//end of the world//
Fall 2013
An American Jew Goes to Hiroshima
Joshua Fattal
A small flame was burning on a large white marble slab, rising out of the water, in the middle of the silent lake. Behind the lake stood a round stone structure, with a plaque that read: “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.” This stone structure was hollow, constructed in such a way that the viewer, reading the plaque, sees the city buildings standing in the distance. One rusty metal skullcap of a building, set in the center of the field of vision, is different than all the others: this is the Genbaku Dome, the only lasting structure to survive the hypocenter of the atomic blast on August 6th, 1945.
Hiroshima today is a bustling city with a dark and sad history. The completely reconstructed city, featuring a modern metro-rail that cuts through the streets, hotels, and shopping centers, was little more than rubble sixty-eight years ago. On that fateful and bright summer morning the 393rd Bombardment Squadron B-29 Enola Gay, armed with a fifteen-kiloton atomic bomb codenamed Little Boy, flew 32,000 feet over Hiroshima. The city was selected as a target because it served as home to the Japanese Second Army. The bomb was released at 8:15 AM, devastating the city—one square mile was obliterated by the blast, and fires spread across 4.4 square miles. Between seventy and eighty thousand people, about 30% of the city’s population, were killed by the blast and firestorm.
The area surrounding the dome, once the downtown center of the city before it had been left barren by the blast, was developed into a memorial park in the post-war years of 1950-1964. The Japanese decided to use the spot not only to commemorate the bombing of this particular city, but also to serve as a site to memorialize nuclear horrors and to advocate for world peace. The name of the project, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, transcends this specific bombing. And the park was put together well: the wide expanses of green grass, still lakes, marble memorials, and the simplistically designed museum building draw the visitor into this world of reflection. The park is also a widely visited site in Japan. On the day I was there hundreds of schoolchildren were visiting the memorial on class trips, as the school system attempted to instill in the younger generation an appreciation of history and a hope for peace.
This was my first time in Hiroshima. But the eternal flame, the marble slabs, and the eerily silent memorial for unimaginable numbers of people who had died were already familiar to me. My mind, refusing to focus, drifted away from Hiroshima to another memorial: Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. It was not the depths of the sorrow at Hiroshima that moved me to focus on what had happened to my own people during the same war, but rather, a sense of comfort propelled me to do so; Yad Vashem was mine, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial was foreign. The tales of Jewish suffering that I grew up hearing and the lachrymose conception of Jewish history that I had learned about in school had taught me how to be a victim. And it was as a victim that I was more comfortable; victimhood was my home.
As I was walking and reflecting along the silent lake, the Jewish guilt set in. Yad Vashem, and the general idea of a Holocaust memorial, is comfortable in its familiarity and intimate connection to my own family and people. But this sense of belonging with the Jewish people has always been intertwined with my sense of belonging with the American people. I was a Jew in Japan and also an American. Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gray and the man tasked with weapon delivery, was unrelated to my family or to me. Indeed, my family was rounded up and killed by Nazis in Europe just months before the people of Hiroshima were faced with Little Boy. I was not culpable for this crime. But my historical sense tells me to retroactively support America and the Allies—to oppose Germany and Japan—even if I do not agree with every decision the Americans had made.
So while I knew that I, personally, was not the Japanese people’s enemy, and that this was not my war, I inexplicably felt the weight of my country’s history on my shoulders. Opening the door to the museum, yet another white marble structure built in clear viewing distance from the Atomic Dome, I consciously held it open for the Japanese family walking in behind me. What they mistook for common kindness was an impossibly small token of apology from an American boy from Brooklyn.
My experience inside the museum aggravated my guilt. Towards the end of the walking tour, we were guided to a large globe that sat rotating in the center of the room, with missiles sticking out of various countries: representations of the world’s nuclear armaments today. The United States currently maintains over 5,000 warheads. Not quite as bad as Russia’s 8,000, but still capable of destroying the planet several times over. The written message behind the globe called for worldwide disarmament as the only real way to prevent another nuclear atrocity from taking place. I looked at pictures of people sick with radiation who only barely looked human, and horses left scarred without legs, and the great number of warheads my country still possesses seemed beyond explicable.
I had been taught at Yad Vashem that when the immensity of the tragedy is too much to take in, one is better off focusing on the individual. “Six million is an unbelievable number”, I am told every time I have taken the walking tour through that museum’s triangular exhibit hall. So I applied that lesson here too: one Jewish life, one Japanese life. Sinichi, a little boy of around five years of age, died instantly in the blast. He loved riding his tricycle, but did not have much time to ride it, so his parents buried the tricycle with him in the ground so that he could still play with it. The stained and rusty tricycle is on display in the museum’s halls. One Jewish life, one Japanese life.
On the plane home, I struggled to make sense of what I had seen. The role-reversal I had unknowingly stumbled into, from victim to aggressor, confused and stunned me. But by walking through Hiroshima, by understanding the city’s story first-hand, I was able to understand something that the history textbooks and partisan narratives do not let on: that the enemy is also human. The Japanese red and white flag hanging over the memorial is reminiscent of the loyalties of those killed, but Sinichi’s tricycle tells of the individual lives lost. Perhaps it was my own proximity to another one of World War II’s monumental disasters that led me to place myself within the narrative at the Hiroshima memorial. I do not know whether my response was justified. But I know how important it was for a person who has often been led to self-associate as the victim, who is part of a people whose story is replete with victimhood, to learn that other people are victims too; to learn that however much I associate with the memorial on my side of the field, there is another memorial on the other; and to learn that looking at history one-sidedly is a convenient virtue, but not an accurate one. I wonder what it’s like at Normandy.
Photo by the author.
Hiroshima today is a bustling city with a dark and sad history. The completely reconstructed city, featuring a modern metro-rail that cuts through the streets, hotels, and shopping centers, was little more than rubble sixty-eight years ago. On that fateful and bright summer morning the 393rd Bombardment Squadron B-29 Enola Gay, armed with a fifteen-kiloton atomic bomb codenamed Little Boy, flew 32,000 feet over Hiroshima. The city was selected as a target because it served as home to the Japanese Second Army. The bomb was released at 8:15 AM, devastating the city—one square mile was obliterated by the blast, and fires spread across 4.4 square miles. Between seventy and eighty thousand people, about 30% of the city’s population, were killed by the blast and firestorm.
The area surrounding the dome, once the downtown center of the city before it had been left barren by the blast, was developed into a memorial park in the post-war years of 1950-1964. The Japanese decided to use the spot not only to commemorate the bombing of this particular city, but also to serve as a site to memorialize nuclear horrors and to advocate for world peace. The name of the project, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, transcends this specific bombing. And the park was put together well: the wide expanses of green grass, still lakes, marble memorials, and the simplistically designed museum building draw the visitor into this world of reflection. The park is also a widely visited site in Japan. On the day I was there hundreds of schoolchildren were visiting the memorial on class trips, as the school system attempted to instill in the younger generation an appreciation of history and a hope for peace.
This was my first time in Hiroshima. But the eternal flame, the marble slabs, and the eerily silent memorial for unimaginable numbers of people who had died were already familiar to me. My mind, refusing to focus, drifted away from Hiroshima to another memorial: Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem. It was not the depths of the sorrow at Hiroshima that moved me to focus on what had happened to my own people during the same war, but rather, a sense of comfort propelled me to do so; Yad Vashem was mine, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial was foreign. The tales of Jewish suffering that I grew up hearing and the lachrymose conception of Jewish history that I had learned about in school had taught me how to be a victim. And it was as a victim that I was more comfortable; victimhood was my home.
As I was walking and reflecting along the silent lake, the Jewish guilt set in. Yad Vashem, and the general idea of a Holocaust memorial, is comfortable in its familiarity and intimate connection to my own family and people. But this sense of belonging with the Jewish people has always been intertwined with my sense of belonging with the American people. I was a Jew in Japan and also an American. Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gray and the man tasked with weapon delivery, was unrelated to my family or to me. Indeed, my family was rounded up and killed by Nazis in Europe just months before the people of Hiroshima were faced with Little Boy. I was not culpable for this crime. But my historical sense tells me to retroactively support America and the Allies—to oppose Germany and Japan—even if I do not agree with every decision the Americans had made.
So while I knew that I, personally, was not the Japanese people’s enemy, and that this was not my war, I inexplicably felt the weight of my country’s history on my shoulders. Opening the door to the museum, yet another white marble structure built in clear viewing distance from the Atomic Dome, I consciously held it open for the Japanese family walking in behind me. What they mistook for common kindness was an impossibly small token of apology from an American boy from Brooklyn.
My experience inside the museum aggravated my guilt. Towards the end of the walking tour, we were guided to a large globe that sat rotating in the center of the room, with missiles sticking out of various countries: representations of the world’s nuclear armaments today. The United States currently maintains over 5,000 warheads. Not quite as bad as Russia’s 8,000, but still capable of destroying the planet several times over. The written message behind the globe called for worldwide disarmament as the only real way to prevent another nuclear atrocity from taking place. I looked at pictures of people sick with radiation who only barely looked human, and horses left scarred without legs, and the great number of warheads my country still possesses seemed beyond explicable.
I had been taught at Yad Vashem that when the immensity of the tragedy is too much to take in, one is better off focusing on the individual. “Six million is an unbelievable number”, I am told every time I have taken the walking tour through that museum’s triangular exhibit hall. So I applied that lesson here too: one Jewish life, one Japanese life. Sinichi, a little boy of around five years of age, died instantly in the blast. He loved riding his tricycle, but did not have much time to ride it, so his parents buried the tricycle with him in the ground so that he could still play with it. The stained and rusty tricycle is on display in the museum’s halls. One Jewish life, one Japanese life.
On the plane home, I struggled to make sense of what I had seen. The role-reversal I had unknowingly stumbled into, from victim to aggressor, confused and stunned me. But by walking through Hiroshima, by understanding the city’s story first-hand, I was able to understand something that the history textbooks and partisan narratives do not let on: that the enemy is also human. The Japanese red and white flag hanging over the memorial is reminiscent of the loyalties of those killed, but Sinichi’s tricycle tells of the individual lives lost. Perhaps it was my own proximity to another one of World War II’s monumental disasters that led me to place myself within the narrative at the Hiroshima memorial. I do not know whether my response was justified. But I know how important it was for a person who has often been led to self-associate as the victim, who is part of a people whose story is replete with victimhood, to learn that other people are victims too; to learn that however much I associate with the memorial on my side of the field, there is another memorial on the other; and to learn that looking at history one-sidedly is a convenient virtue, but not an accurate one. I wonder what it’s like at Normandy.
Photo by the author.
\\ JOSHUA FATTAL is a junior at Columbia College and Managing Editor for The Current. He can be reached at jrf2126@columbia.edu