In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

66 Chapter 1 united states is mentioned, it is identified in language that is largely celebratory and intended to generate awe: the president of the united states . . . identified the new bomb as atomic. “that bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of tnt. it had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British Grand slam, which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare .” . . . [it was] the first great experiment in the use of atomic power, which . . . no country, except the united states, with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an important wartime gamble, could possibly have developed. (49–50) the narrative of united states triumphalism, which was launched at the very moment that the bomb fell, includes as its principal component that the bomb helped to end the war by striking in the Japanese a fearful respect for the might of the u.s. military. the bomb demonstrated in unmistakable terms the magnificent capability of u.s. technology. it was touted as the weapon to end war, not as a weapon of unimaginable destruction. to criticize the bombing is still unacceptable in public discourse. the unmistakable evidence of the ascendancy of the triumphalist narrative was the fierce controversy (1993–1995) over the smithsonian’s national Air and space museum’s decision to exhibit the enola Gay.9 i will not go into the details of that controversy other than to say that the original curator of the exhibit came in for intense criticism because he was perceived as not sufficiently celebratory of and grateful for the achievement on the part of the united states and appeared to be biased in favor of the Japanese people. the traditional and dominant narrative is that without the bomb, the atrocities of the Japanese imperial Army would have continued unabated, requiring the united states to send in ground troops to invade Japan and overcome it militarily. A ground invasion would have killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers; the bomb preempted such mass death (s. Walker 2005, 312). this narrative, of course, completely glosses over the fact that it was civilians who were killed at Hiroshima and nagasaki—a total of two hundred thousand civilians, not soldiers of the Japanese imperial Army. Of course, the justification for killing civilians is that the Japanese people had blindly supported their emperor’s ambitions of conquest and so were to blame in part for the destruction that fell on them. samuel Walker (2005) offers a valuable overview of the vast literature that addresses the reasons for the dropping of the atomic bombs. Whether, as ronald takaki believes, it was motivated by racism and hatred toward the Japanese people (s. Walker 2005, 313), or to impress the soviets with u.s. military capability (312), or to hasten the end of the war and force Japan to surrender, it has been the only instance of the use of a nuclear weapon and, moreover, targeted at civilians. Literary Imagination and American Empathy 67 John Whittier treat’s (1995) book Writing Ground Zero is a deep and thoughtful engagement with his subject-position as an American writing about Japanese literature that focuses on the bombings of Hiroshima and nagasaki . His preface explores eloquently and poignantly his obligation to address the human significance of Hiroshima, an atrocity that created a “dumbfounded amazement over how the damage could have been so unexpected in its delivery, so brief in duration, so inexplicable in its power” (3). yet despite the horror of those bombings, there has not been a world literature to match the enormity of the act. treat notes, “there has never been a Japanese counterpart to Anne Frank’s diary, a work disseminated among school children the world over, including Japan” (4). He further implies that there has been a systematic and deliberate attempt to see the bombing as strictly a Japanese affair and not a human-made catastrophe of global import. treat is unequivocal in his condemnation of the bombings, calling them acts of “illegal violence” and “state-sponsored terrorism” (7) and “mass murder” (9), whose effects were not confined to those who were victimized by it at the time but to generations of Japanese who suffered the genetic mutations and other physiological poisonings from the radiation of the nuclear device. treat will not let the united states ignore the fact that it shares with the nazi perpetrators of the atrocities at Auschwitz and other concentration...

Share