What can a suitcase, found in a pile of garbage, tell us about Hiroshima and its legacy?
The suitcase was found eleven years ago by a man who was out taking his dog for a walk in Watertown, Massachusetts. Inside were 700 photographs of post-bomb Hiroshima. The images depict an annihilated city: twisted girders, imploded buildings, miles of rubble. This was the original Ground Zero, a term first used in 1946 to describe the epicenter of the blast.
1946 was also the same year that the writer Mary McCarthy called our understanding of Hiroshima "a kind of hole in human history."
Since then, accounts by survivors of the bombing have been published, documentaries have been produced and historians have fiercely debated the decision of why the bomb was dropped in the first place.
And yet the photographic record of what took place in Hiroshima has long been absent. Our lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb's effect has helped us to deny its devastating impact.
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Our culture is saturated with images of catastrophe. Think of the stream of news photographs and cell phone images of the tsunami in Japan or any number of forest fires, tornados and floods that have ripped across the global landscape. We have become accustomed, practically inured, to images of disaster. We expect to see the human cost as well - images of victims lamenting lost relatives, property and homes.
The same applies to war. Since the invention of the camera in 1839, photography has marched in lockstep with death. Starting with Alexander Gardner and Matthew Brady's images of Gettysburg, Robert Capa's photographs from the Spanish Civil War (made more potent by the camera having been freed from the tripod), through to photographs of Auschwitz after it was liberated, a series of powerful images come to mind: haunting pictures of war's destructive impact.
But think of Hiroshima and what comes to mind is the mushroom cloud. Terrifying in its way, with its bulbous head and towering stem, it is nonetheless an abstract image freed of human agency and human consequence.
That we have seen only a few images of post-bomb Hiroshima is not an accident. On September 18, 1945, just over a month after Japan surrendered, the US government imposed a strict code of censorship on the new defeated nation. They confiscated or suppressed the handful of still images taken by Japanese photographers and banned all future photography.
There was one exception. The day after Emperor Hirohito announced defeat on August 14th, President Truman commissioned the United States Strategic Bombing Survey for the Pacific Theater of War. Its mission was to "measure precisely" the impact the bomb had on the infrastructure of the city, "to put calipers on it, instead of describing it in emotive terms" as Paul Nitze, the Vice Chairman and de facto author of the Survey would later write.
A crucial, and classified, aspect of the mission was to photograph the bomb damage. Members of the Survey fanned out across the city, taking photographs that could be used to trace the bomb path and evaluate its impact on homes, hospitals and public institutions. Rarely do people appear in these images. The photographs document the shattered bones of the city.
They served a second purpose as well. An architect, Robert L. Corsbie, who was a member of the Survey, kept a set of the prints. He later worked for the Atomic Energy Commission and designed one of the first atomic bomb shelters, and in the 1950s he was involved in nuclear testing. He analyzed the impact that nuclear weapons could have on the infrastructure of our country.
He died in a house fire in 1967. The house, according to a fireman who was on the scene, "was built like a fortress" and was practically impenetrable. Yet the photographs survived, only to be accidentally abandoned on a street corner and rescued years later. They are now on view to the public.
The Strategic Bombing Survey, declassified in 1951 posed a crucial question: "What if the target for the bomb had been an American city?" The victory over Japan sowed the seeds for a new anxiety. As we prepare for the tenth anniversary of the second Ground Zero it is a fear that haunts us to this very day.
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The United States could have demonstrated the power of this monstrous bomb to the Japanese, without killing a single person.
As to remarks here that there's an "aesthetic beauty" to the images, I cannot understand that at all. The images make me sick to my stomach, and sick at heart.
Rather than get all caught up in who was worse to whom, and why this country was justified in doing what it did to innocent civilians, maybe people could read up on it some more:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/index.htm
It was much more strategic and political, and that should be remembered.
Drop the bombs. If my dad died in some rice paddy in Japan, well, like many of you with dad's and grandfathers who would have been in the invasion forces, we wouldn't be here today.
They institutionalized inhuman war crimes via medical experimentation and vivisection, developing WMDs involving bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases, as well as phosgene and chlorine gases. (Google Unit 731 sometime)
They subjected prisoners of war to slave labor, and torture.
When beaten, they refused to surrender. Upon witnessing the devastation of one atomic bomb, they continued to arrogantly refuse to surrender.
Those of us who had loved ones who were facing the dismal prospect of invading a country in which millions more casualties were being predicted are thankful for the courage of President Truman to make the decision to end the war quickly.
The bombings to end the war with Japan resulted in substantially fewer civilian deaths and dramatically fewer allied deaths than the allied bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Pforzheim and other cities, where estimates of civilians killed (mostly incinerated by incendiary bombs) ranged upwards of 500,000.
Kurt Vonnegut, who witnessed the firebombing of Dresden from the ground stated: "You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
The Axis Powers in WWII murdered or otherwise killed an estimated 30 million civilians. Another 25 million soldiers died fighting the war. I'm sure it's easy for you to play Monday Morning Quarterback 66 years after the fact, but I'm very glad that after President Truman's grave warnings to the Japanese were arrogantly ignored, he stopped the slaughter as quickly and with as few American casualties as he did.
At that time, in China, you had the KMT, the Communists, various Chinese warlords, the Japanese and just regular everyday bandits, who were fighting each other. While I'm certain the IJA killed many Chinese in the course of the war, there were just as many, if not more, that were killed by the other factions.
There were no countries of Vietnam or Cambodia at that time. They were part of the French colony of Indochina. The French, as well as the Americans also slaughtered millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians before and after WWII. The Philipines were an American colony as well. How many Filipinos were slaughtered by the Americans during the course of their occupation? Malaysia and Burma as well as India were all British colonies at that time, too. How many of those people were slaughtered by the British before and after WWII when they controlled those countries? Indonesia was a Dutch colony. How many Indonesians were slaughtered by the Dutch before and after WWII, during their occupation? Japan certainly did not have a monoploy on war, conquest and killing. Japan was no better and absolutely no worse than Europeans and Americans in this respect.
As for Japan "arrogantly" refusing to surrender. Why did America "arrogantly" refuse to surrender after their losses at Pearl Harbor, the Philipines, Wake and Guam?
The Japanese were an imperialistic nation and over ran a number of other countries and took control of those countries by force. Japan bombed the US Naval base in Hawaii...an unprovoked attack. They tortured many of the US soldiers that they captured and inflicted unspeakable horrors on tens of thousands of people in the Japanese concentration / prisoner of war camps, and in the countries that they occupied. They would not surrender, and the A-Bombs finally made them realize that the only choice that they had was to surrender or see their entire island wiped off the face of the earth. Dropping the bomp saved thousands of American, and Japanese lives.
Those people who suggest that the US apologize to Japan need to open a history book on the subject and read. It would do them a hell of a lot more good than watching the latest reality show that does nothing more than dumb down the intellegence of the US population.
I'm sure that these people will also want the US to apologize to the talaban for killing Osama Bin Ladin.
Robert Freer
Born of destruction and continuing to destroy this is atomic power. To me, America changed when it used that destructive bomb. It became the pawn of big business and its war machine.
50th Anniversary of the Bomb
ii
Visited Hiroshima in ’95.
Met cousin Isao
who fifty years earlier
claimed our packages that
saved his family
and three sisters who
looked like mom.
Chocolates and coffee traded
for rice and medicine,
medicine for cousin Akiko,
who lay trapped for days
under the rubble of the family home
1,000 meters from
ground zero.
The fallen house saved her
from becoming, as some people became,
a white outline burned onto a black cement wall—
or buried under hot ash
in mid-sentence like residents of Pompeii.
140,000 souls left this existence—
women on their way to work,
uniformed school children singing,
elderly men and women preparing morning tea—
became ghosts wandering
the purgatory of an atomic desert
before their next transformation.
Survivors became living remnants,
bedraggled, soaked by radioactive rain,
guinea pigs of the first man-made mass destruction.
Akiko, a fifteen year old,
survived the blast,
heat and radiation.
Scars, like burnt islands
on a topographic map, singed
into her body, never to be revealed.
Nothing compared to
her fear of contaminating
the family line and passing
deformities to future generations.
Fear of never finding a husband—
someone to marry a woman such as she.
Lawrence Matsuda
We should all grieve.
Have you researched the origins of the war? Is it possible you and others make decisions based on quick and faulty access to media ideas?
Do you realize not ONE citizen of Iraq manned the 911 planes? Research that.
If you are to be a citizen of the world and truly want peace you must search for real truth.
Truth will set you free.