Extremes

Nuclear war was invented 80 years ago today. It was tried again three days later. Perhaps unfortunately, it worked.

NHK, Japan’s equivalent to our PBS, makes much of the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As you would expect, it is unreservedly condemned.

Here, we make much of those bombings, too, thinking of them as miracles that saved maybe a million American lives that it is said would have been lost had the Allies invaded Japan.

Thing is, both sides are right, though advocates of neither side is willing to admit, never will be willing to admit, that the other side has a point, too. And they’re also both wrong.

Nor has anyone learned any lesson beyond the agreement that atomic bombs are very powerful and destructive. It’s not as if they’ve made war less likely. Ask around Ukraine.

My thought has always been that if you don’t want Hiroshima and Nagasaki, don’t do Pearl Harbor. I’m right, too, for all the good it does., which is none. Try appearing before a pro-Islamic demonstration and seeing how far “If you don’t want Gaza, don’t do October 7” gets you.

“For a while we’ll have everything our own way, stretching out in every direction like an octopus spreading its tentacles,” said Yamamoto Isoroku, the Japanese admiral who planned but did not want to attack Pearl Harbor. “But it will last for a year and a half at most.” Then Japan would begin to lose. Compare his prediction to the timeline of the war. He was right. It was Japan that got destroyed in the resulting war, ultimately through the invention of nuclear weapons but one way or another Japan would have lost.

It’s all still argued about, vigorously, sometimes viciously, always one-sidedly. Hiroshima was a militarily significant city, though whether that was the point of the bombing is debatable.

It stands to reason that, whether the aggressor is the one that got destroyed or not, it’s the destroyed losing side that holds the most vivid and bitter memories. Wars continue to be discussed among the winners by historians and military hobbyists and of course most personally by those who lost friends and family members. But they remain in the collective consciousness of those whose civilizations were destroyed. Japan has been rebuilt, but tell that to Japan, which was changed in definitive ways. Japan is now Tokyo and a few other cities, all connected by a declining country. I think that’s an effect of World War II. Learn about the small, once-thriving villages. It is to cry.

There were misinterpreted events. I think, toward the end of the war, beginning at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 with the kamikaze — “divine wind.” These were the opposite of the drones popular today. Close to 4,000 young Japanese men strapped themselves into airplanes, took off, and flew themselves and their planes into their targets. They did not want to do it. Their final letters tell us that. Yamamoto’s prediction was proved there (though there’s a case to be made that the end began earlier, that the tide turned at Midway in 1942, in which case he lived to learn of his prescience — his plane was shot down in April 1943).

When you are killing your own pilots and destroying your own airplanes, your actions can be seen as acts of desperation. But the Allies saw it as a sign that Japan was so bloodthirsty and vengeful that it would fight to the last person in the whole country. In reality, Japan was starving. (The link is to a cartoon movie, but the story is real — the author said that no live-action film could do it justice.)

We knew all this, or should have. But Japan denied it, for the greater glory of Hirohito, Emperor Showa. Japan lost 750,000 civilians in World War II, close to a quarter of them due to the two atomic bombs. Hirohito didn’t save face. We occupied Japan and were not always on our best behavior. For decades, motorcycle gangs and groups of other unruly youth in Japan have called themselves “Yankii.” Wonder where they got the name?

Having great affection of course for the United States but also for Japan, I spend more time than most thinking about the war I wonder if it might have made the point if we had, say, dropped the atomic bomb on one of the many uninhabited islands in the Seto Inland Sea. That seems like a good idea until I consider that Japan is an archipelago festooned with volcanoes, where incredible disasters are so common that one wonders why anyone would live there at all.

The great Kanto earthquake of 1923 and the fire that followed killed 140,000 people and destroyed much of Tokyo. The great east Japan earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 killed more than 20,000 people. (The most moving documentary I have ever seen was about its effect on one small town.) On January 1 last year, an earthquake hit the Noto peninsula, killing 500. Much will probably never be rebuilt. The list is long. Japan is accustomed to such things. That raises the question of whether a test bombing of some island would have been sufficient to draw the attention of Japan’s wartime leaders — whom, we thought, were perfectly willing to have every person in Japan die rather than have the emperor surrender. Yet within a week of the bombing of Nagasaki, Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender, which was formalized September 2, 1945. The question is whether something less might have nudged the country to quit fighting.

We invented nuclear war 80 years ago today, and we seem as countries to be glad to have nuclear weapons. Which is an abomination — but name a war that isn’t, nuclear or otherwise. We all the time talk of peace, but it is buried in meaningless diplomat words like “dialog.” We have organizations like the (thoroughly corrupt, in my estimation) United Nations, which burns through billions of dollars each year and accomplishes nothing.

We have doctrines like “Mutually Assured Destruction,” which makes sure that we’ll only think of nuking countries incapable of retaliation.

I could go on, but it would add nothing to what each of us in his heart of hearts already knows. It is said that those who do not know history are destined to repeat it — so we no longer teach history (and seldom ever did in any meaningful way to students at large), substituting teachers’ political philosophy instead. We go along with leaders who lie to us. That’s not true just here but elsewhere. Anyone who believes Trump cannot be surprised that there are those who believe Putin. That’s true in every country.

It is more useful to remember that we all face Judgment Day as individuals.

Instead of writing at length, I would recommend to you a book and three documentaries. And an anime.

The book is Hirosihma, by John Hersey. You can read it online here.

The documentaries are from NHK and you’ll want to have the Kleenex handy. The first is “Searching for the Standing Boy of Nagasaki,” about the most famous post-bombing picture, made by a U.S. Marine photographer (and shown above).

The second is “Holding on to Peace: Atomic-bomb Survivor’s Message.” I lack the skill to describe it adequately. Just watch it.

The third is “Nagasaki: 188 Memories of the Bomb.”

The anime, mentioned above, is “Grave of the Fireflies.” It is a true story. If you were to watch it twice, the second time you would begin weeping three minutes in, when you recognize the contents of the candy tin. If you have Netflix or Amazon Prime, you can watch it for free. It ought to be free to everyone, all the time. Everyone should watch it.

Then, remembering that you will ultimately answer for your decision, ask yourself what you would have done.

The answer isn’t as easy as they make it out to be, is it.