Hiroshima on December 7

Top: The Atomic Bomb Dome, from Ground Zero in Hiroshima; the ruined building has been maintained as a reminder of the devastation of war.

Above: Paper cranes formed into doves, created by schoolchildren and displayed in Peace Park in Hiroshima.

The hundred years between the opening of Japan (if that’s the right word) and the end of World War II were almost a blur of trade, rapid economic development, military buildup, and turn of the century wars with Russia, China, Korea, and forty years later the Allied powers. Not too many American even know about the Japanese war with Russia, invasions of Manchuria and the establishment of Japanese occupation in parts of China, including Shanghai, in the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly enough, even though World War II killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of Japanese, and ended with the devastation of the atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima (the museum at Hiroshima notes that 140,000 people died within a few months of the bombing, and thousands more months and years later of their injuries and radiation-related diseases), the history of conflict between Japan and the United States, though horrible and deadly in an almost unimaginable way, is a relatively short one in comparison to Japan’s conflicts with China and Korea; those countries are important sources of Japanese culture but were also enemies for centuries.

As some historians have written, when you look at what happened in and to Japan between the arrival of Commodore Perry and World War II, you wonder if perhaps if had been better to stay isolated than to jump into the world arena. I went to Hiroshima with some of our students last Thursday night (some of us had no classes on Friday). That happened to be December 7, an irony that was not lost on the students and me. I know people who visited Hiroshima twenty years ago who imagined themselves met with angry glances and comments from people who remembered the bombing. There are fewer and fewer people who were adults during the war alive now, sixty years later. There are plenty still, though, who were children then and are now in their sixties and seventies. There are an estimated 350,000 people still alive in Japan, according to the Peace Museum, who survived Hiroshima’s or Nagasaki’s bombing. But we did not encounter any unkind words or resentment from any of the people we encountered; surely Hiroshima residents are accustomed to tourists who are coming to see and consider the famous site of the bomb blast. And Hiroshima offers plenty to see. It’s a modern city – it feels much more modern than historic Kyoto, which was not bombed. Kyoto still includes many ancient temples and old wooden houses, and forbids building skyscrapers over five stories tall.