BY DOUG JENNESS
HIROSHIMA-"Our officers said we shouldn't go to
Hiroshima for the ceremonies on August 6," a young U.S.
marine told us. "They said people wouldn't like it and it
might cause problems."
He was traveling with his Japanese wife and new-born baby on the train from Hiroshima to Osaka, where they were going to get a flight to Detroit to see his parents. His father is an auto worker there. Three of us from the Socialist Workers Party delegation to the 50th anniversary activities in Hiroshima were also headed for the Osaka airport.
"Even if you wore civilian clothes?" Mark Friedman from Los Angeles asked him.
"It didn't make any difference," the young man replied.
We were reminded of an earlier conversation with the taxi driver who took us to the Peace Memorial Park for the main ceremonies marking the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
After asking where we were from, the driver said, "I'm glad you've come. It's good that people from your country come here." He added, however, that he thought the annual activities in his city had become too much of a symbolic thing that was being used to attract more tourists.
At the main event, attended by 60,000 people, hundreds came from many countries, including the United States. Some had attended the week of conferences leading up to the ceremony. They came to learn and to help shine an international spotlight on the horrible deed that was done there 50 years ago.
The attempt by the U.S. military brass to discourage the young marine and his family from participating is part of the long history of Washington's efforts to prevent people from learning the truth about the atom bomb atrocity. During the U.S. military occupation of Japan, which ended in 1952, U.S. officials censored Japanese news reports and scientific publications carrying information about the A- bomb attacks.
Until 1960 the U.S. government withheld the release of photographs documenting the damage resulting from the atomic bombings. Christian Herter, then secretary of state, wrote to John McCone, director of the Atomic Energy Commission, that his department had "serious reservations about the release of these photographs because we have been concerned over the political impact in Japan particularly, and because of our reluctance to present the Communists with a propaganda weapon they would use against us in all parts of the world."
Mass murder of civilians
What U.S. officials couldn't cover up about the
bombings, they lied about. One of the most flagrant lies
was President Harry Truman's statement on Aug. 9, 1945, the
day the plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. "The world
will note," he said, "that the first atomic bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we
wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible,
the killing of civilians."
Although there was a military base in Hiroshima, most of the casualties were civilians. According to a report at one of the conferences we participated in, 65 percent of the casualties were children, women, and elderly. The true figure was even higher, as many of the men were civilians. One after another, survivors of the bombings told us the same story. So did the exhibits at the Peace Memorial Museum that we visited.
The horrible truth is that this was the intent in dropping the A-bombs, as it had been in unleashing thousands of tons of firebombs on nearly every other city of Japan. David Kruidenier, retired head of Cowles Media Co., the Des Moines-based owner of a number of Midwest newspapers and TV stations, was a navigator flying B-29 bombing raids in Japan in 1945. In an opinion piece in the August 9 Minneapolis Star-Tribune, he confirmed, "We had been firebombing the largest cities in order to kill the maximum number of civilians, and Hiroshima was the largest untouched available city remaining."
The aim of those dropping the A-bombs was to ignite a number of fires. As the heated air rose it drew in more air, which created gale force winds that linked the fires together, killing by incredible heat, asphyxiation, and the collapse of buildings. This effect accounted for the biggest share of casualties. With one plane carrying one A- bomb, U.S. air force officials had accomplished what had previously taken hundreds of planes and thousands of bombs. Modern nuclear weapons are even more lethal. The H-bomb tested in Bikini in 1954 was 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
On the airplane flight to Japan several of us read an article in the July 31 New Yorker by Murray Sayle, describing in detail how the U.S. and British military pioneered firebombing raids. They first targeted the civilian population of Hamburg, Germany, in 1943, and later Dresden in February 1945. On the evening of March 9-10, 1945, some 300 U.S. B-29s firebombed Tokyo, killing as many people and causing more damage than in Hiroshima. By the summer of 1945, of Japan's 66 largest cities, 59 had been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead and 20 million were homeless.
Getting out the truth about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the other crimes committed by the U.S. military during World War II helps expose the true, hideous face of capitalism. And not just the face of militarist and fascist regimes of capitalism, but of liberal democratic capitalism carrying out mass murder as a tool of foreign policy.
Growing debate in Japan
The debate that has opened up in the United States over
the atomic bombings 50 years ago - a discussion fueled by
the Smithsonian's caving in to rightist pressure to drop
its exhibit on the bombing attacks - is being followed
closely in Japan. It coincides with a deepening debate
there over the savagery of that government's military and
colonial policies in the 1930s and 1940s.
Several government ministers have been forced to resign because they publicly refused to hold the Japanese government responsible for a series of atrocities. Among these crimes are forcing Koreans to work as virtual slave laborers in Japanese factories and mines; kidnapping Korean and Chinese women to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers; the massacre and rape of 200,000 Chinese civilians in Nanking in 1937; the massacre of tens of thousands of Filipino civilians when defeated Japanese troops withdrew from Manila in 1945; the grotesque use of Chinese and Koreans as guinea pigs for medical experiments; and the cruel treatment of prisoners of war, including the infamous Bataan march.
A new wing was added to the Hiroshima Peace Museum last year that takes steps toward describing the evolution of Japanese military and colonial policies. But the pressure to come to grips with past policies is moving so fast that we noticed one exhibit had been recently updated with a temporary label giving some details of the Nanking massacre.
On August 15, the 50th anniversary of the Japanese government's surrender, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, with the approval of his cabinet, stated that Japan had followed "a mistaken national policy, advanced along the road to war, only to ensure the Japanese people in a fateful crisis, and through its colonial rule and invasion caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations." This is the strongest criticism to date by a top government official of the wartime military regime and it will accelerate the current debate.
Right-wing protesters immediately denounced the prime minister, according to an Associated Press report. From loudspeakers atop a sound truck in Tokyo, one protester bellowed, "If Murayama and other politicians want to apologize, let them slit their bellies and apologize!" We had seen similar right-wing sound trucks, festooned with Japanese flags, in the streets of Hiroshima on August 5 blaring the same type of message.
Many participants in the peace conferences leading up to the August 6 and 9 ceremonies believe a much more thorough reckoning with the past needs to be made and more affirmative action is needed to compensate the victims of the military regime's bestial actions.
In a final declaration the 1995 World Conference Against A-and H-Bombs also criticized the Japanese government for refusing "to denounce the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" by Washington and instead emphasizing that "Japan is the `only A-bombed country.' " Tokyo, the statement added, acts "as a loyal partner in U.S. nuclear policies."
An exhibit in the Peace Museum presents the facts about the 94 U.S. military sites in Japan, where 63,000 U.S. troops are stationed. It describes the various ways the Japanese military works hand-in-glove with the U.S. military, including through its Command, Control, Communication, Intelligence force, which is designed to help manage a nuclear war. At the same time there are capitalist forces in Japan that are pushing for the military to have more independence from Washington.
The unfolding debate in Japan, as in the United States, is not primarily about history, but connected with the crisis of capitalism that is driving the wealthy rulers in Japan and the United States into more fierce competition and toward the need to use military might to enforce their policies. The decision taken several years ago by the Japanese government to permit its soldiers to participate in UN armed "peacekeeping" forces in Cambodia reflected this pressure and has served to intensify the debate in Japan.