Susan Southard's book on postwar Nagasaki (2)

August 8, 2015

Memories of those marked by nuclear war

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/08/08/books/book-reviews/memories-marked-nuclear-war/#.VcdkEPnwmot

Special To The Japan Times

August, 2015. This is a month of great testimonials: outpourings of guilt, grief, consternation, remorse, atonement and, for those whose ends are not served by an honest reckoning of the past, evasion.

Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, by Susan Southard.
416 pages
Viking, Nonfiction.

It was, arguably, Emperor Hirohito, who is posthumously called Emperor Showa, who first practiced the appropriation of grief and tragedy to deflect responsibility when he made his surrender speech to the Japanese public at the end of World War II.

Talking of the enemy having deployed a “new and most cruel bomb,” the Emperor depicted Japan’s surrender, in author Susan Southard’s words, as “a heroic and humane act,” calculated to save civilization from total extinction.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 followed rampages by Japanese soldiers, who, “tore through Shanghai, Nanjing, and other Chinese cities, slaughtering, mutilating, and torturing millions of Chinese soldiers and civilians,” writes Southard in her new book “Nagasaki: Living with Nuclear War.” In the postwar years, Japanese school children did not grow up learning about such incidents as the Rape of Manila, or the 1938 terror bombing of residential districts in Chongqing.

Southard’s book addresses the destruction of Nagasaki and its consequences, and she deftly reconstructs a detailed profile of the city before the bomb, outlining the political climate of the era as Japan entered a period retrospectively known as kurotani (literally, “the dark valley”).

Even before the bomb was dropped on the morning of Aug. 9, 1945, many residents of Nagasaki were suffering from malnutrition, reduced to subsisting on meals made from, “acorns, sawdust, soybean grinds, potato stems, peanut shells and pumpkin gruel, with protein sources from bugs, worms, rodent flesh, and snakes.”

In readiness for an invasion, anemic civilians were still expected to participate in war drills using bamboo spears. The absurdity of pitting hand-held wooden weapons against a 5-ton plutonium bomb with the impact of 21,000 tons of TNT and with infrared heat rays that instantly, “carbonized human and animal flesh and vaporized internal organs,” underlines the delusional state of the Japanese authorities, who were already fully cognizant of the attack on Hiroshima.

Southard examines wartime propaganda from both Japan and the U.S. — campaigns designed in both instances to dehumanize the enemy. The resulting climate of irrationality and bloodlust helped to condone the unthinkable: mass evisceration of civilians. Assessing the character of the Japanese, the author quotes from a contemporary Time magazine article: “Perhaps he is human. Nothing … indicates it.”

An example is given of just how determined and how utterly fixated the U.S. War Department was on unleashing the bomb on Nagasaki. Even when informed of a POW camp near the city’s center, the information failed to stall the release of the bomb. Little stock was taken of the fate of atomic bomb victims. American scientists neglected to conduct studies into the possible effects of high radiation exposure, nor were medical treatments for potential victims explored.

As it happened, radiation toxicity would cause, among a myriad of other reactions, skin, blood, liver and endocrine diseases, leukemia, internal bleeding, low blood cell counts, nausea and permanent keloid scars. Many babies exposed to radiation in the uterus would experience brain damage, retardation and other disabilities. Those who survived would have to cope with the memory of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, quoted in this book, termed the “suddenness and totality of their death saturation.”

Southard’s credentials as a writer on this topic are unimpeachable. Already fluent in Japanese, she visited Nagasaki for the first time during a trip with her high school senior class. Making numerous trips to Nagasaki as an adult, she was able to conduct extensive interviews with several hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), whose physical traumas and erosion of health have not diminished their memories.

Having survived the nuclear furnace, the victims of Nagasaki should have become icons of hope and fortitude. As it turned out, they represented, in the eyes of many Japanese, objects of embarrassment and even public derision. In a supreme irony, these victims of a grotesque scientific experiment were now treated by their own countrymen as grotesqueries. Even more reprehensible is the existence, decades after the event, of discrimination against the children and grandchildren of hibakusha, who, if they were to speak openly, may be denied employment or have their marriage prospects scuttled.

Despite the gravity of her subject, Southard writes in an engaging narrative style that propels the reader through the phantasmagoric horrors of nuclear extermination and its aftermath. Given the nature of the topic, however, readers should steel themselves for her unsparing account. In one instance, Southard describes a young woman wandering amid the ruins after the explosion, carrying, “a bucket holding the decapitated head of a young girl, all that the woman had been able to find of her husband, son, and daughter.”

I asked Southard about how she coped emotionally with the traumatic testimonies of her subjects.

“Often I had to take breaks in order to get through a segment of work,” she explained, adding that one of the things that sustained her was, “the thought that these stories needed to be told, and if the survivors could live through it, I would find a way to write about it.”

This reminded me of a comment made by war correspondent Emma Daly, searching for the meaning of her own work reporting from the front line: “the purpose is to record these scenes so that no-one … would have an excuse to say: ‘I did not know.'”