JAPAN: Attempts to commemorate the horror of the bombings reveal persistent fallout, writes Anthony Faiola in Tinian, Northern Mariana Islands
Sixty years ago, the world went black for Keijiro Matsushima, then a 16-year-old Hiroshima schoolboy. He vividly recalled an airplane he now knows was the Enola Gay, shimmering in the sky like a "flying popsicle" before the great flash from the atomic bomb vaporised tens of thousands and left a ghostly parade of "the half-living covered in ash and burns" to die in the months ahead.
Since those days, Matsushima said he has felt a "deep if troubled" connection to this Pacific island, about the size of Manhattan, that housed the runways and staging area for the US atomic strikes.
The same can be said for Michael Kuryla (79). He is among the few remaining survivors of the USS Indianapolis, sunk on July 30th, 1945 by a Japanese submarine after delivering parts of the Hiroshima bomb to Tinian. Kuryla spent five days adrift before rescue, watching scores of his fellow crewmen drown while others were devoured by sharks.
On opposite sides of the fateful mushroom cloud, Matsushima and Kuryla are bound by invisible links that drew them and 200 others this week to an extraordinary and controversial commemoration here. Few questions in modern history remain more divisive than whether the US bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Six decades after the war, and with their countries now the closest of allies, no two groups remain more polarised on the issue than US Pacific War veterans and Japan's atomic bomb survivors.
But at what most participants described as the last major gathering at this historic site for a vanishing generation of second World War vets, the local organisers did the once-unthinkable - they brought the two sides together.
For some, like Kuryla, who raptly listened to Matsushima's accounts, the event became the final act of cleansing of a long-harboured hatred. The stocky Chicago resident staunchly believes that dropping the bombs saved countless lives by forcing Japan's early surrender. He gradually came to forgive, he said. And after hearing Matsushima's recollections in a conference room, Kuryla stood up in tears to offer his hand in friendship.
"Yes, it was a horrible thing," Kuryla said. "You suffered the bomb effects and I wish we didn't have to do it. We feel sorry about that. Believe me. But it was war."
"I did not come here to blame," said Matsushima. "You veterans did your job. But, at the same time, what you dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was very horrible. Now, if possible, please, just a drop of your tears, and a prayer that this never happens again." The two men embraced, taking a step toward a reconciliation that - like the question of the bombings itself - is not that simple. The unprecedented attempt did have successes and failures. Most here reached their limits at agreeing to disagree.
The Japanese remain on a campaign to force the world -and Americans in particular - to remember and reflect on the horror of those bombs. But many no longer see merit in discussing it. Dozens of American veterans of the Pacific chose not to attend the event, including the surviving crew members of the Enola Gay and Bock's Car, which delivered the August 9th, 1945, bomb on Nagasaki.
Others bitterly opposed the mayor of Tinian's proposal to turn this commemoration into a "peace conference" by inviting the Japanese delegation. It included former Japanese veterans who fought here and on nearby Saipan - Tinian's sister island in the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
Those who did come, including 38 US vets involved in some way with the atomic bomb missions, mostly welcomed the chance to engage the Japanese. But US military authorities did not attend, nor did Juan Babauta, the governor of the Northern Marianas. One poll by a Saipan newspaper indicated that only one in three island residents supported the event.
"This was not easy for us to pull off - a lot of people were against this idea," confessed Francisco Borja, mayor of Tinian, a lush island with 4,500 residents. His mission is to create a museum here "that will tell both sides" of the atomic legacy, he said.
That legacy remains the last major sore spot in the peacetime relationship between the United States and Japan.
As the 60th anniversary of the second World War's end in the Pacific is marked on August 15th, Japan is still struggling to mend fences with China and South Korea over charges that the Japanese have yet to fully atone for wartime atrocities.
In stark contrast, the United States and Japan are jointly developing a missile defence system and beefing up strategic co-operation to serve as a counterbalance to China's growing might. Japan, which has embraced pacifism since the bombings, seeks to play a major role on the world stage. The government is moving toward changing its constitution, which renounces war, and hopes to gain a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Yet the atomic bombs - which killed about 140,000 in Hiroshima and about 80,000 in Nagasaki while leaving tens of thousands of survivors maimed or plagued by radiation sickness - still haunt the United States and Japan. A joint poll last month by the Associated Press and Japan's Kyodo News Service found 75 per cent of Japanese still feel the bombings were unnecessary, while 68 per cent of Americans called them unavoidable.
Matsushima said many in Hiroshima were also opposed to his visit. But he said he thought it was a chance to share his story with American vets and "see this place in honour of the bomb's victims". He and Kiyoshi Nishida, a 76-year-old Nagasaki survivor, were driven by event organisers to the now-overgrown runways where the US B-29s carrying the bombs took off. They stoically studied what in 1945 was the world's largest airfield. But at the now glass-encased pits that had stored Little Boy, the bomb that hit Hiroshima, and Fat Man, which hit Nagasaki, their reserve shattered.
"So this is where it came from. Somehow, I am glad to have seen it with my own eyes," Matsushima said, softly crying and clutching a bracelet of wooden Buddhist prayer beads. "This is what human beings did. So many dead. Maybe they were doing their jobs, but for us, it was hell."
Fumiyaki Kajiya (66), who saw his three-year-old sister impaled by searing steel in Hiroshima, was visiting the pit where Little Boy was stored when he came across Leon Smith, who had been in charge of maintaining the bomb in Tinian. The men struck up a conversation about the horror of the victims, the American rationale for dropping the bomb, and the paradox of Japan's protection under the US nuclear umbrella. Beside the atomic pit, the two shook hands.
"This is not something that can be resolved or agreed upon," Kajiya said. "But I feel that we've achieved something very important. We've finally started talking." - (LA Times-Washington Post)