Monsters Plague Japan. But What Do They Mean?

HIROSHIMA

ON A BLUSTERY afternoon last November, I stood on the esplanade of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park listening to the solemn gong of the Peace Bell as English and American tourists rang it again and again. A traditional Japanese bell made of oxidized metal, it has a pendular log that strikes at the atomic symbol engraved on its side as if to banish that evil from the earth. A few feet away, a group of Japanese schoolboys stood laughing and gamboling, hanging on each other as schoolboys do everywhere.

Hiroshima is impossible. At Auschwitz or Dachau, one is asked to fill in what happened, the ruins urging the imagination to conjure what is no longer there. At Hiroshima, the ask is altogether different: We are forced to subtract from the life of one of the busiest cities in southern Honshu, the country’s largest island, to re-enter its near-total annihilation on Aug. 6, 1945. In the last weeks of World War II, the United States chose this city of about 300,000 at the time (today it has a population of 1.2 million) as the target of the first-ever atomic bomb to be dropped on civilians. Pikadon is the Japanese word for the white bleaching light and thunderous boom from the detonation of Little Boy, a light so brilliant that it etched human shadows over stone stairs, as in a photograph. Then a searing wind, a deadly cloud and a fire that turned human skin to rags. “Trying to visualize, trying to imagine … I fail,” writes the American essayist Donald Richie, who first came to Japan in 1946, in his memoir “The Inland Sea” (1971).

My grandfather was in the British Indian army, fighting the Japanese in Burma (now Myanmar) when their guns threatened Calcutta. Years later he spoke to me of having killed a Japanese officer and finding his letters, which were in English. He had been given the officer’s traditional Japanese sword as a trophy, something that filled him with distaste, and he was glad to be dispossessed of it (along with everything else) when he became a refugee after the 1947 partition of India. The Second World War had not merely pitted Asian against Asian; it had also dashed the hopes of the region’s lesser developed countries, such as colonial India, whose freedom fighters had rejoiced at the rise of Japan’s power when it stunned the world by bringing czarist Russia to its knees in 1905. But by the 1930s, Japan’s expansionism and militarism looked much like an Asian version of European colonialism. That hubris of prewar Japan gave way to a docility in defeat that puzzled observers of the country. “There is something almost uncanny,” wrote the Indian diplomat K.P.S. Menon in the late 1940s, “in the welcome which the people of Japan have given to their ex-enemies, their acquiescence in the drastic measures introduced by SCAP [Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers] and the homage, almost amounting to worship, which they pay [General Douglas] MacArthur.” Eighty years on, gazing out at this delta city of sprawling green waterways from the reconstructed Aioi Bridge, the target of Little Boy, I found myself still puzzling over where Japan had filed away the pain and anger of that time. There was the defeat, then the imposition of a largely U.S.-written pacifist constitution and the added humiliation of an occupation that lasted from 1945 until 1952, resulting in the establishment of dozens of military bases, many of which remain to this day.

Two years after the treaty that ended American occupation, a Japanese film came out that would enthrall the nation and the world beyond for generations to come. Godzilla, as the professor character in the first film says, “was baptized in the fire of the H-bomb and survived.” Awakened by nuclear testing, he emerges from Tokyo Bay to terrorize a newly rebuilt country. All conventional weapons fail to stymie Godzilla on his path of ruin, which culminates in a rampage through Tokyo. Ultimately, a weapon called an oxygen destroyer is found to kill him out at sea. It comes at the cost of vast quantities of marine life, and also the life of the bomb’s inventor. In the film’s final underwater scenes, full of pain, pathos and futility, man and beast, both hostage to the calamitous effects of a new weapon, are laid low together in the deep.