A Case of Selective Memory : Japan is right to mourn atom bomb victims, but U.S. motivation shouldn’t be distorted

In this 50th-anniversary year of the destruction of their cities by American atomic bombs, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have again challenged the military necessity of those attacks, with Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima describing them as a crime comparable to the Holocaust. The two raids, on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, produced more than 200,000 casualties, mostly civilians. (The Holocaust, since the comparison has been made, erased nearly 6 million lives.) That Japan continues to mourn these victims is proper. That most Japanese still know little about the years of aggression that led up to the bombings largely reflects an official policy of denial.

Japan and the United States today, as for many years past, enjoy close and essential if sometimes difficult ties. That relationship will survive the painful memories this anniversary year evokes. It will not, though, be well-served by continuing selective recall of the history of the war years and what immediately went before.

Japan’s centrally run schools have always shielded the public from many facts, including the most brutal, about the aggression and crimes against humanity that the country’s military-dominated regimes committed in the 1930s and early 1940s. Only in the last few years and mainly through unofficial sources has candid and welcome information about those years begun to appear. Only now, and partially, are Japanese beginning to have access to information that puts the war, and the calamities that befell Japan, in clearer perspective.

Commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the bloody battle of Iwo Jima has just ended. Observance of the even more costly battle of Okinawa will soon begin. The ferocity of those battles deepened the conviction of American leaders that the projected invasion of Japan proper would involve enormous casualties, Americans in the hundreds of thousands probably but Japanese--including civilians--in far greater numbers still. Information about the regime’s plans for defending the home islands that came to light after the war fully supported that assessment.

It was in this context that the decision to drop the atomic bombs was made. The bombings were not, as the mayors suggest, done to intimidate the Soviet Union or justify the cost of developing the weapons. They were done to shorten the war and limit its casualties. The results of the bombings, as all the world knows, were frightful. But the invasion that the bombings made avoidable would have been infinitely more destructive. The dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like all the war’s innocent victims, should be mourned. But respect for historical truth demands that the countless other lives that were spared because of the bombings must also be remembered.