Hiroshima, Nagasaki… Slough! Think now!
Hiroshima, Nagasaki… Maidenhead! You’ll soon be dead!
Hiroshima, Nagasaki… Chiswick! Abandon nuclear physics!
When I was a little kid I used to worry myself to sleep at night over the possibility that I (and to a lesser extent, everyone else in the world) might soon be obliterated by a nuclear war. At the age of eleven following in my father’s footsteps (who chanted the above in the 1960s as the Aldermaston ban-the-bomb marches approached London) I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We organised screenings of Peter Watkins’ The War Game in community halls, and I would take the local CND group’s newsletter round Edmonton to the members who paid their subs but didn’t come to meetings (I took it very seriously, and I remember being slightly scandalised by one student who excused the state of her living room by saying it looked as if it had been hit by a bomb). In the early 1980s with the renewal of the US-USSR arms race (its effect within ten years of bankrupting the state capitalist economies and completely reconfiguring Europe as yet unpredictable) achieving nuclear disarmament seemed the most urgent thing there was.
In our propaganda and discussions we talked about Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the sun unleashed, the instant devastation, the thousands dying, horrific injuries and long-term aftereffects of radiation on the bodies of the survivors; grainy black-and white photocopied images of third-degree burns and keloid scarring. Hiroshima was where it had happened, and we had to make sure it never happened again. Then, the threat of the “nuclear holocaust” almost eclipsed for us the history and memory of its reference point the European holocaust (also seen in a new way after 1989). Hiroshima, the event and idea, stood for a lot.
And in Hiroshima the place, you can stand (on a nondescript street next to a nondescript hotel) underneath the very point at which the crew of the Enola Gay, for the first time in history, dropped an atomic bomb on other human beings.
The site of the devastation itself, at the northern edge of an island splitting a river into two as it forms the delta which made Hiroshima an ideal port and barrack town even before the military state of the early twentieth century, is now the Peace Memorial Park, containing a memorial cenotaph, a Flame of Peace, a mound where the bodies and ashes of thousands of the dead were collected and buried, and a large two-winged museum dedicated to the history of the attack. Most striking, though, is the Hiroshima Industrial Promotion Hall, built in 1915 by a Czech architect, the other side of the river, and close to the hypocentre of the explosion. Steel-reinforced concrete buildings were the only structures to survive the initial blast: wooden residential and commercial buildings were reduced to ashes in seconds. The Hall, now known as the A-bomb dome, still stands, its windows and frames blown out and its outer walls buckled, but the steel framework of its dome intact. Today the building is wreathed in scafolding and sheets as the city carries out a triannual ‘soundness inspection’ — Hiroshima’s authorities have decreed that this building will stand ‘for ever’ as a reminder of the destruction and a call to peace.
There are many other smaller memorials in the park. One commemorates the Korean victims of the bomb: 10% of the 140,000 or so victims of the attack were Korean forced labourers. In one of the videotaped survivors’ testimonies inside the museum, a Korean man (not a forced labourer) recalls seing the bomb from the port and then remembering how after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 the call went out to kill Koreans, and having survived the bomb he feared for his life again. Around the Children’s Peace Monument, visitors bring tens of thousands of folded paper cranes strung together in huge multicoloured garlands and even woven into murals, a ritual started by 12-year old Sasaki Sadako in 1955, who attempted to fold 1,000 cranes to achieve her wish to survive the leukaemia that killed her.
The conversion from a historic barracks town and military port to ‘city of peace’ is hard to understand in the abstract, and you might wonder if Hiroshima’s power and role have diminished since the end of the cold war. The ultimate (so far) nuclear atrocity still caused fewer deaths than either the Rape of Nanking or the firebombing of Tokyo. It’s the tiny, almost futile things that suggest it still matters. Every single time a country tests a nuclear weapon, the mayor of Hiroshima sends the representatives of that country a telegram, telling them to stop it. The most recent is on display in the museum, dated 2004 and addressed to Vladimir Putin.
