If you’re a nuclear tourist searching for traces of the Bomb, give Hiroshima a miss. This is a bustling, modern town with an overwhelming focus on the present and the future. In Hiroshima the past, for all its world-historical importance, really is another country – or, more accurately, another theme park. The theme park is about peace, and is managed for the benefit of two kinds of people: those who wish to remember – mostly foreigners – and those who wish to forget – mostly Japanese.
The foreigners, meaning primarily Americans, are there in order to inspect, regret, digest, or justify the reality of nuclear holocaust. Whatever their attitude to 6th August 1945, they want to smell the odour of history. They are hungry to face the horror of absolute destruction.
The Japanese are there less to confront reality than to sanitize it. To do this they have created one of Japan’s most efficient mass-producers of virtual reality: the Peace Industry. This is an industry dedicated to forgetting. Its method is not to recall national crimes, as the Germans do, in order to say nie wieder; not to stare fascism’s malign spirit in the face in order to understand it and discredit it. Its method is to drill the mantra of peace into the nation’s mentality, so that it becomes self-fulfilling. Not remembrance, but hypnosis.
If you want glimpses of the nightmare, there are only two places to find it. One is the infinitely moving Peace Memorial Museum, located near the Peace Bell and the Peace Fountain in the Hiroshima Peace Park; the other is the famous skeleton of the A-Bomb Dome – a monument as much to Japan’s survival as to its destruction. Almost all the other evidence was bulldozed or silenced long ago.
The Dome – which topped the Industry Promotion Hall before the mushroom fireball vaporized it – is, oddly, the less powerful of the two memorials. Shorn of historical context, it looks more maudlin than violated, more iconic than real, a bit like one of those isolated ruins beloved of 19th-century romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich. It recalls the bombed-out church on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächniskirche, whose floodlit masonry and jagged bell tower have become a reassuringly familiar landmark, one of the few constants in a perpetually changing urban environment, an epicentre of cosiness surrounded by a popular open market, cafés and hotspots for late-night assignations. Stripped of its history, just about everything loses – or refuses – meaning.
In contrast to the Dome, the Peace Memorial Museum is a gem: the simple, unsentimental way it shows the effects of the Bomb on ordinary people and everyday life is overwhelming. So is its roll-call of the horrors of all war. Few of those horrors, however, are specifically attributed to Japan. The Nazi death camps get their due, but I couldn’t find anything on Japanese prisoner-of-war camps – though the Chinese and Korean forced labourers in war-time Hiroshima are movingly commemorated. The war in Vietnam is prominent, though it had nothing to do with Japan; while Japan’s adventures in China and Korea, including the Rape of Nanking, are conspicuous by their absence. The devastation of the Atomic Bomb is everywhere, but the war in Asia that led to it is virtually nowhere. To some extent, this is inevitable: the museum is, after all, mainly about the realities of nuclear attack. There are sufficient other places to recall the larger historical picture.
And yet there is clearly denial at work here, the sort that is impervious to evidence or argument. The Japanese people and, in particular, the public bureaucracies – which exert an iron control over the museums for which they are responsible, as well as over schools and textbooks and other agents of remembrance – have never come to terms with the evil of the fascist policies of the 1930s. The criminal acts of a perverted regime and national spirit have not been confronted to even a fraction of the extent that Germans have so courageously managed. Most Japanese regard the whole historical episode as foolish rather than unethical; or, even worse, as nevertheless somehow “pure”, insofar as it was courageous and unhesitating and patriotic. Some even see Japan’s Asian War as an entirely legitimate attempt to stem the tide of Westernization that threatened the unique Japanese soul and all of Asia’s identity.
In any event, few apologies have been forthcoming, and even by a Japanese conception of sincerity – doing wholeheartedly what is expected of you in any particular situation – the apologies that have been made don’t seem particularly sincere. But sincere apologies for other sorts of errors happen all the time, for example in cases of corporate failure, or when financial or medical scams get discovered. Unconditional apology is very much part of the Japanese tradition. So is the belief that something is bad if it fails, and very bad if it fails very badly.
I had a strange sense of deprivation, of an unnatural and corrosive silence all around me, as the city that inaugurated the nuclear era stubbornly refused to yield any further evidence or explanation of the Bomb. It seemed incredible to be standing in this place whose name resonated in every corner of the globe, and yet to feel as though I were in the middle of a gigantic cover-up. Obliteration had itself been obliterated. In its stead stood the “Mecca of World Peace”, as one brochure had it: just another ugly Japanese town, with the ubiquitous overhead cables and tangles of roads and soulless boxlike buildings and unplanned chaos. As I wandered the bustling streets, I couldn’t help wondering how a nation so innately receptive to beauty could live amid such atrocious ugliness. The Japanese seem in love, above all, with the idea of beauty, their feeling for beauty having become so abstract that it doesn’t necessarily find expression in actual things. Where beauty undeniably exists, it tends to be either portable or ephemeral – as it is in food, in ceramics, in traditional dress, in contemporary clothes, in horticulture.
Tired and hungry – by now the Peace Museum and the Dome seemed like tiny islands where the past was prohibited from flowing into the present or the future – I plumped for a simple café serving delicious-smelling hoto dogos (hot dogs). I ordered an espresso, and was leafing through a Herald Tribune that another nuclear pilgrim must have left behind when I was interrupted by a mousy voice.
“Excuse me,” she said. Then, a little more boldly: “Excuse me if you please.”
A small lady, perhaps in her early fifties, with sparkling eyes and dyed jet-black hair done up into a scraggy bun, was bending over me.
“I like foreigners,” she said. “Foreigners good people.”
I thanked her for her approval, and hastened to resume my reading, suspecting that she was a chatterbox who had never terminated a conversation of her own free will.
“You like Japanese? We good people? What’s your sense of us?”
I smiled affirmatively, mainly because I meant it, but also to avoid a dialogue from which I would be unable to extricate myself.
“What do you do?” she persisted.
“Guess,” I succumbed.
“Construction engineer. Or maybe computer software. Anyway, something very modern. You look like a very modern man.”
“Terrible insight,” I teased her. She loved that, and was now definitely coming back for more.
“Good husband. Maybe good lover.”
“Wrong again.”
“Politician? No, you too nice man for politician. And maybe not rich enough.”
“Philosopher,” I replied. “Closely connected to good lover,” I added purely to wind her up.
“Of course!” she said. “Plato eros. I love Plato eros. You can feel it everywhere.”
“And what do you do?” I asked.
“I own beauty salon,” she answered triumphantly.
I was really warming to her. And even if I hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have left me in peace. She was determined to converse, get under the skin of a foreigner, and brush up or show off her impressive English.
“What does your beauty salon do?” I asked.
“So!” she said decisively, trying to summon up all the relevant English words and arrange them into the right order: “Manicure, pedicure, massage, facial beauty, and of course coiffeur. I make people very relaxing!”
“Do you do men?”
“No… But for you… Yes.” She giggled and stroked my shoulder. “If you teach me some Kanto.”
“Kant isn’t very relaxing,” I said, impressed that she had heard of him. “Neither to teach nor to learn. I’ve just given a course on his ethics at Todai.”
Perhaps emboldened by the reception of this magic word by the Yamazaki family in the Nagano Alps, I was testing what response I would get in Hiroshima.
“Ah! Todai! You are at Todai?”
The way she lingered on the “o” of Todai was admiring but hesitant. I could see I wasn’t in for outright adulation.
“But Todai so old-fashioned. You think really good for today Japan? Just manufacture more bureaucrats, who build more bridges and roads and concrete, and destroy Japan natural beauty. And steal so much money.” And she affected a look of mock worry.
This woman was altogether more subtle than met the eye.
“How can philosopher at Todai eat hoto dogo?” she demanded, looking pityingly at the wretched sausage streaked with mustard and ketchup. “You are typical American!”
“But Japanese must like it,” I said. “No one else here is foreign.”
“Japan going to the dogs,” she said. “To the hoto dogs,” she added, laughing at her own pun. “Maybe Japan finished!” – a phrase I had heard so often that it now numbed rather than alarmed me. I knew what was coming: “Too much American influence. Essence of Japanese special soul disappearing. Unique relationship to nature lost. And so economic strength of Japan also lost. Our Japanese blood no longer pure.”
Mercifully, she kept this refrain brief. But her laments followed the usual pattern: Japan was losing a unique soul formed in the mists of ancestral time. This soul was sincere, genuine, resilient, uncompromising and had a wholesome relationship to nature and the gods. It was being undermined by superficial foreign influences, mainly American culture, epitomized by fast food and aggressive individualism. And with the loss of its traditional virtues, Japan was no longer strong enough to beat the West at its own game.
Then abruptly, more like a command than an offer:
“Well, now I invite you to stay at my apartment for as long as you want. Cancel hotel and stay with me. I promise not to talk all the time!”
If she hadn’t promised, I might have believed her. But this pre-emptive reassurance confirmed that she was a seasoned conversational warrior who wouldn’t easily fall silent.
We caught a bus to her place, a poky apartment in Western style. The hall was so narrow that I almost had to edge down it sideways. She took me into the kitchen-diner, which could just about accommodate dinner for two across a table the size of a chessboard. There was a faint whiff of leaking gas coming from the canister that serviced the single-ring hob of a camping cooker. An old fridge that would have been at home in a design museum of Fifties domestic appliances was flanked by rows of light-green laminated cabinets. The corridor also gave onto two other rooms; each of them had little space for anything but a bed jammed between the walls and an aluminium rail for hanging clothes on.
Lodged in such a homely space with a kind stranger from Hiroshima, it seemed an ideal moment to speak to an ordinary resident of the city about the Bomb and its legacy.
“We Japanese are fundamentally very peaceful people,” she replied, not answering my questions. “We never want war, against nobody. Korea and China still don’t understand how much we love peace. They always getting excited about history.” She poured me a cup of green tea. “So! That’s it. Enough of Bomb talk! Enough of nuclear things! They belong to Japan past; they out of date now. I went on home stay to America many years ago, and people only want to talk with me about Hiroshima bomb. Why? Such uncheerful talk.”
She paused. “Anyway, Bomb was America’s crime, though they say it was necessary to end World War. Japanese military government crimes, Stalin crimes, American Hiroshima crimes – all the same! What difference? Just very bad times!”
It shocked me, but oddly it didn’t surprise me, her statement that America’s Atomic Bomb, Stalin’s Gulag and Japan’s Rape of Asia were all morally equivalent. Was it a conviction or merely a hazy mantra?
“Well, I must go to wedding reception this afternoon. So please make yourself at home.” Then, after a moment’s thought: “Would you like to come with me?”
“Oh, I’d love to!” I replied enthusiastically, leaping at the opportunity to be part of a Japanese wedding. “But I haven’t got a suit or anything.”
“No problem, you take my son’s! He will give you. You’re welcome. And you take his invitation card, if you please,” she added.
“I’m, um, probably too large for his clothes.” I had visions of trousers extending no further than my calves, and of a pair of Western shoulders splitting the seams of the jacket.
She led me to the messy little cubbyhole that was her son’s bedroom, and rummaged around on the coat rail. “By the way, you sleep here,” she said. “My son away working for Toshiba company.” It looked like a teenager’s bedroom, full of posters of Western rock idols and Japanese models dressed in flimsy, cut-away dresses, and with cigarette ash trodden into the tatty carpet.
I tried on a badly cut, light-grey salaryman’s suit which she fished out of a jumble of old clothes. I was right about the shoulders, and wrong about the calves. The jacket was far too narrow, but the sleeves and legs were comically long, tailored for a gangly youth who would tower over me. I could imagine her son from the cut of his suit and the unkempt asceticism of his room: gaunt, bony and lank.
“Next, you need gift, if you please. Maybe 20,000 Yen. Yes, for stranger only 20,000 Yen necessary. I’m sorry but weddings in Japan so expensive that guests must give money to pay for banquet and gifts that we receive at ceremony.” And she fetched a beautifully creased envelope, into which she inserted two crisp 10,000 Yen bills of her own money.
Refusing this generosity, I immediately fished two of my own out of my trouser pocket.
She cracked up laughing: “You can’t possibly give that! No, no, impossible! In Japan, we present only fresh new bills from bank, never used ones, even in good condition.” And she buried her face in her hands and squeaked with amusement, still pointing at my crumpled bills. “They look terrible! So terrible! Must sound like this to be correct.” And she flicked one of her bills in that deft, snappy way of checkout clerks and sales people throughout Japan. I found the sound of crisp bills being flicked like that oddly satisfying.
After much resistance, she accepted my bills and gave me the envelope with hers. Examining it more closely, I noticed that it was really two envelopes, an inner wrapper meticulously folded around the bills, and an outer decorated with a printed red-and-white ribbon and sprigs of pine. As one would expect from a culture obsessed with form and appearance, Japan has a complex semiotics of wrapping, the quality of which is unsurpassed anywhere in the world. Protocol dictates precisely what type of envelope and form of address to use for each occasion, from ordinary mail to cards and gifts for weddings, births, funerals, New Year and the whole calendar of festivals. As in so much of Japanese life, appearance is inseparable from content. Form is reality; surface is substance.
We jumped into a taxi called “Cedric” and drove to the local wedding palace, inching our way through the traffic jams of this bustling city that had so inelegantly but decisively resurrected itself from total destruction.