Three days ago, I was checking out what was trending on Twitter. One of it was Obama. It was about his planned visit to Hiroshima at the end of May. I believe the reason it was trending was because Barack Obama would be the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima.
I found this odd. In my mind I was going, “You mean no sitting US president has ever visited Hiroshima since 1946 until now?” So all this while, if any, those who visited Hiroshima were former US presidents? Why is this so? Is the US ashamed of the atomic bombs it dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If they were, shouldn’t they apologise?
Of course, asking the questions above sounds naïve. I suppose I am. I don’t know a lot about world history. I don’t know much about international politics either. What I do know is that I want to know more about it. Reading about Obama’s trip to Hiroshima made me think about the events 71 years ago. As one of the Southeast Asian countries that suffered under Japanese occupation, a lot of my countrymen, myself included, felt that the bombings were a necessary evil to stop a greater evil. This was how the narrative was in school and the media. However, I remember reading a comic book about the bombings when I was in primary school. It showed the terrible consequences of the bombings. I sympathised with the characters; I felt a gnawing sense that it was not right but once I finished the comics, I did not think about it anymore. Looking back, perhaps I did not want to think about it. Obama’s planned visit and the lack of a sitting US president visiting Hiroshima until now makes me wonder that perhaps the bombings shouldn’t have happened at all. Shouldn’t it be considered a war crime to drop bombs on civillians? I know this is an often ignored rule in war but it makes it doubly hypocritical for countries in the West like the US to spout this rule when they have clearly violated it. I’m not saying that just because the US did it, other countries are free to do so. I’m saying that the US should stand by what it says and follow the agreed conventions of war.
Yes, Japan carried out numerous atrocities in China, Korea and Southeast Asia but does that justify the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Does it justify killing 140,000 civilians and injuring hundreds of thousands of others? Should civilians suffer because of their government’s aggressive territorial invasions? Reading about the direct aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing made me realise that the ends does not justify the means.
I had to understand further and wanted to know how anyone could reach such a horrifying decision. Reading about how the US bureaucrats came to a decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki left a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. They wanted to hit a military target that was near a large swath of civilian population. It wasn’t enough to bomb military targets; they wanted to bomb the civilians as well to demoralise the Japanese people. One would wonder why they didn’t bomb Tokyo, the capital of Japan. It turns out Tokyo (and other big cities) had already been bombed by B-29s and was already in ruins. Dropping a bomb on an already damaged city wouldn’t serve the US government’s objective of showing the destructive power of the atomic bombs. Kyoto was initially on the list of prospective targets but was later ruled out due to its cultural significance, it has beautiful shrines and temples. It wasn’t for ethical reason Kyoto was excluded, it was aesthetic. Not that there would be any arguments of ethics or morals when a government had already given the go-ahead to unleash such horror on civilians residing in undefended cities. Hiroshima was bombed on Aug 6, 1945 on a day with good weather. On Aug 9, 1945, the day the second atomic bomb was to be dropped, the target was Kokura but the weather didn’t permit so the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
Mainstream narrative agree that it was the twin bombings that ended World War II. What these mainstream narrative failed to mention was how terrible the consequences for people who didn’t straight away perish in the bombings. Burnt skin, internal hemorrhages and radiation sickness. Those who eventually survived took months to recover and they would have to live with the effects of it for the rest of their lives. US media and historians were forbidden from any mention of the effects on the victims. Years later, there were other historians who argued that the bombings may not have ended World War II. More recently, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara argued that it wasn’t the bombings that forced Japan to surrender, it was Russia’s siding with the Allied forces in the war that did it. Japan was also out of raw materials and was going through a nationwide food crisis and theoretically did not have the strength to continue the war. But there are some who say that the bombings were justified because Japan was also working on nuclear weapons at the time and that if the US didn’t drop the bomb first, Japan would have done it.
I don’t know how true any of these arguments are but I still can’t accept the intentional dropping of atomic bombs on civilians. That gnawing sense of wrongness I felt when I read the comic about the bombing as a kid still lingers after all these years. I also can’t help feeling that the way World War II ended further strengthens the philosophy of survival of the fittest, might is right.
It reminded me of the following scene from the end of Rurouni Kenshin, Kyoto Arc, which coincidentally I just finished watching three days ago.
Yahiko: Hey, Kenshin. We won, right?
We were the ones who were correct, right?
Kenshin: If you are saying the victor is correct, we would be the same as Shishio Makoto.
We fought for what we believe is right, and defeated Shishio. However, Shishio himself was also trying to prove that he was the one who was correct. He truly acted with faith in his own beliefs. In that aspect, he is no different from us.
If I were to explain it all, perhaps the age chose our side. What is correct will really be determined by the people of the next generation, after they learn our history.
But, the idea of the survival of the fittest where the strong live and the weak die, is definitely mistaken. Definitely.
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