On Saturday evening, December 14, 2002, about fifty thousand South Koreans gathered for a demonstration in downtown Seoul’s City Hall plaza. Scores of photographers and TV cameramen stood on top of the surrounding office buildings and hotels ready to capture images of the crowd exploding into the kind of violence that made South Korea internationally famous in the 1980s. Instead of Molotov cocktails, however, pictures show only thousands of glittering little flames burning from candles in paper cups that the protestors held. The cups were covered with the school photos of two teenage girls who had been run over by a fifty–ton U.S. Army mine-removal vehicle as they walked along a country road to a friend’s birthday party the previous June.
With lights spelling out “Season’s Greetings” in English sparkling around the square, the tens of thousands of demonstrators—including countless families with small children—demanded an apology from Washington for the girls’ deaths. They also called for revisions to South Korea’s security agreement with the United States as they sang the year’s most popular carol: “Fucking USA.” The singer leading the crowd was kind of a tuneful Bob Dylan, and his backup group consisted of three women in their late thirties to early forties, dressed in fashionable, activist duffle-coat style, doing a low-key version of the Rockettes’ kick-turn line dance. At one point massive American flags covered the crowd, and these were eventually ripped apart but not burned.
About three weeks earlier, a U.S. military court had convened in Seoul and determined that the road accident was “unavoidable,” acquitting the two soldiers who were driving the armored car. The soldiers were flown out of Korea immediately, and what had been sporadic demonstrations since June’s tragedy spread overnight into a nationwide, anti-American movement, gaining rapid momentum everywhere from Catholic convents to elementary schools, where homework assignments encouraged children to express their confusion and anger over the girls’ deaths and the U.S. military tribunal’s judgment of the soldiers’ innocence.
Almost doubly tragic for the girls’ families, South Korea’s 2002 presidential campaign was in full swing when this national frustration erupted, and none of the candidates could resist becoming involved. By the time of the December 20 election, each of the main contenders had either visited the families’ homes to pay his respects, or attended memorial services or candlelight vigils, and all had used the girls’ story in stump speeches.
Immediately after the movement began, however, it was clear that the protestors’ demands for a stronger South Korean stance vis-à-vis the United States would buoy the chances of the liberal/populist candidate Roh Moo-hyun. The man many had considered the front-runner before the demonstrations expanded, Lee Hoi-chang, quickly seemed too cozy with Washington. As Lee desperately tried to recast his image, unusual events began to happen, including President George Bush’s November 27 condolences for the girls’ deaths issued through the then American ambassador to Seoul, Thomas Hubbard.1 Although no public evidence exists to suggest an ulterior motive on Washington’s part, many South Koreans instantly leapt on Bush’s timing (“Why not last June?” became one protest chant) and upped the ante, saying nothing less would suffice than George Bush himself coming to Seoul to deliver a “direct apology.”2
South Korea’s presidential candidates understood the depth of the country’s mood and quickly latched onto the language of “direct apology.” Together they sensed that the winner of the 2002 election would need to articulate this emotion as national policy because the protestors on the streets were not just student activists: they were noticeably middle-class and middle-aged men and women with families and mortgages who were fed up with the accidental and purposeful violence against civilians that American soldiers stationed in South Korea so routinely commit. Therefore, in addition to drawing attention to the lived reality of America’s military presence in South Korea—a long-standing issue—this moment also shed light on why Seoul’s official demands for more public apologies from Japan have increased during recent years.
In South Korea, intrinsic to the nation’s democratization process has been a widening determination to gain popular control over the apologies that the country’s leaders have long performed in handshakes and bows behind closed doors. It is noteworthy that this phenomenon has encouraged a related South Korean movement with Vietnam to apologize for Seoul’s sending three hundred thousand troops to assist in the American war there.3 In South Korea, any part of this history—let alone atonement for it—was so taboo until recently that even Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, could only be shown in Korean theaters after its 2001 re-release.
Unfortunately for the dead girls’ parents, Seoul finds that it is not (yet?) in South Korea’s national interests to demand official apologies from the United States, unlike Japan. Although the presidential candidates could clamor along with protestors for “direct” words and action from Washington, South Korea’s then president Kim Dae-jung (who was ineligible for another term and free to say whatever he wanted to at the time) calmly received the U.S. ambassador in his office to accept the American president’s sentiments, underscoring the issue of relative power in political apology.
NO GUN RI
South Korean demands for a “direct apology” from the United States in December 2002 stemmed from more than just the awful end to the young lives of Mi-sun and Hyo-soon. These deaths themselves compounded a long list of violent incidents involving American soldiers and Korean civilians in South Korea, which poster-sized photographs of mutilated bodies made plain for all to see throughout Seoul’s parks and on its subway walls.4 Almost entirely underappreciated in the international coverage of the moment and yet deeply mixed into it was Korean social awareness of a different American declaration of regret for a different tragedy that had come just about two years earlier: President Bill Clinton’s January 2001 statement concerning the deaths of Korean civilians killed by American soldiers in the Korean village of No Gun Ri in July 1950.
Similar to how Korea’s recent protests against Japan over the islands between them seemed to collapse the nation’s entire postcolonial history of rancor into one moment, South Korea’s 2002–2003 mass demonstrations against the United States funneled the bitter emotions stemming from America’s fifty-plus-year military presence there into one event. And during these anti-American protests, South Koreans made absolutely clear that they wanted more amends for the civilian deaths that U.S. soldiers continue to cause than what they got in 2001, when Bill Clinton told Kim Dae-jung, “On behalf of the United States of America, I deeply regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri in late July, 1950.”5
Clinton’s pronouncement as well as the terms of the much longer and simultaneously issued “Statement of Mutual Understanding between the United States and the Republic of Korea on the No Gun Ri Investigations” made clear that there would be no formal American apology for the Korean deaths. Like Washington’s stance on the events at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968, the American troops involved in the killings in Korea in 1950 were described as “young, under-trained, under-equipped and new to combat” as well as “legitimately fearful” of the enemy, meaning that in the end no one would be held responsible for what had happened.
Therefore, although not entirely causal, two years later when President Bush issued his “regrets” for the deaths of the two schoolgirls, South Koreans wasted no time in saying, “No. We want an apology,” which also meant, “No. Someone must take responsibility.” When Koreans demanded George Bush’s appearance in Seoul to deliver America’s apology, they were mirroring similar demands that call for the Japanese emperor to come to Korea to atone for Japan’s past.6
Along with Clinton’s spoken words, the “Statement of Mutual Understanding” appeared in January 2001 at the end of a sixteen-month Pentagon review process. It sought “to examine the facts and circumstances surrounding the events” that occurred under a railroad track bridge in the village of No Gun Ri in central South Korea during the early days of the Korean War in July 1950 when as many as several hundred people died.7
The American government’s sudden interest in this history was a matter of damage control, pure and simple. For decades, historians and survivors of No Gun Ri had discussed the incident—as well as numerous others like it—drawing little if any response. In Seoul’s freer political climate of the 1990s, however, some survivors petitioned the U.S. Embassy there to respond to their claims, and in 1997 one group filed for compensation with the South Korean government. In 1998, a South Korean journalist then with the Associated Press, Choe Sang-hun, chronicled survivors’ efforts in Korean papers, and then, finally, on September 29, 1999, the Associated Press ran an article that was picked up worldwide as the “shocking” story of an American “massacre” of Korean civilians at No Gun Ri. The following morning, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen charged Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera with conducting an investigation, as if it were news to everyone in Washington.
Lest any American may have worried that the U.S. government was embarking on a lengthy process of taxpayer-sponsored self-examination to give voice to the claims of some previously unheard of foreigners, Cohen could not have been clearer about why the Pentagon wanted to review this particular past. On September 30, 1999, he wrote Caldera: “This review is important to the active and retired members of our armed forces, the confidence of the American people in the finest armed forces around the world, and our relationship with the people of the Republic of Korea.”8
Two weeks later Cohen sent Caldera a second letter, however, revealing that neither of them had yet fully grasped the stakes involved. The note began with Cohen’s description of a recent telephone conversation with South Korean Minister of Defense Cho Song-tae who “made clear that the allegations of civilian deaths at No Gun Ri have enormous historical, political, and emotional importance for his government and the people of the Republic of Korea.”9 It appears that Minister Cho may have come as close as he could to demanding U.S. action, yet regardless of the level of tension involved, Cohen emphasized to Caldera that “we need to ensure that no relevant information is overlooked and that the ROK government has complete confidence that the whole story has been told…. [T]he Army is responsible for determining the full scope of the facts.”
Most apparent from all this is that even before the U.S. Army chose people to conduct the review, the Pentagon had determined the shape of the final product.10 Cohen mandated that the review board would affirm the justness of the American military’s cause across time, which does not always have to do with what actually happened and which is what some might consider history. Most significant, the authors of America’s official narrative of No Gun Ri would necessarily have to circumscribe their findings in light of the marred faces of the incident’s survivors appearing at the time around the world on television and in newspapers, telling their lived nightmare of being trapped with fellow villagers under a small bridge for several days without food or water as American soldiers fired on them if they tried to move and, in some cases, even if they didn’t.
It is no surprise that the Korean victims’ version of what had happened to them would not be considered as trustworthy a source of evidence as the American perpetrators’ side of the story. Although Washington would emphasize that the “highest levels of ROK and U.S. bilateral co-operation” enabled the review, in place after place in the Pentagon’s report and in the “Statement’s” summarized findings deep differences clearly remained along the line of “they say/we say.” In such cases, the American reviewers invariably determined that the evidence “could not be confirmed.” In answer to the question of how many Koreans died, the “Statement” explains: “The Koreans have reported an unverified number of 248 Korean civilians killed, injured, or missing while the testimony of U.S. veterans supports lower numbers.” In the conclusion the review board maintains, “The U.S. Team believes the number to be lower than the Korean claim.”11 Was the number 30? Was it 200? How did the civilians die? The “Statement” is at its most critical of American action on this point and allows that the review team could “not exclude the possibility that U.S. or Allied aircraft might have hit civilians.”12
Although the American veterans’ testimony generated as many inconsistencies as the Korean victims’ recollections, the Army reviewers followed Cohen’s charge, and their word choice and writing style consistently made the U.S. soldiers’ explanation of what happened at No Gun Ri appear more credible. In other words, the language of the Pentagon authors neutralized the underlying horror that their own report confirmed: U.S. troops fired on and killed many unarmed and terrified Korean adults and children. Ultimately, the “Statement” reads as “us versus them,” defining the essence of a national narrative approach to history and indicative of why such methods—indeed, such “ruses”—fuel the politics of blame rather than any learning from the past. When the review was released, it was denounced so fast and furiously that President Clinton had to spend the last days of his presidency defending it and amplifying his own statements: “We are profoundly sorry.”13
When Clinton first offered his regrets, he announced that in lieu of compensation payments the “United States [would] construct [a memorial] to these and all other innocent Korean civilians killed during the war [to] bring a measure of solace and closure.”14 The American government also would sponsor a “commemorative scholarship fund … [to] serve as a living tribute to their memory.” By the end of September 2006, however, the $4 million dollar budget expired with only a portion spent on design plans, because Washington refused to grant the survivors’ wish that the monument mention their history alone and not be a generalized tribute to all the civilian casualties of the war.15 Moreover, the survivors wanted the monument to inscribe who fired the shots.
Millions of Korean civilians died during the Korean War, and clearly the American government wants to protect itself from a spiraling series of demands. This raises the question, though, of how anyone could believe that what many would call the practical approach would solve anything given that it demonstrates only that the most powerful nation in world history, for fear of lawsuits, cannot even acknowledge what happened to some unfortunate people more than half a century ago.
The South Korean government successfully lobbied the United States to prolong the fund for one more year, yet during the extension period, instead of pushing Washington to meet survivors’ demands, it embarked on its own form of damage control. The “Statement” was, after all, a “Statement of Mutual Understanding,” meaning that it was as much Seoul’s as it was Washington’s. South Korean officials knew that should the fund disappear without anything to show for it there could be more media attention on the victims, which might encourage more criticism of the nature of South Korea’s relationship with the United States. These were not new problems, yet North Korea’s October 2006 nuclear test was exacerbating them at the time.
An interesting note, however, is that as early as June 2004 South Korean officials anticipated that the pragmatic approach to which they and their American counterparts had agreed might not satisfy the desires of those who wanted to record the story in a way that was meaningful to them. As such, in Seoul’s own attempt to reign in future disruptions to the nation’s official relations with the United States—such as large anti-American demonstrations—the South Korean government passed a special law allocating national funds for a commemorative park that would include the kind of monument survivors wanted. Set for completion in 2009, it would seem, therefore, that the so-called pragmatic approach to narrating the story of American soldiers killing Korean civilians means that the South Korean government must frame such histories on its own out of necessity, and its citizens must pay the bill, all of which would make seemingly implausible ideas such as the U.S. government simply telling the truth appear a little more sensible.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Tucked into Washington’s “Statement of Mutual Understanding” about No Gun Ri is a sentence that some might consider no more than a throwaway line: “Civilian casualties are, without exception, the most tragic of the unintended consequences of conflict.”16 These words, however, run so afoul of America’s known record of targeting civilians during the nation’s wars in Asia during and since 1945 (and before, if you go back to the Philippines in 1898 or Hawai’i in 1893 or Korea in 1871) that they wind up doing the opposite of simply padding out a bureaucratic document. Instead, they draw attention to one of America’s most enduring problems in Asia and one that remains at the heart of the No Gun Ri controversy: confronting the history of killing noncombatants.17
Some might want to wish away the whole problem of civilian deaths, which the euphemism so coldly defines as “collateral damage” that cannot be avoided. Such relativism, however, does not calm the lived events for those involved. More fundamental in the American context, it fails to recognize America’s unusual twentieth-century (and now twenty-first-century) position of having a demonstrated history of having killed hundreds of thousands of noncombatants during various wars (according to the most conservative estimates) while continuing to maintain huge troop presences throughout the world—especially in Asia—that cause civilian deaths unintentionally or intentionally even when no declared war is going on.
South Korean society’s conflation of the two girls’ deaths in 2002 with earlier histories of deaths caused by American soldiers suggests that this tense reality may have become so intractable in places where people have long lived alongside American troops that even distinctions of war and peace may no longer be useful. In other words, wartime pasts now blend into a present still surrounded by American troops. The expanding impetus for apology and reparations for history has only made things more difficult.
That the U.S. government created and perpetuates its own problems is not surprising. Without question, America’s napalm-infused firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 is elemental to its uncomfortable twentieth-century record of killing civilians, as is its decimation of Pyongyang, Hue, and eastern Cambodia. Sadly, there are many more such examples. On a different level, however, the nation’s regressive refusal to deal with the human costs of nuclear warfare has even more dogmatically shaped and sustained America’s narrative of denial.18 It is ironic that the problem of apologetic history and political apology lies at its center and arguably at the core of America’s post-1945 national story writ large.
One of the simplest ways to understand how nuclear weapons fit into America’s problems with confronting civilian casualties is by considering Washington’s control of information concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the immediate wake of their destruction. The blatant contradiction, for example, between America’s orders for Japan to eliminate all vestiges of the country’s war time thought-control system with its own command to cordon off southern Japan to reporting of any kind could not have been starker.
As soon as the war ended, American authorities and, more important, many Japanese began to address the so-called valley of darkness into which Japan’s notorious thought police (the kempeitai) as well as their milder counterparts at the Ministry of Education had led society through their wartime censorship policies.19 Collective efforts to remake Japan into a place that would encourage free speech defined much early postwar rhetoric and policy. At this very same juncture, however, U.S. officials set in motion a policy of total knowledge control about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, barring news reports, photographs, and, perhaps most disturbing, any public discussion of medical information.
Right away this is revealing, not in the least because the combined number of noncombatant deaths that America caused across the rest of Japan was higher than those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and these were not censored. In other words, from the start it was not so much the issue of civilian deaths per se that American authorities wanted to control but rather these deaths in particular.
The most serious rift in the restrictions concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred as General MacArthur was in the process of issuing them, when the combined response to the breach by the U.S. government and the U.S. media set in motion the pattern of denial that has existed and gained strength to this day. In his 1983 memoir, Shadow of Hiroshima, the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett claims that he didn’t know Hiroshima was out of bounds and traveled there in early September 1945, acting, as he said, in “obedience to the most fundamental and categorical imperative of journalism: Get to the spot as soon as you can, preferably ahead of your colleagues, and faithfully report back to your readers what you have seen and felt.”20 Whether Burchett knew that Hiroshima was off-limits does not really matter in terms of history, because he went, wrote about what he saw, and, on September 5, 1945, the London Daily Express published his highly charged account on its front page under the headline: “The Atomic Plague.”21
The article marked the first disclosure about what would come to be known as radiation sickness.22 As such, it was also the first indication to the world beyond Japan that people could become ill or die from this weapon—and not just be blown up—making Burchett’s notice of blast survivors covered with spots and with hair missing in clumps and blood coming out of their mouths a direct threat to how Washington wanted to portray its victory. The article’s opening sentence alone laid waste to the American triumphalism that was already declaring the planet’s bright future thanks to the new weapon: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”23
Official American repudiation of Burchett’s account came swiftly from voices as seemingly different as military leaders to journalists and university presidents. Simply put, as the historian Mark Selden explains, the article “forced damage control measures … to reaffirm an official narrative that downplayed civilian casualties, flatly denied reports of deadly radiation and its lingering effects, and accused the reporter of falling for Japanese propaganda.”24 In light of today’s embedded reporting practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, seeing how a radically different depiction of events erased Burchett’s revelations revives questions about the substance of precisely what Americans would come to know as the history of Hiroshima, as well as of the nation’s global preeminence that followed.
To begin with, in his memoirs Burchett describes his astonishing twenty-hour train ride from Tokyo to Hiroshima on September 2. The date matters because, on that morning, every other foreign reporter in Japan dutifully assembled aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay to watch and record the big history of Japanese delegates signing surrender papers with General MacArthur.
Meanwhile, Burchett caught the 6:00 am train south jammed with little histories:
The train was overflowing with freshly demobilized troops and officers. The officers still wore their long swords with samurai daggers tucked into their belts …. After the first five or six hours, my fellow platform-swingers, ruddy of face, bleary of eyes and glowing with saki, started dropping off at the various stops …. No salutes, I noted, for officers who got off at the same stops, no bows, no signs of recognition even …. The hostility was total. An American in priest’s clothes whom I approached with exuberance, not entirely due to saki, warned me in guarded language that the situation was very tense. Then I noticed that he had an armed escort and was very nervous. He said that a smile or handshake would be taken as gloating over the surrender.25
Arriving at 2:00 am the following day, Japanese police threw Burchett into a makeshift jail until the sun rose, when he was able to display a letter of introduction from a Japanese reporter in Tokyo to a colleague in Hiroshima. The meeting took place, and Burchett and a Japanese journalist named Nakamura walked as best they could through “the flattened rubble of 68,000 buildings.”
Surviving violent stares and moves to lynch him, Burchett and Nakamura made their way to the Hiroshima Communications Hospital among others, where Burchett had one of the first encounters that a non-victim would have with the city’s living nightmare:
In these hospitals, I discovered people who, when the bomb fell suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the after effects. For no apparent reason, their health began to fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And then bleeding from the ears, nose, and mouth. At first, the doctors told me, they thought these were the symptoms of general debility. They gave their patients Vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting away from the hole caused by the injection of the needle. And in every case the patient died.26
Burchett’s account caused a worldwide sensation that was comparatively muted in the United States, which makes sense, however, given that many Americans were still dancing in the streets from having won the war. Many also would have disparaged his known communist sympathies.
In fact, Burchett’s coverage and its dismissal by the United States might be less significant if other American journalists, including the New York Times reporter William H. Lawrence (not to be confused with the paper’s science correspondent William “Atomic Bill” Laurence who also figures prominently in this story) had not also published articles about the “mysterious” deaths in Hiroshima that same day, which they later recanted.27 As Burchett was squatting in the rubble of what had been Hiroshima to record his surroundings for his own writing, he looked up to see a small squad of American journalists who had been dispatched from Tokyo by General MacArthur that morning (the day after the surrender ceremony), and who arrived on a U.S. Army plane that also brought a small van to shuttle them around the city.
Burchett’s recollections of the moment, coupled with Lawrence’s article in the New York Times, paint a disconcerting picture of American censorship, as he clearly helped the others only to be wholly discredited later—despite having done so because the story he encouraged them to pursue was later determined to be off-limits.28 Burchett writes that he and his fellow reporters “chatted normally until their officer escorts appeared.”29 Seeing their keepers, the Americans moved away from the Australian and “strolled off taking pictures of the grotesquely twisted girders of the few buildings that had not been melted or pulverized.” Even allowing for self-importance, Burchett writes that he had to urge them to go to the hospitals to see “the real story,” which at least some did because, in his New York Times article, Lawrence explains that doctors in Hiroshima were concerned that everyone who survived the bomb “would die as a result of [its] lingering effects.”30 Devoting even greater attention to medical detail than Burchett did, Lawrence observed that people in Hiroshima “only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit … vomited blood and finally died.”
Yet, despite this, Lawrence himself directly disavowed his own words a week later.31 After a few days back in Tokyo, he sent home a story that ran on the front page of the September 13 paper under the banner headline: “no radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin.” The journalist Amy Goodman observes that this article is bewildering on numerous levels but mainly because “the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness which he wrote the previous week.”32 Instead, Lawrence capitulated to governmental pressure or personal conviction or both and repeated verbatim as fact Brigadier General Thomas Farrell’s denial given at a press conference that the Army had convened in Tokyo specifically to renounce Burchett’s article in the London papers. In print, therefore, America’s “paper of record” (as historians referred to the New York Times for generations) repudiated “‘categorically’ that the atomic bomb had produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity in the ruins of the city.”33
By then, however, this first William Lawrence was already irrelevant to the Hiroshima story, because the famous William “Atomic Bill” Laurence had taken charge, and he would not let go of the shape of the story until his writing about the splendors of nuclear weapons won him the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for reporting. Throughout the 1930s, Laurence worked as the science correspondent for the New York Times and was a known supporter of atomic research. In March 1945, General Leslie Groves rewarded his efforts with the opportunity to write press releases on the progress of the atom bomb’s top-secret Manhattan Project in the New Mexico desert. That Laurence was on two seemingly incompatible payrolls (the War Department and a newspaper determined to publish “All the News That’s Fit to Print”) did not cause ethical problems either for him or the paper, however, where several of his superiors, including the paper’s publisher and editor-in-chief, knew of his work for the government.
Most alarming from any standpoint—ethical or practical—and most significant to what Americans would initially understand as nuclear warfare, however, came in Laurence’s front-page splash on September 12: “U.S. Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales: Tests on New Mexico Range Confirm That Blast, and Not Radiation, Took Toll.” The day before the other Lawrence published his self-negating story from Tokyo, “Atomic Bill” proclaimed to his substantial and intelligent readership that any claims about “mysterious deaths” or illnesses were “Japanese propaganda,” pure and simple.34 Of course, at the time, such pejoratives still held formidable powers of persuasion.
Without doubt, Laurence’s fabrications helped to propel the basic story line for Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Americans would come to cling to as history at the cost of learning what was actually going on: “the bombs saved lives.” Later official American reports would show that during the month following the bombings, radiation sickness killed at least 30 percent of the total dead. Yet, at this moment, the U.S. government and its officially placed mouthpiece at the New York Times established as a fact that no one in Hiroshima had died from radiation and that only foreign lies (British or Japanese) suggested otherwise. Into this mix, Americans widely came to believe that the bombs alone ended the war and preempted the likely November land invasion of Japan, with its officially determined estimate of forty-six thousand American casualties.35 In short, they learned little if anything about the Soviet entry into the war against Japan or about the Japanese government’s attempts to surrender, and they learned close to nothing at all about the bombs’ ongoing effects because no major paper in the United States printed anything about them.
Throughout these months, Laurence instead churned out the image-laden pieces about the brilliance of atomic weapons that won him fame. Among other things, he used his experience in the plane over Nagasaki—not on the ground below where he had never been—to justify his position in defining bomb history:
Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one felt oneself in the presence of the supernatural …. Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.
For many Americans, Laurence’s view from the clouds became the truth of the event and established guidelines at the time for those who have wanted to deny history to the summer of 1945 ever since.
A significant point, however, is that as early as the fall of 1945 and into 1946, while Laurence and others such as President Harry Truman spun tales of the divine creation and purpose of nuclear weapons, several voices in the United States noticed that the Japanese victims were absent in the American narrative. Most famous in this regard would be John Hersey with his long essay, “Hiroshima,” in the August 1946 New Yorker magazine, which was read in its entirety on ABC radio over four nights, and which Alfred Knopf rushed into book form by October, and the Book-of-the-Month Club then mailed free to members.36 Hersey’s book had such impact because of his attention to Japanese on the ground realized through portraits of regular people. It is interesting to bear in mind, however, that he did not actually make much of radiation sickness per se until the book’s last chapter, where it becomes clear that even some who survived the blast were still dying in unusual ways.
As is well known, Harvard University president and wartime atomic policy maker James. B. Conant responded immediately to Hersey’s piece by worrying that Americans would read it and lose their nerve for nuclear war by becoming concerned instead with those who died and how they died.37 In late September 1946 he wrote his friend Harvey Bundy, who had recently served as a close aide to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, to urge action.38
Any reader who first encountered Hiroshima through Hersey’s work might find the following lines of Conant’s letter particularly intriguing:
This type of sentimentalism … is bound to have a great deal of influence on the next generation. The type of person who goes into teaching, particularly school teaching, will be influenced a great deal by this type of argument …. A small minority, if it represents the type of person who is both sentimental and verbally minded and in contact with our youth, may result in distortion of history.39
Several things jump out at once. First, it is curious that the president of America’s most famous institution of learning is so suspicious of critical thinking. Equally noticeable is that, as the president of America’s leading research university, he maintained that stories about the bomb’s victims would affect only “sentimental and verbally minded” people, since substantial examples to the contrary already existed. Conant’s wartime governmental work alone would have made him fully aware that more than 130 scientists involved with the Manhattan Project—people who are not usually described as “verbal” or “sentimental”—had campaigned vigorously against the bomb’s use on Japan and Japanese people during the spring and summer of 1945, with the great physicist Leo Szilard leading the charge.40 Moreover, as would also have been well known to Conant, by late 1945 a group of Manhattan Project members led by Eugene Rabinowitch (and joined by Hans Bethe, Albert Einstein, and others) began publishing the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to educate non-specialists about nuclear weapons and related issues, including radiation. In other words, Conant blanketed those he saw as dangerous to America’s future—which, for him, would necessarily be nuclear-armed—in a way that would portray them as the opposite of rational or logical.
Finally, Conant’s fear of Hersey’s publication and of its readership begs the question of just what kind of “distortion of history” he was talking about. Most assuredly he was not referring to something critics have long noticed about the work itself: that Hersey conjured a disproportionately high number of Christians in Japan to make his characters appealing to Americans, and that his descriptions barely scratched the surface of the horror. Instead, the president of Harvard feared that Hersey’s book would move a majority of Americans to decide that they did not want their government or society to move into a nuclear future without learning about what that meant on the ground. In Conant’s view, raising such questions was tantamount to treason, which, more than anything else, evokes patterns of wartime Japan.
Needless to say, Conant prevailed, and the view from the clouds took over America’s history of Hiroshima. Through Conant’s urging, Harvey Bundy chose Henry Stimson to lay the groundwork for what would come to define, by contrast, the reasoned account of America’s initial use of nuclear weapons. In February 1947, Harper’s magazine published Stimson’s “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” co-authored without attribution by Bundy’s son, twenty-seven—year old McGeorge, who would gain later renown for urging American escalation in Vietnam. Aware that stories from the ground in Hiroshima were causing a stir—what Stimson called “slapdash criticism”—he and Bundy produced a narrative that has endured to this day, no matter how much documentary evidence to the contrary others discover and make public: “No man … holding in his hands a weapon … [which would] end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in the armies [that he] had helped to raise … could have failed to use it.” Millions of Americans remain convinced that this explanation equals the history involved, and Conant congratulated Stimson on a job well done: “I believe that if the propaganda against the use of the atomic bomb had been allowed to grow unchecked, the strength of our military position by virtue of having the bomb would have been correspondingly weakened.”41
Circling back to 1945 for a minute, even the very lowest projection of twenty-thousand American casualties or the standard forty-six thousand is painful to imagine. Yet, as the consensus of American historians who have studied the issue such as Michael Hogan, Martin Sherwin, Kai Bird, Barton Bernstein, J. Samuel Walker, Paul Boyer, Gar Alperovitz, and Robert Messer has demonstrated through copious research on the bombs and the decision to use them, Americans transferred what happened—the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—for an event that never took place—the proposed land invasion of Japan—to stand in for history. By the early 1950s, the imagined truth was American myth, and in 1959 President Truman wrote for the record that the bombs spared “half a million” American lives, and that he “never lost any sleep over the decision.”42
Noticeably, over the years, official estimates for Japanese civilian deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have converged at around 370,000 people. Meanwhile, American storytelling has come to count the number of “saved” Americans as high as 1 million. (This number appeared squarely in David McCullough’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Truman, despite abundant evidence to the contrary at the time.) Even without getting caught up in the long-standing debate about the military necessity of the bombings, it is astonishing to realize how easily democratically elected politicians and reporters and educators supportive of free speech led reading and thinking Americans away from the issue of radiation to make their political justifications substitute for history.
KUBOYAMA AIKICHI
While the view from the clouds dominated America, an eerie absence of discussion about Hiroshima and Nagasaki pervaded Japan outside the irradiated cities where MacArthur’s occupation government controlled publishing houses and newspapers. Compounding matters, the official silence concerning the bomb and its effects became ensconced as legal precedence at the time. In May 1946, on the fifth day of proceedings for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (known as the Tokyo Trials or Japan’s Nuremburg), one of the five American-appointed lawyers for the defense, Ben Bruce Blakeney, questioned the notion that killing in war constituted murder, which, in turn, challenged the legality of the prosecution’s charges and of the tribunal itself.43 In the midst of a courtroom packed with Japanese spectators who anticipated that the American lawyers would do nothing substantial for the Japanese men they were to defend, Blakeney announced in a calm, firm voice: “The very existence of the entire body of international law on the subject of war gives evidence of the legality of war …. The proposition that killing in war is not murder that killing in war is not murder follows from the fact that war is legal.” He followed by thinking aloud to the court that charging an individual with crimes against peace was creating a new category of criminal. If this were to be the case, as it appeared to be, Blakeney continued, “if the bombing of Pearl Harbor is murder, we know the name of the very man whose hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. We know the name of the Chief of Staff who planned that act. We know the chief of the responsible stages. Is murder on their consciences? We may well doubt it.” His words were never translated into Japanese at the trial, and his comments disappeared from the printed record. Moreover, as we all know, Blakeney’s legal gambit failed. Truman was not tried as a war criminal, and nuclear weapons came to generate their own de facto legitimacy, standing today as the international community’s legal weapon of mass destruction.
Surprisingly, in 1954, a random accident in the middle of the Pacific Ocean changed the boundaries of official denial about the bomb, and, in simplest terms, made it more difficult for Washington as well as other governments to turn away completely from the realities of nuclear warfare. Unlike the debate that still persists (in the United States at least) about whether the atomic bombs used against Japanese civilians were aimed at military targets, there could be no such discussion about the purpose of the hydrogen bombs developed soon thereafter. The destructive possibilities of these weapons preempted arguments about their potential targets, because they were designed (and still are) to annihilate entire populations. Most famously, even the creator of the original bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who reveled while watching the Trinity Test in July 1945 by quoting from an ancient Hindu text—“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”—learned from the human costs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and protested Washington’s development of the hydrogen bomb.44 The problem was, however, that although Oppenheimer regretted the use of his science once it was clear to him what it could and would do, the bomb wasn’t “his” anymore. By 1954, during the height of McCarthyism, the so-called father of the atomic bomb himself had become a suspicious American for challenging what was fast becoming the American way of life.
If most Americans are unlikely to know the details behind the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they are much less likely to know about America’s subsequent use of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands from 1946 to 1958. Despite this awareness gap, the anthropologist Holly Barker, who has spent decades in these islands, argues that “the United States achieved its global superpower status as a result of its weapons testing in the Marshall Islands.”45 Since the test explosions themselves register so minutely, if at all, on the radar screens of many Americans of the twentieth century, Barker’s statement might sound outrageous to some. Yet, the logic she argues rests on the palpable fear that the threat of thermonuclear destruction generated for so much of the world during the second half of the twentieth century, making her assertion not so outlandish after all. Most important for us to think about is how American nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific threaded itself into the knot already tying the United States together with Japan and Korea, only further complicating it and America’s history out of bounds.
Washington’s preparations for weapons testing in the Marshall Islands began almost as soon as Japan surrendered in August 1945, with American political and military leaders eager to show off their new power to all who wanted to see. The island setting would allow representatives from around the world to watch the explosions against a blank backdrop—or at least one that would appear to have no history—which was, of course, the opposite of seeing the living and dying reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time. In other words, all awe and no mess. In July 1946, the U.S. government invited more than one hundred diplomats, generals, and scientists to stand aboard observation ships near Bikini atoll and watch the first test, self-consciously named “Operation Crossroads.”
Although officials repeatedly stated that the purpose of the test was only to demonstrate the science and not to threaten anyone, everyone understood, by watching the test, that the Americans were invincible, at least for the moment. And although the American government repeatedly announced that there were no dangers involved in the tests, later that month the second blast of the series churned out all sorts of inconveniently unpredicted by-products, causing the cancellation of the scheduled third test and exposing the forty thousand participating U.S. troops to radioactive fallout, which Robert Stone’s 1987 film Radio Bikini stunningly demonstrates.46 After this mishap, Washington was much less eager to display America’s tests in real time and routinely created giant no-go zones in the Pacific Ocean around the islands, continually relocating Marshallese islanders from one spot to the next while blowing up their native lands.
Poisonous debris was part and parcel of the sixty-seven different tests that continued until 1958 (equaling in total about seven thousand Hiroshimas), a reality Henry Kissinger infamously defended by saying, “There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?”47 As a result, the Marshallese have long been suing the U.S. government to apologize and provide compensation for the illnesses and premature deaths caused by the weapons as well as the whole-scale degradation and destruction of their country.
In the midst of the testing program in 1954, during a brief moment that would ultimately give the Marshallese basis for their subsequent claims, one explosion went completely out of control and ended up killing a Japanese fisherman. When the U.S. government stepped in to make amends for the situation, Washington created guidelines—inadvertently or not—for coping with the civilian casualties that U.S. military actions would cause in the new era of nuclear warfare. Noticeably, the American government’s only partial extension of justice at the time of the 1954 accident affirmed what would become an official inability to deal comprehensively with related histories, foreign or domestic. Moreover, the Japanese government’s compliance with the United States at this juncture set in motion the self-perpetuating cycle of avoidance at the official level that continues to this day.
As is well known, in March 1954 the fifteen–megaton Bravo explosion generated far greater force than anyone predicted. One thousand times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, Bravo spewed fallout over a much larger area than the military’s established perimeter. The white coral reefs in the area dissolved into an irradiated, fine white powder that came to be known as the “ashes of death.” The ash rained down on the crews of at least twenty Japanese fishing boats within a hundred miles of the test, showered at least three hundred Marshallese who had already been relocated from their homes to so-called safe places, and coated about thirty American Marines involved in conducting the experiment.
Within several months, one of the Japanese fishermen, Kuboyama Aikichi, died from radiation illness. His plight set in motion two opposing concerns that rotated around the same issue. On one end of the spectrum, the circumstances of Kuboyama’s illness and death created the first widespread, public effort anywhere in Asia to hold the U.S. government accountable for civilian deaths and injuries caused by American military actions. On the other end, Washington’s response to Kuboyama’s death entrenched legal maneuverability for those who would justify America’s use of nuclear weapons across time.
It is important to bear in mind that there was no large-scale Japanese movement (or any other) to ban nuclear weapons after their initial use on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, let alone to seek American atonement for having done so. This does not mean that Japanese meekly accepted the fact of being the world’s first victims of nuclear warfare. At the end of the war, however, the combination for most Japanese of needing to survive—which included competing for already scarce resources with the waves of repatriates from Japan’s collapsed Asian empire (roughly one-tenth of the population of 70 million at the time)—and of believing the most horrible rumors about the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was enough to make many Japanese complacent with the U.S. occupation’s informational black hole about the bomb.
By 1954, however, when the Japanese fisherman sailing aboard a trawler called the Lucky Dragon became the world’s first known victim of a hydrogen bomb, conditions in Japan were very different and allowed many Japanese to openly question America’s nuclear program writ large. To begin with, survival for many Japanese now meant getting up early enough to catch the right train to get to work on time. Also important, when the American occupation ended in 1952, so did its censorship of the atomic bombings, meaning that by 1954, when Kuboyama Aikichi became ill and died before the nation’s eyes, many Japanese had read about and seen photographs of the 1945 blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and were also aware that many Japanese were still plagued by similar illnesses from that earlier history. On top of this, and pushing matters over the edge for most, nine tons of contaminated tuna from this fisherman’s boat alone (others were hit, too) were sold and consumed by hundreds across the country.48
Two months after the Bravo test, in May 1954 a group of housewives in Tokyo’s Suginami district began collecting signatures to demand that the Japanese government do something to protest the actions of the United States.49 The Suginami Appeal, as it became known, sparked a national campaign that amassed almost 15 million signatures by August 1954 and spawned the first World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in August 1955 (by which time the Appeal had collected signatures from over half of Japan’s registered voters).50
Like South Korea’s 2002–2003 protests against American military violence, Japan’s 1954 Suginami Appeal became a matter of middle-class concern, meaning that even Japan’s very pro-American prime minister, Yoshida Shigeru, had to respond. Fortunately for Yoshida, the U.S. government was more than eager to defuse the situation for him, and on January 4, 1955, the American ambassador to Japan, John Allison, wrote Japanese Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru to explain the terms of America’s atonement:
Your Excellency knows of the deep concern and sincere regret the Government and people of the United States of America have manifested over the injuries suffered by Japanese fishermen in the course of these tests, and of the earnest hopes held in the United States for the welfare and well-being of these injured fishermen. The Government of the United States of America has made clear that it is prepared to make monetary compensation as an additional expression of its concern and regret over the injuries sustained.51
The United States would disburse $2 million to the Japanese government to pay roughly $20,000 to each fisherman aboard the Lucky Dragon. Fifty years later, a former schoolteacher and local activist from the fishing boat’s home port of Yaizu in Shizuoka prefecture described how this money made unaffected fishermen jealous of the sick ones because they all had fallen into poverty as a result of the national fish boycott after the Bravo test. As he recalled, some of the local women exclaimed, “I wish my husband had been showered with radioactive ash.”52
The whole event spread more than just awareness about financial payments and apology as a means of redress: it marked the first time that a broadly popular movement resulted in the United States accepting responsibility for foreign civilian casualties of U.S. military action. But this was not simply a routine victory for activists, for Washington at once wrapped Tokyo into the terms of its settlement. Shigemitsu’s acceptance of Allison’s note and its provisions meant “the full settlement of any and all claims against the United States” and “confirmation of these mutual understandings of our Governments.” In turn this came to mean, in practical terms, that other deaths from related nuclear histories such as Hiroshima or Nagasaki would remain out of bounds, a condition the government of Japan has upheld to this day.
LEGAL MASS DESTRUCTION
In mid-February 2002, President George Bush visited Tokyo during the first of his two state trips to Asia. He and his advisers hoped to accomplish all sorts of things, from launching plans for the 150-year anniversary of Japanese-American relations to thanking the Japanese government for its financial and logistical support of America’s War on Terror. Officials also wanted to calm anxieties that had sprung up throughout the region following the American president’s surprise inclusion of North Korea in his now infamous “axis of evil” speech a month earlier.
Bush arrived in Tokyo on a warm, clear day, one that I remember well because, thanks to his visit, I had an unexpected, theatrical education in one of the trajectories of Hiroshima’s history during my routine walk to the archives. As I headed down the main boulevard near Japan’s parliament building and across the street from the National Library, several of the notorious black trucks popular with the country’s extreme right wing passed me by with the lead van blaring the customary martial songs. This was not unusual, but the message pouring from the loud speakers of the second truck stopped me flat: “Welcome to Japan, President Bush of the United States of America! Apologize for Hiroshima and enjoy your stay!” I stood there stunned for a moment; it seemed as if the sum total of avoiding history everywhere was landing at my feet.
Throughout the recent era of apologies all around—or maybe in spite of it—there has remained one matter on which Washington holds firm, regardless of who is in office: there will be no apology for Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Most noticeable was Bill Clinton’s powerful delivery of the national line in April 1995: “The United States owes no apology to Japan for having dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”53 Perhaps these words reverberated so strongly because Clinton had been surprisingly vocal in offering other apologies during his presidency: for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, for example, for “European Americans receiving the fruits of the slave trade,” or for U.S. sponsorship of right-wing governments in Guatemala, all of which usefully challenged other American narratives.54
Clinton’s statement about the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not distinguish him from his predecessors. Yet, as the first president born after 1945, his words reveal America’s dependency on the “saved lives” rhetoric more than anything else. Put differently, unlike the others, Clinton would not be able to recall for the nation where he was that August morning, or how grateful he felt that the war was over, or any of the other usual ways of explaining away Hiroshima’s history on the ground. As a result, the question of why this history remains so untouchable again comes back to us. If, as Clinton demonstrated, he was willing to tackle other contentious histories such as slavery and its ongoing legacies, or the issue of America’s blind support of anything “anticommunist” during the Cold War era, what keeps the nation’s nuclear history so off-limits?
The chronic inability to confront how America’s use of nuclear weapons against Japanese people in 1945 might constitute the kind of history for which survivors would seek an apology, let alone why the use of such weapons might represent a crime against humanity, is sustained by Washington’s determination to maintain these weapons as the once and future legitimate tools of the national arsenal. It is not at all by chance that among weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological—only nuclear weapons are not prohibited in international law.55 Were it otherwise, the likelihood that the history of America’s use of them on Japan would generate charges of attempted genocide against the United States or Harry Truman would increase exponentially.
This remains improbable, however, not in the least because the Japanese government continues to abet this dynamic. The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have famously traveled to the International Court of Justice at The Hague where they have made impassioned pleas about the illegality of nuclear weapons on behalf of their constituencies’ history and on the future of humanity. In response, representatives from Tokyo’s Foreign Ministry stand up and explain that although such statements are were quite moving they do not represent the official Japanese view. Then everyone sits down. As matters remain, only the government of Japan could charge the United States with the illegal use of nuclear weapons against civilians in war. Meanwhile, its leaders feed Washington’s view from the clouds by not doing so.
As Japan’s desired world posture has increased with its economic prowess, America’s rigidity about the nation’s historical use of atomic weapons against Japan has increasingly played into the hands of hard-liners who urge Japan to stand on its own, regardless of U.S. policy, along the lines of “Japan That Can Say No.” Essential to this trend has been the co-option of Japan’s atomic history away from traditionally left-leaning groups for very different purposes. Official Japan used to regard the sometimes openly anti-American and openly pro-communist (or at least pro-socialist) “NO MORE HIROSHIMAS!” demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s as a threat to Japanese society. Today, however, such sentiment is not considered violent coming from the other direction. Different from the riot police that once surrounded Japan’s long-gone leftist protestors, not even one patrol car followed the black sound trucks and their menacing anti-American message on that February day in 2002, which was only noticeable because President Bush was so physically nearby.
Maybe everyone was hoping no one would hear, or, if they did, that they would not understand Japanese.
