Hiroshima and the Time Machine

By LANCE MORROW

One morning in Hiroshima, I watched as hundreds of Japanese schoolchildren -- a newly minted generation in their navy-and-white uniforms -- poured out of the Peace Memorial Museum. The Japanese authorities take children there every day, busload after busload, to see the evidence: the photographs taken on Aug. 6, 1945, and the days afterward; the drawings that the child survivors made to show what they had seen; the blinding thousand-sun light; the river choked with bodies; the melted clocks; the nuclear soot that fell upon the city -- "black rain." These sights are implanted in the minds of today's Japanese children as What? Warning? Against what exactly? Accusation? Against whom precisely?

Now it is common for Japanese children to practice their English on the gaijin, and seeing me outside the museum, a little boy danced up, peered into my face and said brightly, "Murderer! Hello!"

I thought of the Japanese schoolboy in recent months as Washington's Smithsonian Institution shuffled through one script after another, trying to figure out how to deal with Hiroshima in a 50th-anniversary exhibition about the end of the war and the dawn of the nuclear era. Around the Smithsonian, the task brought on profound moral discomfort -- historiographical hives.

The first script for the exhibition, which will display a part of the reassembled Enola Gay, was way left of the mark. It interpreted Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a way that managed to transport a righteous '60s moral stance on Viet Nam ("Baby killers!") back in time to portray the Japanese as more or less innocent victims of American beastliness and lust for revenge. As if the Japanese had been conquering Asia by Marquess of Queensbury rules. The curators said to the American public, "Murderer! Hello!"

The spirit of the, er, text struck some Americans who had the advantage of having been there at the time as a revisionist travesty. The curators seemed to be confused about who started the war and who pursued it (in China, the Philippines and elsewhere) with relentless inhumanity. To turn the Japanese into the victims of World War II, and the Americans into the villains, seemed an act of something worse than ignorance; it had the ring of a perverse generational upsidedownspeak and Oedipal lese majeste worthy of a fraud like Oliver Stone.

The anger of World War II veterans and others who knew what they were talking about descended upon the Smithsonian. The curators produced a revised script earlier in the summer and last week a third try, which finally puts Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the historical context of Japanese aggression and its many victims and of a long and vastly destructive war.

Of course, the metaphysics is confusing. Hiroshima, introducing the nuclear age, lifted war out of its traditional (and more or less manageable) place in human affairs and into a realm of the absolute, of doomsday.

When the Italian author Primo Levi was in Auschwitz, a guard told him, "Hier ist kein warum." (Here is no why.) He was right. That was the terror, the mystery and the evil.

But you have to make distinctions, even -- or especially -- when using the vocabularies of seeming absolutes. At Hiroshima there was, precisely, a warum, an excellent why.

To understand the reason, it may be necessary to climb into a time machine, to return to the moment. Events occur in contexts. At the time, it seemed that nothing less than such a devastation would serve to eradicate a Japanese militarist regime that had killed infinitely more innocent civilians than died on those two nuclear mornings. The scales of death were pretty heavy, well before the Bomb. Four months earlier, Americans suffered 48,000 casualties taking Okinawa. And in March 1945, the incendiary- bomb raids had burned down much of Tokyo and killed at least 100,000, a toll approaching the combined carnage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To have possessed a weapon that would end such a war almost instantly and not to have used it would have been inexplicable and, to those who would have died in the longer war, inexcusable.

It is possible in hindsight to entertain hypothetical doubt about whether an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have been absolutely necessary at that stage of the war. Perhaps the Japanese would have submitted, although nothing in experience predicted that. One may argue whether the nuclear bombs really saved a million or two or more lives, Japanese and American, that might have been lost in a protracted endgame. But sometimes hindsight is decadent and a little fatuous.

+ Last week, a couple of days after the Smithsonian released its third Hiroshima script, Elie Wiesel was speaking in Washington at the new U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was addressing 120 teenagers from five Middle Eastern countries who had spent a summer session at a Maine camp in the "Seeds of Peace" program. A Palestinian boy in the program minimized the Jews' Holocaust under the Nazis and said bitterly, thinking of his own people, "There are many holocausts!"

Elie Wiesel embraced the boy and told him, "Don't compare! Don't compare! All suffering is intolerable."