Nagasaki with a horrific flash and a boom.

The decades have passed, but Nagasaki still struggles to remember, to forget and to get on with life.

Hypocenter Park is characteristic of the city’s ambivalence about its past. A casual visitor might stroll the length of it without noticing a sleek, black monolith at Ground Zero, or see a nearby corner littered with an odd assortment of nuclear junk. Signs identify the debris: a warped water tank from Keiho Middle School, a mangled I-beam from Mitsubishi Steel Works, a ruined wall from Urakami Catholic Cathedral.

The tale is familiar. Three days after the first atomic weapon was detonated over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped a second nuclear device, a 22-kiloton plutonium bomb irreverently named “Fat Man,” on Nagasaki, taking more than 70,000 lives and hastening Japan’s surrender in World War II.

But the story of the atomic legacy left to the city of Nagasaki is more difficult to grasp. Compared to Hiroshima, where twice as many people were killed, Nagasaki’s martyrdom is pensive and melancholy. Hiroshima has for years boldly promoted itself as an international peace capital, and in the process spawned what might be called “nuclear tourism,” drawing more than 100,000 foreign visitors each year to its sprawling, elaborate Peace Memorial Park and museum complex.

Nagasaki has followed suit, but somewhat reluctantly and on a smaller scale. Japan’s foremost Christian city, by dint of its association with Portuguese traders and Roman Catholic missionaries in the late 16th Century, it has been far less strident in its anti-nuclear appeal. People in this city like to cite the aphorism: “Hiroshima in anger, Nagasaki in prayer.”

Indeed, while Hiroshima is in the midst of a highly publicized campaign to raise $1.5 million in donations to repair and maintain its signature “atomic dome” ruins, Nagasaki is tearing down what remains of the scattered public school buildings that survived the blast. Ostensibly, this is for safety reasons, but many of the city’s 450,000 citizens would seemingly just as soon let go of the burden of history.

“Except for a few old people who survived it, nobody in Nagasaki really cares about the atomic bomb,” said Tokio Kankeko, 40, proprietor of a coffeehouse near the city’s Chinatown district. “People want to forget.”

Favors the Wrecking Ball

Hirotake Ejima, 47, a local salaried worker, said he considers the bomb a vital part of history but still favors the wrecking ball for the old school buildings identified with the bombing.

“There’s no denying what happened, but we should move forward with life,” Ejima said. “We’re all for peace, but if you cling to the past, it’s only going to deepen the wounds.”

For some, however, the wounds never will heal. Kazuko Nagase, 51, was 7 when she was stunned by a burst of yellow light and saw her wooden house come tumbling down on top of her. She escaped serious injury and was spared the searing burns that disfigured many hibakusha , or atomic bomb victims. But she has suffered from kidney ailments and other symptoms of radiation sickness. Acute exhaustion has made it impossible for her to work.

“Today’s fatigue carries through until tomorrow, no matter how well I sleep at night,” said Nagase, a tiny, stooped women with bow legs who for the last 14 years has lived in a special home for hibakusha run by an order of Catholic nuns. “I think of the atomic bomb every day. If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be living like this. I’ve been waiting more than 40 years to get back to normal again.”

Distressed Over Plans

Nagase is distressed that city officials are considering demolition of the elementary school she attended before the bombing, whose crumpled shell of reinforced concrete was repaired after the war and made serviceable.

“If they take it down now, we’ll lose an important thread,” Nagase said. “There won’t be anything to teach the children about the bomb. I hope they’ll keep it, at least until I die.”

Altogether, more than 300,000 people are believed to have lived through the conflagration and radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though thousands are dying each year. The survivors’ vivid accounts of death, chaos and panic dominate remembrances each August, when Japan goes through a ritual of re-examining the ghosts of World War II.

As the victims’ wounds are symbolically reopened, appeals for global disarmament are renewed. The country’s splintered--and extremely politicized--peace movement moves into high gear at this time every year, with rival conferences and incessant resolutions.

Complaints from Foreigners

Foreigners frequently complain, as they walk away from the pacifist speeches and the displays in the atomic bomb museums, that the Japanese seem to believe that they were the war’s primary victims.

Indeed, Nagasaki’s outspoken mayor, Hitoshi Motoshima, 67, advocates shifting the focus away from the “victim’s consciousness” that permeates the anti-nuclear movement here and instead asking what Japan did to invite catastrophe.

“The truth is that when the atomic bombs were dropped, the people of the world applauded--it was revenge against Japan’s brutal aggression,” Motoshima said. “The Nagasaki bomb has a lot of meanings, but one is that it all started at Pearl Harbor and ended right here.”

Motoshima, a Roman Catholic whose family is descended from Nagasaki’s centuries-old sect of “hidden Christians,” gained widespread notoriety last December by daring to say publicly--in a speech marking the anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor--that Emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for the war.

Shattered Mood

The statement brought Motoshima a series of death threats, but it also shattered a mood of restraint as Hirohito lay on his deathbed and underscored the fact that the Japanese seldom seriously debate the causes of World War II.

“The Japanese have a philosophy of neglect. We say, ‘Put a lid on something that stinks,’ ” Motoshima said in a recent interview. “So more than 40 years have gone by, and we’ve dealt with all this through nonverbal communication. It’s unspoken, and when it comes right down to it, the Japanese do not know what war is. Nobody knows what we did.”

People know what the Americans did, however. It is illustrated in graphic detail in the small museum run by the city near Nagasaki’s Hypocenter Park, and on a grander scale in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. In the Hiroshima museum, foreign visitors may listen to a recorded guided tour in which a sonorous, British-accented male voice explains that the bomb was a “dreadful, genocidal weapon.” Among the exhibits is a glass display case containing ghoulish wax figures of bomb victims, whose burnt skin is peeling off their hands and breasts.

Both cities, understandably, have special peace education programs in the schools to teach children about the horrors of nuclear war. But Fumio Yamashita, 23, a civil servant whose job it was to guide a visiting reporter through the Nagasaki A-bomb museum, conceded that he did not learn much about Japan’s own acts of aggression while in school.

Silence on Causes of War

“There really isn’t much talk about the war in peace education,” Yamashita said. “We didn’t hear anything about what caused the war.”

Right-wing elements in the national government, particularly in the Education Ministry, meanwhile, are pushing a revisionist version of history that has increasingly worked its way into the textbooks used in public schools. Among the revisionist theories gaining credence is that the United States forced Japan into war by cutting off its access to oil supplies.

At the same time, Japan’s nuclear phobia shows no signs of abating. A furor resulted in May with disclosures that an A-4E Skyhawk plane carrying a one-megaton hydrogen bomb rolled off the American aircraft carrier Ticonderoga off Okinawa in 1965. The plane and bomb were never recovered and are believed to have sunk--harmlessly--in waters 16,000 feet deep.

Because the Ticonderoga later made a port call at Yokosuka, near Tokyo, critics said the incident was solid evidence of a pattern in which the United States, then and since, has routinely introduced nuclear weapons into Japanese territory despite the “three non-nuclear principles” declared for Japan by former Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in 1968: not to produce, possess or store nuclear weapons.

Fresh Grist for Indignation

It has long been an open secret, confirmed publicly by former U.S. Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer, that American ships have carried nuclear weapons into Japanese ports without first consulting with Japanese authorities, as required under the U.S.-Japanese security pact. Still, the Ticonderoga incident provided grist for fresh indignation, perhaps in that it exposed a predilection for ostrich-like avoidance in Japan.

The government’s position has been that because it receives no advance consultation, it assumes that the United States is not introducing nuclear weapons to Japanese waters or violating the non-nuclear principles. The United States will neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons aboard ships.

Nagasaki’s mayor, Motoshima, advocates giving some sort of legal status to the “principles.”

“We can’t leave it vague forever,” Motoshima said. “The government has got to make efforts to clarify” how the protocols are in fact observed. “And once the true situation is clarified, we must have realistic discussions on what is acceptable.”

Mayor Takeshi Araki of Hiroshima would go a step further: Let the cities of the world take the initiative. Araki and Motoshima are currently co-hosting an international conference of “Mayors for Peace,” which coincides with the A-bomb anniversaries.

“It’s the cities and local governments that bear ultimate responsibility for the safety and welfare of their residents,” Araki said in an interview. “We can’t leave it up to nations anymore.”

But asked what concrete actions these cities might take to ensure peace, Araki was, in a word, vague.