Japan trip #6 – Hiroshima

So, today is a different, and in some senses more difficult day, overshadowed with a sense of foreboding the night before, and the morning when the journey begins. I am reminded of a visit I made, 10years ago, with similar foreboding, to another relic of the 2nd world war, in Poland. There, at Auschwitz, the relic of the sheer scale of man’s potential inhumanity to man was the since untouched, now crumbling remains of the machinery of mass slaughter used by the Nazis in their ‘final solution’.  I recall the horror with which I learnt that this place had, at the height of its operation, extinguished the lives of 100,000 people in one day, and over a million in all. Here, in Japan, the relic I visit today is the famous, barely surviving dome, at Hiroshima, surrounded by the Memorial and Peace Park where the lives of the between 90 and 166,000 people who were snuffed out on (and in the few months after) 6.8.1945 are remembered. The distinctions between these two sites are of course crucial. The former was perhaps the worst excess of cruelty perpetrated by a conquering power bent on mastery over its neighbors. The latter was the overwhelming force with which two countries attacked by such conquering powers brought the conflict to an end.

It may also be pointed out that some commentators would assert that in the former case, the defeated conquering power has learnt its lessons well, owned and absorbed its past; and that in the latter case the defeated conquering power has by contrast yet to fully own its past. I’m not qualified to say, and both interpretations may in fact be merely stereotyping rather than insightful. ‘Culture’ is all too often too broad a brushstroke with which to describe a country’s people and its ways.  What is most alarming, perhaps, today, is that the UK and US, the two powers who used the bomb on Japan, are today in the grip of just the kind of xenophobic, right wing populism that marked the rise of the Nazis. Thankfully the kind of militarism that gripped Japan following the Meiji restoration of 1868 and (on and off) up to the 1930s does not appear to be evident; the US, however, already has the most powerful and extensive military machine in world history, including a fleet in every ocean and troops stationed in numerous countries around the world, and spends some 54% of its Federal Discretionary spending on its military – roughly 40% of all arms spending in the world, as much as the nine next biggest national defence budgets combined.

That the use of this overwhelming force is soon to be at the discretion of a xenophobic, misogynistic, far right populist with zero experience of politics, government, and – most importantly – diplomacy, is a frightening prospect.  A very sobering day, altogether.

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Just to the south west of Hiroshima, is the delightful island of Miyajima, with the amazing Tsukushima Shrine in its bay.  Here, at the end of the day, I was lucky enough to find tranquility and serenity once more.