The people of nagasaki ask
While invoking Hiroshima has become universal shorthand for the horrors of nuclear war, Nagasaki, on the southwestern island of Kyushu, has mostly lived in the other city’s shadow
When Miyako Jodai was six years old, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on her hometown, the port city of Nagasaki. She was knocked unconscious, and her home was destroyed. She spent the next several days huddling with dozens of others in a cave on the side of a mountain.
The Guardian reported: She said that she was scared and crying and stepped on some of the bodies of the injured people, because there was no room to walk. When she finally ventured out, the city was still ablaze with towering flames.
Ms Jodai was one of the fortunate ones. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki the morning of Aug9, 1945, killed about 74,000 people, about half as many as those who died in the bombing of Hiroshima three days earlier.
On Friday May 27, President Obama became the first sitting American president since the end of World War II to visit Hiroshima. Nagasaki is not on the itinerary.
While invoking Hiroshima has become universal shorthand for the horrors of nuclear war, Nagasaki, on the southwestern island of Kyushu, has mostly lived in the other city’s shadow.
Yet many in Nagasaki recognise that Hiroshima, in some ways, stands in for both cities. They say the message they want the world to take from Mr Obama’s visit that nuclear weapons must never again be used, does not require that he set foot in their city.
That Nagasaki was bombed second has made it an afterthought in the history of and debate over nuclear weapons, even though many historians argue that the bombing was harder to justify precisely because it was a repeated act.
If one accepts President Harry Truman’s rationale that the Hiroshima bombing was necessary to force Japan’s surrender and end the war, the moral calculus for dropping a second bomb on a civilian population three days later is more contentious. It was a very hard, harsh and inhuman decision by the president.
Close to 700,000 people a year visit the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, compared with nearly 1.5 million at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, where Mr Obama lay a wreath on Friday.
Ms Jodai, now 76 and a retired schoolteacher, said she admired the president’s decision to visit Hiroshima and understood that his schedule did not allow him to visit both cities. Still, she said, the Nagasaki survivors should at least be invited to the ceremony in Hiroshima. She said that she feels like Nagasaki has been abandoned and thrown away.
As Japan wrestles with its own history of wartime atrocities, and as scholars and politicians here and in the United States continue to debate the use of the atomic bomb, Nagasaki, in many ways, offers a more complex narrative than Hiroshima does.
One of the earliest Japanese cities to have contact with traders from the West, including Portuguese and Dutch explorers, Nagasaki is also the oldest having stronghold of Roman Catholicism in Japan.
When American pilots dropped the bomb, the devastation swept across Urakami Cathedral, then the largest cathedral in East Asia. About 8,000 Catholics in the area were killed. For the Nagasaki Christians, long ostracised in Japan over their faith, it was a bitter truth that their community was destroyed by a predominantly Christian nation, in a mission blessed by a Roman Catholic chaplain.
Yoshitoshi Fukahori, 87, a bomb survivor, said he did not quite understand the fuss about the president’s visit after so many years of devastated action of United States, yet he welcomes it
Nagasaki’s Catholic heritage, combined with Hiroshima’s vocal role as a center of antinuclear activities, helped give rise to the Japanese saying “Ikari no Hiroshima, inori no Nagasaki,” or “Hiroshima rages, Nagasaki prays.”
In 1990, Hitoshi Motoshima, then Nagasaki’s mayor, was shot and wounded by a right-wing nationalist after he suggested that Emperor Hirohito should bear some responsibility for World War II. Around the same time, a city assemblyman, Masaharu Oka, founded a museum to commemorate the Korean laborers who were conscripted to work in wartime factories in Nagasaki and who were either killed or wounded by the atomic bomb.
Toshiaki Shibata, the former secretary general of the Masaharu Oka museum and the son of two bomb survivors, said he was glad Mr Obama would not visit Nagasaki. Mr Shibata, 65, contends that it would be better if he doesn’t visit Nagasaki.
Yoshitoshi Fukahori, 87, a bomb survivor, said he did not quite understand the fuss about the president’s visit after so many years of devastated action of United States, yet he welcomes it. A visit to Nagasaki, it is not necessary. He urged that it’s imperative for Obama to stop bloodshed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
I see people get their hopes up, and then are disappointed, so I don’t want to put too much stock in words. Point is why Mr Obama wanted to visit Hiroshima after so many years. Every Japanese feels it was unnecessary and has once again put them in tears for the tragedy they have faced and its aftermath for so many years. They also feel that the killings in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are due to the America’s aggression towards control of the world.
