Chapter 2: “Three Narratives of Our Humanity” by John W. Dower Summary
According to historian John Dower, America’s cultural inability to view itself as both victimizer and victim in the context of the battle with Japan made the original Enola Gay exhibit impossible. Although carrying a nuanced, often contradictory image of itself is difficult for any country, the tendency to simplify history is particularly strong in the United States. In fact, Dower argues, this tendency worsened in the America of the 1980s and 1990s, in contrast to Japan, where an opposite movement was happening.
For a long time after 1945, Japan indulged in mass cultural amnesia regarding their own atrocities against China, the Philippines, and the Allied forces during World War II. Events such as the Nanking Massacre and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, in which the Imperial Japanese naval air force killed at least 2,000 American soldiers on the base, were almost taboo in the public narrative. Japan’s narrative around the war was built around the idea of the Japanese as victims, the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki blotting out all other events for them. This could be seen in the special term the Japanese have for the victims of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, which is not just war victims, but hibakusha, literally meaning “receive-explosion-person (or people).” For the Japanese, the bombings signified a unique kind of suffering, much like the Holocaust did for the Jews. Thus, the Japanese narrative of World War II became only about the bombings. This selective amnesia was enabled by the United States, now an ally of Japan. Why did the US enable this culture of forgetting? For one, the US wanted to minimize the horrors of World War II in Japan in general—including that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—because of its own role in inflicting those horrors. Secondly, as America rebuilt its ties with Japan and helped reconstruct the nation, it was only prudent to soft-pedal its ally’s wartime atrocities. Third, for ease of governance in Japan, the US continued to publicly support Emperor Hirohito, the man behind much of imperial Japan’s violence against China and other countries. Finally, it was in the US interest for Japan to remain in victim mode, but with China as the victimizer.
However, despite official censorship, from the 1970s onward more people in Japan began turning their attention to Japanese aggression during World War II. As diplomatic ties with China improved, Japanese journalists and historians focused on war crimes against China and other Asian nations. This movement was strengthened particularly after Emperor Hirohito died in 1989. Though the Japanese government found it difficult to issue an official apology for Imperial Japan’s war crimes on the fiftieth anniversary of 1945, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama “did indeed use August 15, the date of Japan’s capitulation, as the occasion for a major speech condemning and apologizing for Japanese aggression and atrocities.” Thus, the Japanese were beginning to accept a complex war memory which included the idea of them as both higaisha (victims) and kagaisha (victimizers). This nuanced consciousness was not just limited to intellectuals and scholars: a 1994 opinion poll showed that eighty percent of Japanese believed their government had not adequately compensated war victims in the countries they had invaded and colonized.
In contrast, the Enola Gay controversy shows the resistance to a more nuanced cultural memory in the United States. Strikingly, this was not the case in the US of the 1940s and 1950s, when President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons on a largely civilian population was a topic of debate, even though it ended the Pacific War. But by 1981, the public space for such debates was shrinking,...
(This entire section contains 1057 words.)
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as shown through the publication of Paul Fusell’s influential essay “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.” The “meta-narrative” that the nuclear bomb was good and unavoidable had come to dominate American culture. Within this narrative, the American decision to use the bomb was unassailable and even sanctioned by God. Of course, racism played a part in the narrative, since the Japanese were seen as savages whom the civilized Americans needed to control for the good of the world. Hiroshima was seen as a triumph, and not a tragedy. Because theEnola Gay exhibit aimed to show triumph (the aircraft) alongside tragedy (images and artifacts from Hiroshima-Nagasaki), it ruffled feathers like no previous exhibit.
Historians are trained to approach history as a process, rather than an unassailable truth. This scholarly approach often makes them the target of the ire of conservatives. This is what happened in the case of the Enola Gay exhibit, where the AFA and other lobbies labeled the historians on the advisory panel “revisionists.” Research on the bombings had raised interesting facts and questions, such as why Nagasaki had to be bombed within three days of Hiroshima if Hiroshima was meant as a scare tactic for Japan. Why didn’t the air force wait for a longer period to see imperial Japan’s response to Hiroshima? And then there was the Soviet angle. Were civilians killed to send a strong message to the Soviet Union about US power? These questions suggested there was more than one reason for the bombings, which diluted the idea of the US fighting only the good fight.
Another objection the AFA and other critics raised was that the photos of the Japanese dead were not balanced out by photos of American casualties. But even if the exhibit had planned to show both, the impact would be very different, because American casualties were soldiers, while the Japanese dead were women and children. Even the smallest Japanese artifact—such as a schoolgirl’s melted lunch box—had the potential to overshadow the mighty Enola Gay airship. The truth is that nothing could cancel out the tragedy of Hiroshima. It had to be accepted, as much as the narrative of triumph.
By denying the coexistence of these two narratives and running down the work of serious historians, the AFA, sections of the media, and other opponents delivered a blow to the spirit of democracy itself. The ability for a culture to critique itself is “the lifeblood of democracy.” A democracy has to possess “tolerance of principled criticism, a constant willingness to entertain serious challenges to entrenched and orthodox views.” The cancellation of the Enola Gay exhibit shows the peril in which American democracy lay at the end of the twentieth century.