Original Child Bomb: What We Talk About When We Talk About The Bomb (Part 6)

Today is the 72nd anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. This is the last post in the series. For now. The other posts can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. 

Nagasaki, August 1945

There are still so many issues to explore: how the collusion between science and big money (The Manhattan Project) created a legacy of how science is done to this day; the Dr. Strangelove-ian aestheticism that some feel toward the god-like power and extreme violence of these weapons; how the US government censored much of the information and imagery about the bombings from the US public and how that legacy of being treated as children has shaped how the US public sees itself in terms of each new war that has followed (as innocent children, willfully ignorant of atrocities committed in their name); and a look at nuclear weapons proliferation and the lack of interest on the part of any nuclear power to begin talking about disarmament.

Nagasaki Peace Park, 2017

Right now, today, the nuclear missile saber rattling is still going on between Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump. Two narcissistic leaders, consumed with their own power; showing the world, through their reckless rhetoric, what deep insecurities they have about their manhood. It would be almost funny…but mostly sad…if you saw this threat and counter-threat going on in a bar…but we're talking about nuclear weapons. Too many lives are at stake. As I've said a few times in this series: NO ONE should have this kind of power. Not the US, not North Korea, not Russia, not China, or any other countries possessing a nuclear arsenal. No one is capable of handling it.

A Shadow Etched in Stone

Nagasaki, 1945

As I explored different aspects of the nuclear weapons debate, specifically taking a good, long look at the strategy of bombing civilians in general, the image of the shadow etched in stone on the steps of a bank in Hiroshima kept coming back to me. The shadow without body, an image of a person who is not there, anonymous, became etched deep into my mind, and, for a time, I couldn't shake it. It appeared in my mind's eye before sleep, and returned when I woke up. Who was that? Why were they waiting in front of the bank? Did they have money worries? What did they hear that morning before the blast? Birds? Trolleys?

Nagasaki, 1945

I began to see the image of the shadow on the stone steps as a symbol for all those who have ever died, or suffered terrible loss, from falling bombs - not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims - but all the dead everywhere. When bombs begin falling, civilians become shadows without bodies. No one considers all those bodies in their decision-making process. Which leads me to a conclusion about the nuclear bombing of the two Japanese cities in 1945: it is my belief that once war is declared and the fighting begins - a hideous and morally indefensible decision like that is bound to be made.

Shadow Poem

Mother & Child/Hiroshima, August 1945

During the weeks when I could not shake the image of the shadow in stone, a poem began to form. The subject matter called to mind the writing of Paul Celan - creating a balance between the desperate urge to give something so terrible a voice and the desire to remain silent as an appropriate form of reverence to the magnitude of the pain and loss suffered. I started reading Celan again. After I finished the poem, I realized that the last half of the last line is from one of Celan's later, more fragmentary poems. So, a gassho to Celan for helping me finish it.

  

Absence: Shadow

1.

What is always there

is what is not there.

2.

A lifted leg, deep in stone.

Running, deeper into stone.

3.

No tongue, can't say the word.

Take it, please take it, my word.

4.

Money worries. Morning heat.

The heart. A bird.

5.

No skin. No sense.

Take it, take it, my cheek against stone.

6.

At what temperature

does love burn?

7.

No lifted hand, gesturing for water.

Take it, please take it, drink from my mouth.

(for all the dead from falling bombs)

Hiroshima Peace March, 2017

 Other resources:

Nagasaki: life after nuclear war by Susan Southard

Nagasaki: the forgotten victim of nuclear terror (article about Southard's book)

Hiroshima by John Hersey

Hersey's New Yorker article about Hiroshima, 1946  

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Arsenals of Folly, Dark Sun and Twilight of the Bombs, by Richard Rhodes

Empire & The Bomb: how the US uses nuclear weapons to dominate the world by Joseph Gerson

Willliam J. Perry on the Nuclear Threat - Truthdig

Peace crane offerings at the Children's Peace Memorial, Hiroshima

Organizations

ICAN: international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons: http://www.icanw.org/

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: https://www.wagingpeace.org/

Nukewatch: https://nukewatch.org/  

Peace Action: http://www.peace-action.org/

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament: http://www.cnduk.org/

Transform Now Plowshares: https://transformnowplowshares.wordpress.com/

Original Child Bomb: What We Talk About When We Talk About The Bomb (Part 2)

A section from "Poems of the Atomic Bomb" 

by Tōge Sankichi

This is part two of Original Child Bomb - an exploration of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it's legacy in the 21st century. Here in the US, history is a tricky thing. The past is seen as inconsequential when it doesn't serve our current aims and purposes. (But then, I would say this is true for just about any nation and corporation on earth...and many individuals...) The first part, about the annual peace vigil at Los Alamos and the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty, is the previous post.

Toge Sankichi

The poems of  Tōge Sankichi bring the historical support or criticism of the bomb into sharp focus. These poems are a potent and living record: this is what happened on the ground. Under the noise from the arguments for and against, I keep looking at what happened to those people - real people, flesh and blood people - during and after the blast. This helps me focus on the present - right now, in many parts of the world, there are those living with the threat of imminent annihilation from missiles from the sky (US drone strikes), those that have lost family members and loved ones from incessant bombing campaigns, those that have lost their homes, their eyes, their legs, their hands... 

Here's a section from the book

Poems of the Atomic Bomb 
(Genbaku shishū)
by 
Tōge Sankichi:

activist, poet, and survivor of the atomic blast in Hiroshima.

Record of a Storehouse

That Day: In a field of lotus plants, all leaves burned into the shape of a horseshoe, the place: the second story of the army clothing warehouse. A concrete floor with dim light from a single tall latticed window. A layer of army-issue blankets spread on the floor; those who have fled lie here facing all directions. All are naked save for the fragments of underpants and work pants on their waists.

            Those who so fill the floor that there is nowhere left to step are nearly all younger schoolgirls who had left to take care of the evacuated houses. But the scars that cover their entire bodies from their faces on down, the mercurochrome, the clots of blood, the ointment, the bandages, transformed by filth, make them look like a group of old beggar women.

            Shaded by thick posts, the pails and buckets by the wall are full of dirt, and into these they pour excrement, and amid the foul, chest-piercing smell,

            "Help me daddy, help me!"

            "Water, hooray, we have water! Oh, I’m so happy!"

            "Fifty sen! Hey, here is fifty sen!"

            "Take it away that dead thing at my feet take it away!"

            The voices are high and thin and unceasing; the minds of some of the schoolgirls have already been torn apart; half of the girls have become corpses that no longer move, but there’s no one to take them away. Occasionally, a parent bound in air-raid clothing will enter looking for a daughter; flustered, he’ll look around for familiar features or for work pants of a particular pattern. When they know this is going on, the girls briefly cry out desperately for water and for help.

            "Water, sir! Draw some water for me!"

            Hairless, one eye in a spasm, her entire body swollen, a girl emerges partway out of the shadow of a post and holds up a crushed canteen, waves it in the air, and repeats her plea again and again and again. But the adults have heard that they are not to give water to the burn victims, and they pay no attention to these cries. So most of the girls get tired of calling and spitefully drop their voices, and that girl too finally collapses back into the shadows.

            The storehouse without light sends into the earth the echoes of the faraway city that continues to burn, and, its crazed voices wasting away and rising up, is swallowed by the darkness of the night.

(Translated by Karen Thornber)

*****

A PDF of the entire book can be found here.

(The book contains poems from the moment of the blast, through the aftermath, culminating in a peace march in Hiroshima in 1950, commemorating the 'death anniversary' during the American occupation, that was crushed by police)

Memorial for Toge Sankichi at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

"...give back the human race..."


(Original Child Bomb is a mistranslation of the Japanese term for the atom bomb, genshi bakudan. Genshi, which means "atom," contains root characters which, when rendered individually, can possibly mean "original" and "child." There is a Thomas Merton poem and a documentary of the same name. It was supposed for years that this was the literal translation of "atom bomb" because the Japanese saw it as the first of its kind. As far as I can tell, Original Child Bomb was never used by the Japanese - and yet it seems to contain, in English - because of the strange and innocent distance that "child" and "original" seem to make from the horrors of the explosion and its aftermath - a more appropriately ominous and terrifying feel than "atom bomb." A dread thing inside a chrysalis, so to speak.)

Next:

A Short History of the Decision to Drop the First Two Nuclear Bombs