On December 8, 2024, 83 years after the start of the war against the United States, the representative of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Victims Organizations (Hidankyo) departed for Oslo to attend the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony. The victims of the bombing are passing away one after another, and only a few people are left who can talk about their indescribable experiences . After 10 years, there will be almost no one left who can talk about their experiences based on clear memories. The award came too late. In Japan, under the restoration of the monarchy in 1867, a new absolute ruling system called the modern emperor system was established, and many historical distortions and concealments continued. The most prominent of these was the confusion over who was responsible for the Asia-Pacific War. Regarding the atomic bombing, Emperor Hirohito, who had just finished his visit to the United States at the end of October 1975, said, "It is regrettable and unfortunate that it was dropped, but it was unavoidable because it was during the war ." The victims of the bombing must have been stunned. However, few people realized that the person most responsible for the dropping of the bomb was the Emperor, who was the supreme commander of the military that started the war. The idea that the Emperor was responsible for the war, including the atomic bombing, is an outrageous and untouchable idea that continues to bind the thoughts and actions of the Japanese people, overtly and indirectly. What is being questioned is the law of maintaining peace in our hearts and the physical obedience to uniforms in our actions.
August 1945. Two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Kokura City, Fukuoka Prefecture (now Kitakyushu City), where my parents worked, was the second candidate site for the Hiroshima bombing on August 6. Hiroshima was the first to be hit because the weather was clear after 8:00 a.m., and Kokura was spared. On August 9, Kokura became the first candidate, and after 9:30 a.m. on the same day, a formation of three B29 bombers circled Kokura, waiting for the right opportunity to drop their bombs. The U.S. government, which ordered the bombing, considered Hiroshima and Kokura to be experimental sites and ordered accurate dropping on the targets. The bomber's fingers are thought to have repeatedly touched the button to drop the plutonium-type atomic bomb, named Fat Man. The sky above the target, the Army Arsenal, where my father worked , was covered in smoke from the air raid on the Yawata Steel Works the night before, and it was impossible to visually confirm the bombing. This determined the fate of Kokura and Nagasaki.
This blog posted the English version of the front article, "The Atomic Bombing: My Life - Postwar Japan - Introduction," because we wanted people outside of Japan to read it. We reprint the opening paragraph below.
At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped from a US military plane on Nagasaki, following Hiroshima, instantly taking the lives of nearly 80,000 civilians. At 9:44 a.m. on the same day, prior to the Nagasaki bombing, a formation of three US B-29 bombers reached the skies above the Kokura Arsenal (a Japanese Army munitions factory) in the center of Kokura City (now Kitakyushu City), the gateway to Kyushu, which was the original target. The bomber's door containing the new bomb was opened, and for about 45 minutes while the bomber circled at an altitude of nearly 10,000 meters, the bomber's fingers were focused on the bombing. It is believed that the button had been fastened to it many times. At the time, my father, who had served on the front lines in China, the Philippines, and the Indochina Peninsula for most of the 15-year war and had returned in 1944, the year before, was working at the Kokura Arsenal, which was the target of the atomic bomb. For the people of Kokura, it was under conditions that can only be described as fortunate that the U.S. military planes gave up on dropping the atomic bomb on Kokura and headed for Nagasaki. The details of this have been made clear by Japanese researchers who have directly consulted U.S. government archives.
I am the child of an attempted murderer by atomic bomb. It is almost a miracle that a human being is born into this world. My father, who was in a weapons factory at the hypocenter, miraculously survived as the B29 bomber headed for Nagasaki without dropping the atomic bomb, so my life is a gift of miracles among miracles . It was the height of summer. It was a clear morning in Kokura. The people of Kokura escaped the unprecedented disaster following Hiroshima because the smoke from the Yawata Steel Works, located about 5 kilometers southwest and smoldering from the air raid, continued to cover the Kokura Arsenal for nearly an hour as American military planes circled the area.
In addition, my father, who served in the military for 13 years, was shot in the chest during the Second Shanghai Incident but survived when a metal object (details unknown) he had in his left breast pocket hit him, the reconnaissance plane he was aboard nearly crashed due to engine problems during the bombing of Chongqing but managed to make an emergency landing, and he was afflicted with malaria in Myanmar (the Burmese front) and was on the verge of death . My father taught me more than I could have learned from books about the unreasonableness of the Japanese Army's military organization, which enforced obedience through violence, was careless about logistics (rear support such as weapons, ammunition, and food ) , and continued to behead Chinese prisoners of war without hesitation in accordance with international law. My mother, who was a primary school teacher, also narrowly escaped death after being machine-gunned by a US military plane at the end of the war.
From the age of 14, I was obsessed with the idea of "life that embraces death" and "life that contains death." The sudden death of a family member added to this, and I could no longer find meaning in life. I studied at a municipal school in Kokura, while I was agonizing over the shadows of the atomic bomb survivors and my father standing on the stairs at the entrance to the Bank of Japan's Hiroshima branch. However, no teacher in elementary or junior high school mentioned the attempted atomic bombing of Kokura . August 6th and 9th were during the summer vacation, and I had no opportunity to talk about the atomic bombing with my classmates. For them, the disaster in Nagasaki was something that didn't concern me. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mentioned in a corner of social studies textbooks, and were merely events of the past that we prepared for entrance exams. I became a reporter for Kyodo News, and finally, in the mid-1970s, I visited the Nagasaki hypocenter for the first time, while also reporting on the incident.
Since moving to Tokyo for university, I have not been aware of what is happening in my hometown, but around 2010, I found out on the Internet that a memorial monument for the victims of the Nagasaki atomic bomb (photo) had been erected in the park on the former site of the Kokura Arsenal. It was erected in 1973. In 2022, the Kitakyushu Peace Town Museum will open, and its website states that children from Kitakyushu will be sent to the Nagasaki City-sponsored Youth Peace Forum , where they will learn about the reality of the bombing and the value of peace by listening to lectures on the experiences of atomic bomb survivors and attending the Atomic Bomb Victims Memorial Peace Prayer Ceremony. It has been 80 years since the Nagasaki bombing. I feel relieved, but at the same time, I wonder why now. Without the harsh experiences, it would all just be a meaningless prayer for peace.
In 1942, the United States launched the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb, and as the development progressed, F. Roosevelt and Churchill made a secret agreement at the Hyde Park Conference in 1944 to "not use it on the Germans, but on the Japanese, and to warn them that it would be repeated until they surrendered." If the United States had not declared its acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration on August 15 and proceeded to the decisive battle on the mainland, Kokura, Niigata, and Kyoto would certainly have been bombed, following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The emperor at the time considered the preservation of the Three Sacred Treasures to be the protection of the nation . ( Kido Koichi's diary) When Takeshi Hara wrote, "In short, for Emperor Showa, securing the Sacred Treasures was more important than the lives of the 'people,'" criticism arose that "it's not that simple."
"The people were saved by the Imperial Decision (August 15)" is an undeniable distortion of historical fact. The nation of Japan is truly an absurd existence. It is not a Japanese republic. The Emperor system continues in an inexplicable way, and the Japanese Empire seems to have perished but has not. The subject of the pledge on the Hiroshima Memorial to "We will not repeat the mistake" became a problem, and it was settled on "the people of the world." In that case, the sins of humanity are not borne by "Jesus" alone, but by all of us. It is the same logic as the collective repentance of 100 million people immediately after the defeat. There is no need for criminal legality, international law, or courts. All we need is the Christian church.
Those who were called postwar intellectuals liked to quote Maruyama Masao's "System of Irresponsibility". However, if one reads the Meiji Constitution before being told by Maruyama, one can see that the prewar system of irresponsibility in Japan was established by the Meiji Constitution. Article 3 states that "The Emperor is sacred and inviolable", and provides for the immunity of the Emperor and the immunity of the state. " Even if damage is caused by the illegal acts of the state or its public officials, the state shall not be liable for compensation". According to Maruyama, this is because before the war, people were considered subjects and were not able to form a subjective citizenship. Even under the new constitution, it cannot be said that a sufficient subjectivity has been formed, and there is no prospect of how to improve it. "Because Japan is Japan". The " Peace Preservation Law" and the physical obedience that remain in the minds of postwar Japanese people are the barrier.
Note: The gap between Japan and Germany is clear when it comes to the establishment of freedom and independence. Memories come back to life in the month of "celebration" in February.
Former Nagasaki Mayor Hitoshi Motoshima was shot for making statements about Emperor Showa's war responsibility ( February 20, 1922 )I would like to ponder the words of the late Prime Minister Abe ( October 31 , 2014 ): "The dropping of the atomic bomb was the result of aggression and aggression . "
