A perverse appeal
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Rosaleen Love
Download the complete article PDF
Rosaleen Love's biography and other articles by this writer
I was an accidental tourist. I travelled to Japan to see my daughter, Nora, who – like many young Australians – financed her travels by teaching English. Nora went to Japan as a guest worker, and I went as the guest worker's mother. I'd travelled in Europe, but not in Asia, and I wasn't looking forward to it. I thought I'd feel totally lost and way out of my comfort zone as a tourist. Of course, that happened. The feeling never left me. But, instead of finding it scary, I found it exhilarating. I kept going back for more.
Nora was first posted to Hiroshima, then after two years to Okinawa, where she lived at Ginowan in a flat overlooking the US Futenma Marine Corps Air Station. Futenma is one of thirty-nine American military bases that cover 10 per cent of the island, and one of the largest. Early each morning we woke to the boom of the Stars and Stripes as it blared from loudspeakers on the base, followed by the Battle Hymn of the Marines. One day an American military helicopter crashed into the university just up the road, luckily at a time when the students were absent.
While I was there, because I was there, I visited the Peace Parks at Hiroshima and Okinawa. After Nora returned to Australia, I decided I wanted to see more of Japan, and I made a deliberate choice to go to Nagasaki. In each of these places, the Peace Parks created by civic authorities have become UNESCO World Heritage sites, sites of global importance marking the final acts of World War II.
On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb exploded in the air above Hiroshima, with the death toll then and in the years following estimated at more than 150,000. The second atomic bomb exploded in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945: the estimated death toll then, and in the following years, was more than 140,000. The empty space now occupied by Peace Parks was created at the moment everybody and everything there was destroyed. The Peace Park at Okinawa marks the site of the Battle for Okinawa, which took place from March to July 1945; it was where the US forces landed and the Japanese military put up its last defence. The tourist knows well in advance that these are places with dark histories.
My initial reluctance to visit the Peace Parks was tied up with the fear of what I would see and learn – a fear that was entirely justified. Being there, doing "dark tourism", entails immersion in a place of mass death, where horrors happened within living memory. The ambience is overwhelming. I ask myself whether this is what I really want to do with my leisure time, and the answer is no, not really. To be there and not go, though, would be like betraying the dead, turning away from knowing about their suffering. It is important to find out more. Facing the horror is a defining aspect of dark tourism.
Years separated my trips to the three Peace Parks at Hiroshima, Okinawa and Nagasaki. In reflecting now on the tourism experience, I bring to it memories – some fuzzy, others inexorably clear. The clearest memories are those moments of visceral impact when some sights seem too much to bear. There's a sudden jolt, a "wham!" experience, the recognition "so that's what it was like", "so there it is". Then there is the return home, the heightened awareness of, and receptivity to, further information from relevant TV programs, articles and books.
THE PEACE PARK AT OKINAWA PROVED THE MOST personally disturbing – something I had not expected. The two A-bomb sites are places where horror is anticipated and found. The Okinawan experience was worse, if such horrors are comparative rather than each, separately, absolute. At Okinawa I experienced the biggest jolt, or so it seems now, remembering these visits several years later. Today the Peace Park at Okinawa sits on a beautiful cliff-top site overlooking the Pacific Ocean; in 1945, it was a corpse-strewn morass. Okinawa, as Japan's outer defence, was the place chosen by US forces for the first landing before the anticipated invasion of the Japanese home islands. Okinawa was also chosen by the Japanese Imperial Army as sacrifice in defence of the homeland. The civilian population of Okinawa was doubly doomed, regarded as the enemy by both American and Japanese soldiers.
At the Cornerstone of Peace, the eternal flame, the fire of peace, burns at the centre of a shallow pool close to the cliffs. Radiating out from the flame, as the "everlasting waves of peace", row upon row of stone plinths record the names of most of the 237,000 people killed during the Battle of Okinawa. Over 300,000 people died, victor and vanquished, military and civilians, including 94,000 Okinawan non-combatants. Japanese, American, Korean, Taiwanese and British names are recorded in recognition of the dead from both sides and no sides. Some names are still being added: the names of Okinawans who were in Nagasaki and Hiroshima when the bombs fell, and became hibakusha, victims of the bomb. The naming of all the war dead, people of various nationalities and ethnicities, is what makes this site special – as former US president Bill Clinton described it in 2000, "more than a war memorial, more of a memorial to the tragedy of war". This is even more so if acknowledgement is made of names that are not there – the names of Korean "comfort women", for example, and of some Okinawans whose families were opposed to the project.
The tourist returns home, and wants to find out more. The question, "Why did they die, here then?" (asked by Gerald Figal in 1997) inspires further study of the past. In "Waging Peace in Okinawa", also by Figal (2003), I discovered the work of the Okinawan peace activist Ishihara Masaie and his Okinawan philosophy of peace. I began to understand what I had missed in my visit – though of course, as a non-Japanese speaker, I knew I was missing a lot. I discovered that the Peace Museum at Okinawa gives more of the context of World War II than the museums at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in particular more of the dark history of Japanese colonial domination and aggression in Asia.
At the Okinawa Peace Memorial Museum, the exhibits present not only the horrors of the American bombardment and landing on the island, but also the cruelty of the Japanese Imperial Army soldiers towards the Okinawans. Exhibits depict the horrors of the forced suicides in the Die-for-the Emperor campaign, and show shocking photographs of the dead. Japanese soldiers forced schoolgirls to jump off the nearby Mabuni cliffs, and the girls are shown lying in piles on top of each other after they fell to their deaths. The photos were taken soon afterwards by US forces. Equally horrible are film clips that show US soldiers using flame-throwers on undergrowth in which people hid. They are shown running, covered in flames, before falling.
There was much I missed, much I found out later. The year before the Peace Memorial Museum opened in 2000, civic officials changed an exhibit in the section on the Battle of Okinawa to tone down images of the cruelty of the Japanese military towards Okinawans. In one diorama, a Japanese soldier, bayonet drawn, is shown beside an Okinawan family sheltering in a cave. The original exhibit was intended to show a Japanese soldier ordering a mother at gunpoint to smother her crying baby. The exhibit was changed several times. In one change, the rifle was removed entirely. In another, the soldier pointed his bayonet away from the family, as if protecting them. After I returned home, I learned I could have taken a tourist trip through the Haebaru Army Hospital Cave and Itokazu Cave to see what these places were like during the war.
I know I caught only a fraction of what was on offer. It was enough, for then. As a non-Japanese speaker, I was moving in a fog of incomprehension. If I were fluent in Japanese, I might have picked up the nuances of the inscriptions. One memorial may be to people who were killed, the next to others who were slaughtered. The word for "kill" is used to mean killed by the occupying forces; the word for "slaughter" is used for lists of Okinawan civilians killed by Japanese soldiers. In "Waging Peace", Gerald Figal reports the fact that that the graves of Japanese soldiers may carry patriotic messages about "the glorious spirits and manifest merits of the war dead", while the civilian-centred memorials carry messages of peace.