Memory Lags

Nihon Hidankyo, winner of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, makes us see what we cannot: the consequences of our actions.

[National Archives]

Translated by Antony Shugaar

On a state visit to Japan in May 2016, Barack Obama delivered a speech in Hiroshima that won immediate praise from Terumi Tanaka, at the time the secretary general of Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese association of A- and H-bomb survivors. The following morning, on his train ride home, Tanaka read the speech more carefully in Japanese translation: “Seventy-one years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky.” He changed his mind, realizing that his praise had been hasty. On August 6, 1945, over Hiroshima, and again on August 9 over Nagasaki (the city where the thirteen-year-old Tanaka survived the blast), death had not simply “fallen from the sky.” Death, instead, had been dropped intentionally by American B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers, in the form of two atomic bombs, respectively codenamed Little Boy and Fat Man, upon targets selected for the express purpose of maximizing the devastation and shock among the Japanese people below. Obama’s euphemistic description of death falling from the sky exemplified the Western world’s hypocrisy about those two atomic bombings, a hypocrisy that has endured unalloyed for nearly eighty years now.

When I first contacted Nihon Hidankyo in February 2022 in search of a hibakusha (A-bomb survivor) for the book I was writing, nuclear doomsday seemed to have become quaintly obsolete. Even though the world’s nuclear stockpiles still number in the thousands despite various policies of disarmament, and even though there was no reason to think that humankind had managed to exit the Atomic Age (that will never happen), nuclear weapons were somehow no longer a topic of discussion. The “nuclear taboo” seemed to work as intended, while the logic of deterrence apparently continued to ensure peace, at least among the world’s most powerful nations. But then, just weeks later, on the twenty-fourth day of that same February, the taboo was suddenly shattered by the Russian Federation’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Now there was talk in the world press of the potential use of “tactical nuclear weapons.” The world peace ensured by deterrence flipped on its head, turning into its diametric opposite almost instantly.

The hours I had spent interviewing Tanaka via Zoom were now tainted with the very different reality unfolding along Europe’s easternmost border. I asked Tanaka to tell me the story of his survival in as much detail as he could. I knew he’d done this many times before, yet he showed not the slightest sign of impatience. On the wall behind him hung a senbazuru, a garland of a thousand origami cranes. That same origami is the emblem of Nihon Hidankyo. Once a senbazuru is completed, it is said, a wish will be granted.

Tanaka spoke at great length, showing incredible stamina for a man his age and stopping only now and then for a sip of water. As I listened, I realized that every detail of his account upended, or at least complicated, things I thought I understood: the flash of the blast, different from any ordinary light; the demolition of Terumi’s house, so complete he felt a bomb had centered it directly; his aunt Koto’s body, identifiable only by the familiar pattern of a kimono she wore, tattooed onto her calf by atomic radiation.

While had I learned quite a lot about Los Alamos and physicists, I did not know enough about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And while I’d seen dozens of photographs of B-29s in the air and cities razed to the ground, I’d seen very few pictures of the people, the dead bodies, the survivors, the leukemia patients, and the disfiguring keloids. The Western narrative of the atom bombs, almost without exception, had been sanitized long before my arrival, editing out the victims themselves and their individuality as much as possible, relegating them to the mass of at least one hundred thousand direct deaths and the uncounted deaths that followed. Those numbers provided some idea of the sheer magnitude but failed to convey the pain. Why? To help us feel less responsible? I can’t say, but that is exactly what today’s pervasive narratives about nuclear weapons accomplish. On our Zoom call, Tanaka was telling me, for the first time, the most important story about atomic bombs.

It came as no surprise to me that in response to the news that Nihon Hidankyo had been awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, Tanaka’s co-chair at the organization, Toshiyuki Mimaki, mentioned the children killed in Gaza by Israeli shelling. That form of total destruction—little children blasted white with dust—can only stir heart-rending memories for the hibakusha. In Gaza, too, the victims become nothing more than a death count, the bombs described with a shrug as if they just “fell from the sky.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer, years after Hiroshima, took refuge in a divine analogy, taken from the Bhagavad Gita, comparable to the death that falls from the sky: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” A powerful but misleading image. There is nothing divine about an atom bomb. It is a human creation, deeply human. It may have been the one act that most irretrievably split humankind from its own creation, and even from itself. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the tireless voice of Nihon Hidankyo reminds us of just that: the A-bomb is human. The will to produce bombs, of whatever description, and drop them on other people is human. The creation of a bomb is always a specific act. That was true at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it remains true in Gaza.

“Nothing could be more characteristic of humankind today than our souls’ inability to remain up-to-date,” wrote Günther Anders in 1956 in the most important meditations yet offered about atomic weapons. “Our feelings lag behind our deeds: we can bomb hundreds of thousands of people, but we cannot cry for them or feel remorse.” This was true in the twentieth century, and it remains true today. Indeed, it strikes me that no one but the survivors, with their personal accounts, so rich in detail, can grant us the ability to stay “up-to-date” in a world like ours. Only by listening to their words over and over can we prevent our souls from drifting entirely away from the crucial context. Today all the hibakusha are very old; soon the last of them will be gone. Their disappearance will be passed over in silence, amidst a more general state of distraction, but it will constitute a momentous change. At that moment, we will have lost all the revelatory details that remain unknown to us. We will have lost something more precious still—the ability to glimpse ourselves, a brake upon our actions. Nihon Hidankyo’s Nobel Peace Prize is one of many ways that we can guard against that moment. But it will require many other efforts—collective, institutional, individual—everywhere. Literature, film, and all the other arts must do their part, lest the Atomic Age continue while memory lags behind.

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