Raising the Question of Disarmament, Again

Hiroshima, Japan -- Inside the building there is a soft shuffling sound amid the silence. People shuffle on the carpet as if entering a wake. In some sense, they are. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum commemorates the hundreds of thousands of people who died in the first manmade nuclear catastrophe. In some sense, it also mourns our loss of innocence as a species, when we learned we had the power to completely destroy ourselves.

The museum tour begins with footage of the mushroom cloud and a pastiche of facts. The first heat blast was 900 times hotter than the sun. Eighty thousand people died instantly when the U.S. Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" on Aug. 6, 1945. Approximately 200,000 people died by 1950 from injuries and radiation poisoning. Another 100,000 may have died from bomb-related causes since.

On Aug. 9, another U.S. plane dropped a larger bomb, "Fat Man," on Nagasaki. Because of the mountainous terrain, fewer people died: 70,000 by the end of the first year.

Burnt baby clothes. A warped metal lunch tin still filled with its incinerated contents. More gruesome mementoes: the hair that fell out, warped nails, keloided skin. One homemade wooden sandal, the only object that identified a dead girl. We visitors peered at each remnant behind glass, fragments of the lives that were lost.

I was sickened at the description of students burnt so badly that the skin on their arms slipped off and forward, hanging from their fingertips like loosened gloves. I finally started to cry when I saw the placard by a little rusted tricycle. One month shy of his fourth birthday, Shinichi Tetsutani was riding his tricycle in his front yard when the bomb hit. Burned beyond help, he spent the day in agony and died that night. Shinichi's father buried him in the backyard with the body of a girl he used to play with, and with his tricycle. Forty years later, the family re-buried the remains, and donated the rusted tricycle to the museum.

My mind flipped to an image of the Raggedy Ann doll found in the rubble of the World Trade Center, and then to the story of Juliana Valentine McCourt. The 4-year-old was flying with her mother to visit Disneyland on September 11. A family friend, also traveling from Boston, was supposed to meet them there. McCourt and her mother Ruth boarded United Airlines Flight 175, which hijackers steered into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Their friend Page Farley Hackel was on American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the north tower. When I cried for Shinichi I cried for Juliana and many other children who have died in conflicts they can't understand.

The people who filled the museum were mostly Japanese, from babies in their mothers' arms to an old man walking with two canes. I wondered if any were hibakusha, or A Bomb survivors. Would they want to see the vivid reminders of what they'd lived through? Among the many Westerners were crew-cut U.S. military men from local bases, solemnly absorbing what the endgame of war might mean.

Hiroshima's peace museum is filled with exhortations never to relive the "evil" of this day. From the Japanese perspective, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were evil. From the American perspective at that time, they were heroic military actions taken to end the war and further suffering.

Japanese citizens I spoke with during my trip were shocked that the Smithsonian Museum exhibited the Enola Gay on the 50th anniversary of the bombing. That exhibit became one of the most controversial in the museum's history. Veteran's groups objected to materials that they said made them look bent on vengeance. Because of their protests, the plane was exhibited with almost no historical material, and the director at the time resigned.

"The past isn't dead. It isn't even past," said William Faulkner. And even today, our country and Japan are reliving the legacies of World War II. We, as the victors, have largely retreated into the comfortable haze of laudatory war movies about the greatest generation. Japan not only lost the war, but its ability to occupy and control territories throughout Asia, particularly China and Korea. The rebuilding of post-war Japanese society has come with constant soul-searching about the place and meaning of the past, with some defiant neo-nationalists beginning to mix their opinions with the general remorse and regret for actions like the 1937 Nanjing Massacre.