The Hiroshima Panels
A little over twenty years ago, I sat in a Quaker Meeting
House in a small town west of Des Moines, Iowa, looking at slides of several
folding screens painted by the late artist couple, Iri and Toshi Maruki. The screens contain
depictions of the horrific aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, and
are known world-wide as The Hiroshima
Panels. By the time I saw images of those screens, I had seen many photos of
the devastation in books, but those screens were different. This was art. A
horrific event transformed into art.
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| Hiroshima Panels |
What was shocking, what the photos had never revealed to me, was movement - the body writhing in pain. And that movement was extremely uncomfortable to witness.
I can honestly say that that moment was the first time I really felt the horror of the
atomic blast. Those bodies in agony were suddenly alive, in the process of
dying. Instead of seeing those images in terms of the past, and so safely
distant, I suddenly saw those people – their terror and pain – as something
that was happening right in front of me.
It was not hard to come to the conclusion that this should
not happen to anyone else, ever again.
It Saved Lives! & Willful Amnesia
Today is the 70th Anniversary of the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima. The official US version is a recycling of the same old
message: The bomb bay doors opened, the
bomb flew out, and the war ended. It saved lives on both sides, so move on.
We are a culture that’s good at ‘moving on.’ Of course what we really mean by ‘moving
on’ is ‘forgetting.’ In part, this willful forgetting is a refusal to look at
the complexities and consequences of war itself.
The US military spent a lot of time and energy on keeping footage of the devastation from the US public in the decades after WWII (See Atomic Cover-up by Greg Mitchell ). In the sanctioned images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no Japanese victims ever appeared. And so it was not only easier to think about the bombings as just, but also to think about nuclear power and nuclear weapons as powerful and deadly, but good – because they were in the right hands.
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| Official Image |
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| Censored Photo |
Twenty years ago, there was controversy over the
Smithsonian’s exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the bombing. Along
with the fuselage of the Enola Gay (the B-29 that dropped the first bomb), the Smithsonian
staff wanted to include the Hiroshima Panels and some artifacts collected from
the aftermath debris. Conservative and WWII veteran’s groups rose up in arms,
saying that this inclusion would present the Japanese as victims. The exhibit was
eventually scaled back and the story of the consequences of the bomb was
dropped.
Weirdly enough, the story of the panels being displayed in
the US has fared no better. Very few galleries have been willing to display
them over the years. According to Yoshiko Hayakawa, who has brought the
Hiroshima Panels several times to the US, it has always been
difficult to find a gallery or museum willing or able to display them. They were last shown here in 1995, in Minnesota. (Japanese art on atomic bombings
exhibited in Washington, AP, June 12, 2015)
How we see the bombings supports
how we see ourselves now
From my readings, it’s clear that there were many
alternatives to dropping the bomb and none of them were pursued. According to Paul
Ham (Hiroshima
Nagasaki, St. Martin’s Press, 2011), when the decision was made to drop
the bomb the planned invasion of the Japanese islands by US troops had already been
called off as unfeasible and not needed to end the war.
So, how we tell the story of the bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki supports how we see ourselves now.
To blindly accept the official version – or to ignore the whole thing – is to
accept or ignore how we are currently conducting military actions around the
world. To accept the official version is to accept (or be willfully ignorant
of) the funneling of untold billions into research and development for unneeded
weapons of mass destruction.
It saved lives! This was also the line used by both
the Bush and Obama administrations in relation to torture. It is constantly
invoked now when anyone questions the various conflicts the US is engaged in
around the world – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, The Congo,
etc. (according to Washington Blog the US is currently engaged in military
conflicts in 74 countries).
Our refusal to examine the motives and horrific
consequences of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is directly related to our
refusal to discuss and question the countless hellfire missiles fired from drones
throughout the Middle East and Africa today that murder hundreds of civilians.
By reducing such a devastating event to a few simple phrases we shelter ourselves
from the complex truth of the past – and so continue to shelter ourselves from the
present.
The Hiroshima Panels & The
Complex Truth
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| Detail of Crows |
One of the Hiroshima Panels depicts the death of
American prisoners of war in the bombing.
Another one portrays the plight of the Korean slaves in the aftermath. The
one depicting Koreans is called Crows,
a rendering of crows picking at the corpses of Koreans in black ink. The
Japanese buried Korean bodies last, reflecting the discrimination that the
enslaved Koreans faced even in death.
The panels portrayed the Japanese as victims, yes, but also as victimizers. This is the truth of war. Forgetting the complexity of this tragedy means that we can continue to see war from only one side: meaning, all of ‘our’ actions are necessarily heroic and all actions on the ‘other side’ are necessarily evil. Note our current media and military influenced kindergarten language that labels victims of drone strikes as ‘the bad guys.’ It’s grotesquely simple. And it helps make the killing that much easier.
On the 70th Anniversary of the first atomic bombing, the panels have finally made it to Washington, DC. They are currently being shown in The American University Museum, located in the Katzen Arts Center at The American University.
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| Iri & Toshi Maruki |
A great series dedicated to the 70th
Anniversary on the Al-Jazeera America site can be found here:
Other articles worth looking at:
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| Hiroshima Today/70th Commemoration |
Thank you for this. I have it the anniverary in my calendar and this morning when it popped up (I have it marked as "US evil bombing of Hiroshima 1945"), I wasn't sure what to post about it. I'll post your blog..
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