Remembering Hiroshima

Hiroshima today – with the memorial dome on the left of the photo.

It was the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August, and I have just returned from a troubling visit to the city.

Here’s why it was troubling. The focus of the commemoration was on the terrible suffering of the people of Hiroshima as a result of the attack – and that, I guess, is as it should be. But the whole atmosphere of the event – not to say the tone and layout of the hugely popular museum in the ‘Peace Park’ close to the epicentre of the explosion – was utterly condemnatory. The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is not exactly described as ‘a war crime’ in the official Japanese literature, but a visit to the Hiroshima museum certainly gave me the impression that this was what the Japanese authorities want people to think it was. This sense that the Japanese were ultimately ‘victims’ of the war was something which a Japanese academic explicitly expressed to me some years ago. ‘There were two horrendous crimes of WW2,’ he said. ‘The Holocaust and Hiroshima’.

Really? Is that how we should remember Hiroshima?

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