The Lessons of Nagasaki

I have not been to Nagasaki and think I would have reacted pretty much as you did had I had the same opportunity. I find all such places lugubrious. My husband is a historian and loves to visit old battlefields. Not my cup of tea. I prefer flower gardens. This was interesting though. Thanks for sharing your impressions.
Alexandra recently posted..Wellfleet’s Deck This Hall Blasts Off With Holiday Cheer

Reply

I definitely want to visit this site when we get to Japan!
Andrea recently posted..Beers of the World: A Round-Up from Bungas

Reply

Wow. The atomic museum sounds like a harsh, yet necessary, stop. I also remember the school lessons of Nagasaki and can still feel the horror I felt as a child watching the filmstrip. Thanks for sharing your experience. -Veronica
The GypsyNesters recently posted..Heavy Petting

Reply

I haven’t been to Nagasaki yet, but it is on my list, as Japan and its culture do interest me. I lived in Korea for 3 years, but my travel was usually to escape the winters in South East Asia. My grandfather was a prisoner of war in WWII Japan. He was captured on Corregidor (which I spent four days exploring in 2005) and ended up in Cabanatuan’s prison camp, eventually being loaded into a death ship to Japan to work as a slave in the coal mines in Honami (near Fukuoka). He describes the strange mushroom cloud in the air and the camp being deserted, which did turn out to be the aftermath of Nagasaki. I understand from any perspective, to see those memorials and think of the human lives lost is difficult, and my heart goes out to all of those civilians, but the thing that bothers me and is completely lacking in Japan is any acknowledgment of their actions or memorials for the POWs that perished there. You will find no markings or memorials where the camps are. Even the local Japanese people couldn’t tell you, unless you come across an elderly person who remembers. I have a plan to visit my grandfather’s camps there and I have two sets of maps from researchers that helped me. One that is modern and another to lay over that will show the old locations of the camps, as you can’t find them otherwise. Though, I have no problem with modern Japanese people, I still have a hard time with the government and many companies there that profited off the slave labor without ever apologizing or even admitting it.
For those who believe it is all in the past, that is not so, as there are POW survivors who have worked to gain such acknowledgment and get back wages as a principal from the private companies they worked for as POWs. Not only has the Japanese government not acknowledged these actions, but they, not the companies involved will admit or even apologize still. One such company is Mitsubishi and I can assure you I will never drive one. The mining company my grandfather worked for as a slave as his health deteriorated is still a profitable mining company out of Tokyo with many mining contracts in America, specifically Alaska.
There are several Japanese scholars living in the USA fighting the Japanese government over the extreme censorship of the history books they are trying to write, or have written. If you visit anywhere in Asia, you will find the camp sites have been preserved as memorials. Even inside the “Hanoi Hilton”, which is mostly a testament to the French occupation and what they did to the Vietnamese, there are several rooms dedicated to the US prisoners of Vietnam, skewed and propaganda-like as that info may be.
Interestingly enough, many people don’t understand that far more people would have died had we not dropped those bombs. Women, children, the elderly in Japan were all being trained to fight as the US took back islands getting closer and closer to Japan. With each battle, the Japanese casualties grew based on the mass suicides to escape capture as their culture — their honor– couldn’t allow for that. Also, there were over 500,000 allied prisoners in Japan and the order had not only been given to kill them all once Japan soil was invaded, but also orders had gone out to start killing already. There were prisoners killed on the island of Palawan in January 1945 as we were taking back the Philippines, and that was just a start. Many of the ‘comfort women’ were killed as things looked more and more like we may invade in order to cover up some of the horrors being committed.
This is not to say I am pro-nuclear weapons, as I am certainly not, but there is a lot of history and theories around those bombs we dropped being what has kept others from pushing those buttons with their itchy, power-hungry little fingers. The level of destruction was like none anyone had seen before, and though everyone involved in that war had scientists working to create such a bomb, I don’t think any of them understood the sheer magnitude of the destruction, fall-out or consequences until they were used. Many theorize that is why with all the weapons we have stored up no nation has used them since. Let’s hope we can manage to get rid of them all before future generations forget that horror and think to use them again.
What was surprising for me to realize after three years living in and traveling Asia, is the complete lack of trust and at times even fear of Japan from its neighboring states. The things they did, the way the denied it, actions they have taken, such as digging up a group of Japanese soldiers convicted and put to death for war crimes and enshrining them as heroes in the 1970′s. This has had a long-standing effect on all of Asia and it is one I really felt while living there and visiting places like Vietnam and The Philippines.
I cannot deny that based on my grandfather’s experiences and what happened to him (which I have to almost completely research on my own over the years as he really didn’t discuss it and I was only 12 when he died); this is personal for me in a way it may not be for others. Part of that is the simple lack of knowledge we have about what was taking place in Asia while the Nazis were tormenting and killing the Jews. We all know of those horrors, and horrors they most certainly are. Six million Jews died in and Holocaust and many more lost their lives through loss of family, spouses, children, good health, all worldly possessions, and the memories they had to endure for their lifetimes. That should be acknowledged and memorialized and we should never forget. Unfortunately most people are unaware that the Japanese did the same not only to allied prisoners, but to fellow Asians. Thirty million Chinese died at their hands from the early 1900s through WWII. They were tortured and experimented on and kept captive. Their women were taken as ‘comfort women’ to provide comfort to the Japanese soldiers and were raped and beaten up to 40 times per day. The guilt of the bombs has not only changed the way we dealt with our returning POWs, but also the lack of this information in history.
I do hope I have not offended you in any way. Your article was lovely and I do think Japan, and especially many areas outside of Tokyo, with their beauty, history and traditions, are well worth visiting and exploring, and I hope to do so for those reasons as well as the purpose of revisiting those places for my grandfather, but I hope we will never forget the horrors our own people suffered there and how important it is to be aware of history in order not to repeat it.
Thank you, Christine H.
Christine recently posted..Explore, Eat, Write Repeat…

Reply