Shinichi's Trike & The Lessons of War

(Portions of this post were originally published on August 6, 2007)

Shinichi Tetsutani loved to ride his beloved tricycle outside his house in Higashi-Hakushima-Cho, a neighborhood in the Japanese port city of Hiroshima.

Shin-chan, as his family called the three-year-old, was doing just that on the morning of August 6, 1945, when there was a brilliant flash in the sky.

Shin was about a quarter mile from the hypocenter of the detonation of the first nuclear weapon to be used in anger, the consequence of a frightening new technology that its creators were all too aware would change warfare -- and civilization -- forever by wreaking unimaginable death and destruction.

Shin died that night, one of about 140,000 people to perish in the atomic bomb explosion and from associated effects, principally radiation poisoning. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, taking about 74,000 lives. Kyoto, the original target of the first bomb, was spared because the government officials and generals who were desperate to end the war nevertheless were sensitive of its cultural significance.

A third atomic bomb was being readied, but by August 15 the conciliators in the Japanese government had won out over hard-line militarists who had had the tacit backing of Emperor Hirohito, who was not the pitfully manipulated figurehead the Japanese claim, and was the villian of this story. In any event, Japan capitulated and World War II finally was over after some 234,874 Americans had lost their lives in the Pacific theater alone.

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There is no military-political action in modern history laden with as much baggage as President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb.

Those who have argued in favor of his decision offer these arguments:

* The bombs ended the war months sooner and saved an estimated half million American lives that could have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese mainland.

* Millions of people under Japanese occupation in The Philippines and elsewhere who faced starvation, including hundreds of thousands of POWs, were freed.

* The hard-line militarists had adamantly refused to surrender although it was obvious that the war was lost.

Those who have argued against Truman's decision offer these arguments:

* The bombings were immoral, a crime against humanity and constituted genocide.

* In a contemporary context, they were an act of terrorism.

* They were militarily unnecessary because Japan was essentially defeated and ready to surrender.

* * * * *

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is situated at one end of a park. At the other end is Ground Zero and the so-called A-Bomb Dome, the concrete and wire framework of a domed government building that was destroyed in the blast.

I saw Shin's trike on my first visit to Hiroshima and the museum and it is seared in my memory much like the frozen hands on a pocket watch in an adjoining exhibit that will forever read 8:15, the moment that the atomic bomb exploded.

My second visit to Hiroshima included an extensive tour of the hospital and laboratories of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, which was established in 1948 and funded by the U.S. in an act both altruistic and a reflection of the need to better understand the horrors that it had visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For the next 36 years, the commission studied the latent effects of radiation among bomb survivors, including the outcome of pregnancies one and two generations later.

I would have been unprepared for the gracious reception that I received in Hiroshima -- in fact the warmest of anywhere I went during my two-plus years in Japan -- had I not befriended Hiroshi, a native of the city who ran a small bar near my Tokyo apartment. On some nights I would stay after the bar closed, leaving from a hidden waist-high door that led to a narrow back alley after she would regale me with stories about being a teenager during the war whose military family had been evacuated to the country.

It was Hiroshi's view that few Japanese felt enmity toward the U.S. for the atomic bombings, as well as the firebombings that incinerated Tokyo and so many other cities that there were relatively few unscathed targets by August 1945.

While I did occasionally experience hostility, usually in small coastal villages at the end of a rail line, Hiroshi was right. Although they would never admit it to a gaijin (foreigner), most Japanese were well aware that their government, in the thrall of those hard-liners, had started a war that brought out the worst in them. The payback was awful, of course, but the Japanese who have toiled to remember the bombings -- from putting Shin's trike on display to working hard to insure that there are no more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis -- have brought out the best in them.

* * * * *

The question of whether it will ever be justified to visit the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki upon a sworn enemy of the U.S. raged anew in the context of the Global War on Terror when a longshot for the Democratic presidential nomination by the name of Barack Obama declared in July 2007 that he would not use such weapons to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while favorite Hillary Clinton responded that no option should be ruled out.

I happen to thing that the so-called Doomsday Option is insane. Using even tactical nukes against terrorists should never be part of the counterinsurgency playbook, although it was considered in the early years of the Vietnam War.

The point is, in my humble view, that it is too easy to overlay contemporary attitudes on historic realities. President Truman made the right decision in 1945 under circumstances so extraordinary that it is difficult to imagine them being replicated at some future time. Even in the post-9/11 world.