A perverse appeal - Page 2

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Rosaleen Love

Page 2 of 2

WHERE THE NAGASAKI AND HIROSHIMA MEMORIALS DEPICT the horrors of a unique new weapon of war, the Okinawan memorials show the hideous effects of the weapons of conventional warfare: the flame-throwers, the phosphor bombs, the grenades thrown into caves where civilians and soldiers tried to shelter. One of the hibashuka of Hiroshima, Toshiko Sasaki, has said that she thought too much attention had been given to the power and uniqueness of the A-bomb. She wanted more focus on the causes of war, the evil of war, rather than the particular instruments of war. She wanted to get away from that sense of the perverse attraction of the bomb.

I came to learn how hotly contested the "peace" claims have become at these three sites of wartime destruction. The intentions are admirable: the exhibits are intended to present the horrors of the past, for the sake of a better, more peaceful future. The message is that, by showing the horrors of war, visitors will see that wars are futile, that good people as well as bad die horribly, and that the only solution is to turn towards peace. Yet wars happen, cruelty continues, and there will be visitors who find voyeuristic thrills in the prospect of apocalypse and Armageddon. Empathic understanding, sympathy, sharing the burden of pain – these are not the only outcomes possible.

I found myself thinking about what differences there might be between a Peace Park and a war memorial. A Peace Park will be totally upfront about the tragedy of war; a war memorial may not. Before the cliff-top site in Okinawa was designated a Peace Park, it was a "battlefield park special zone". Patriotic memorials to the praiseworthy actions of the glorious war dead are in contrast with poignant memorials to dead innocents – the children, the schoolgirls co-opted as nurses. Just as with Australian history and historians, Okinawa has its history wars: they concern the question of whose history it is and how the massacres of indigenous peoples are portrayed or excluded.

The traveller is a philosophical traveller, not content with the experience of the sombre day out. Where is peace to be found in all of this? How it is it possible to move from the portrayal of the horrors of war to an activist agenda for the promotion of peace? "Learning the lessons of history, we renew our commitment to peace": as Gerald Figal points out, these words are proclaimed official statements, and the three Peace Museums attempt the peace task in their various ways.

Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting on the prayer for the peace of Jerusalem (a tough, ongoing task), made reference to the multiple meanings of shalom: joy, prosperity, goodness and abundance. Peace is more than the absence of war. Today Hiroshima and Nagasaki are rebuilt as modern cities, with prosperity and abundance abounding – at least in contrast to the postwar years. Joy and goodness are trickier to evaluate. Okinawans may find peace in their park, but not in the ongoing presence of the US military bases and their role in bombing raids in the Vietnam War, and the ongoing Middle East conflicts.

EXHIBITS AT THE PEACE MUSEUMS AT NAGASAKI AND HIROSHIMA emphasise the unique nature of the atomic bombs. In graphic horror, they bring home the message that not only did the bombs kill on explosion, but radioactivity keeps on killing for generations. The Peace Park visitor knows she did not start a war – cannot start a war – all by herself; nuclear powers must also be targeted. The civic authorities keep count of nuclear tests, and write telegrams and letters of protest to the offending governments. They seek the abolition of nuclear weapons. The letters are sent, while nuclear tests continue. The Peace Museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki show walls of telegrams and letters from their mayors protesting all nuclear weapons tests since 1968. At Hiroshima, the most recent letter is to Vladimir Putin, dated August 11, 2004, though the websites maintain more up-to-date listings. The visitor admires the persistence in writing thousands of letters, if noting how little effect it is having out there with nuclear proliferation.

The Japanese word hibakusha was used after the A-bombs to mean those Japanese who survived and were injured by the bombs. Exhibits in the Nagasaki and Hiroshima Peace Museums show the word now being extended to cover all victims of nuclear programs – military or civilian – elsewhere in the world. At the Nagasaki museum, TV monitors play interviews with overseas hibakusha, including those from the former Soviet testing grounds in Semiplatinsk in present-day Kazakhstan, the uranium mines at Ronneburg in the former East Germany, the US testing grounds at Nevada, and the Marshall Islands.

It could be that I saw this exhibit by means of electricity from one of Japan's nuclear power stations.

One caption effectively commented that there doesn't have to be a nuclear war for there to be a nuclear disaster. Victims may be created all along the nuclear chain. In October 2005, a photographic exhibition at Nagasaki Railway Station showed Iraqi children suffering from leukaemia, blamed on the effects of depleted uranium from the Gulf War. Some children came to Nagasaki for treatment.

Earlier I mentioned that the dark tourism experience packs a few surprises. The sudden jolt, the "wham" experience, the moment of visceral impact, comes when a sight hits home with sudden understanding of its meaning. At Okinawa, it was an experience in the museum where, rounding a corner, I nearly collided with a larger-than-life model of a US soldier in the army of occupation, arm outstretched as if demanding an official pass. At Hiroshima, one moment of sudden catching of breath was when I casually looked out from the window of Nora's flat into what, in Australia, I'd see as someone's backyard, and saw some grave markers. In the middle of the Peace Park in Nagasaki, the visitor is invited to descend a few steps. The steps go down over a metre to the level of the ground in July 1945. A glass window is set into the earth wall, an archaeologist's slice in time. In the aftermath of war, the ground level rose this far on the top of the remnants of buildings, the bones of the dead, the debris of the city. The viewer senses the backward flow of time, from this rubble to the city that previously stood in this place.

OVER AND OVER AGAIN, VISITORS TO PEACE PARKS are confronted with evidence of the horrors of war. I want to know where peace, not war, might be found, and in Okinawa I found some special places. At Nakagusuku Castle, built in the fifteenth century, burned to ruins some time shortly after, I found an utaki or sacred grove within the castle walls. There are some trees, some stones, a hearth and a view over the ocean to Kudaka Island, an island important in local myths of origin. In one local story of creation, the goddess Amamiku descended from the heavenly city to the ocean, seeking a holy place where the gods might come down and live. She found a place in the open sea, and returned to the heavenly city for the earth, stone, grass and trees she needed to make Kudaka Island, or the island of the Fountain Palms. In the ruins of Nakagusuku Castle, facing the island of creation, people offer prayers for peace and prosperity, as they no doubt did long before the castle was created and destroyed, long before recent wars of conquest and domination. The sacred grove is destroyed, but is renewable. Earth, stones, grass and trees are easily replenished. The sacred grove may be enclosed within castle walls, but it endures. I find offerings, of coins with holes in the middle, of ashes in the hearth. This is a place of peace, or so it seems to the tourist bombarded with images of war. This place, and the other utaki on the island, may outlast the cornerstone, the eternal flame, the everlasting waves of peace of the official memorial.

Arthur Koestler argued that Hiroshima was special, and that's what I thought before I visited the Peace Parks. In Janus: A Summing Up (Hutchinson, 1978), Koestler said: "If I were asked to name the most important date in the history and prehistory of the human race, I would answer without hesitation 6 August 1945." His reason: before this time, humans lived in the knowledge of their individual deaths. Since Hiroshima, he claimed, mankind as a whole lives now with the prospect of its extinction as a species. I'm not so sure. I'm inclined to think that this happened before Hiroshima. It's an insight into nature and human nature that has come since Charles Darwin first examined the question of extinction. Humans are organisms like other species, in a state of transition to future forms of life, given a few hundred million years.

Perhaps Hiroshima can be argued to be special because humans may be killed, as a species, by the tools they create, rather than by the cosmic accident of asteroid impact. If humans, as a species, disappear because of the radioactivity they create, then that doesn't mark the complete disjunction Koestler, and others, imagine. Something will no doubt survive. Creatures as weird as the dinosaurs, or the bipedal ape, may one day inherit the Earth – what's left of it. They might be born with the instinct for peace the next time round, and that will be a good thing – at least for them. ♦

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From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise

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