The difference between a tragedy and an inevitable catastrophe has often been a matter of perspective. Events such as the fall of the USSR have been remembered as inevitable by many who stood under her reign in the Warsaw pact and yet certain circles within Moscow and Minsk remember it tragically. Deniers of German wartime crimes have often referred to the events of Aktion Reinhardt as tragic and isolated whereas any serious academic work view them as the logical conclusions of a decade worth of policy and planning.
Whether or not events are viewed as tragic (regrettable yet isolated) or inevitable (unsurprising, systematic, and with the implication of guilt on one party) can come down simply to how the events are presented. Few events elicit such feverish debate of their nature within the Japanese public sphere as the Second World War and nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two historic and somewhat controversial sites contrast each other in approach to this question; the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Tokyo’s Yushukan Museum.
The most widely known and thus more controversial of the two is the latter. Its halls are adorned with the heraldry and equipment of the Japanese army from its establishment in the Boshin War to its nominal disillusionment at the end of the second world war. Even though the exhibits ground there start in historical fact, as the timeline approaches the start of the era of expansionism in the early to mid 20th century, a subtle shift takes place. The once flowery language filled with nuance and a sense of history gives way to a duller resuscitation of facts.
The validity of the aforementioned ‘facts’, though, has been repeatedly called into question and often labeled as highly revisionist. The war in the pacific is depicted as an inevitable catastrophe, with the perfidious Roosevelt forcing Japan into a war she did not want. The Second Sino-Japanese war, (1937-1945), a conflict that claimed the lives of at least 5 million mainlyChinese civilians is referred to simply as the “China Incident”. The events of the fall of Nanking, whose events were so horrific that they would come to be known even within academia as the ‘Rape of Nanking’, would also earn the monicer of ‘incedent’. Of the estimated 200,000 civilian deaths all that would be said is that “Chinese Soldiers dressed in civilian uniforms were severely prosecuted”.
Events such as those at Nanking, the largest but not only massacre of its kind, are portrayed as tragedies, regrettable, yet isolated. It should be surprising then that a mere 25 meters from the front door lay the enshrined remains of over 1,000 convicted war criminals as well as 11 of those convicted at the Tokyo Trials (the equivalent of the Nuremberg trials), with 6 receiving the death penalty for their crimes.
On the other side of the spectrum lies the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Designated as a ‘peace’ museum, as opposed to the Yushukan’s ‘war’ designation, it strikes a very different balance between the remembrance of victims versus the presentation of context. Largely apolitical, its exhibits focus on the everyday lives of the citizens of the city, and how suddenly and profoundly they were altered on that fateful day. Rather than assigning blame (though it skirts the line at times), it presents the tragedy of the bombings in and of themselves. Though some may argue the bombing was inevitable at that stage in the war, the museum admirably keeps the remembrance of victims and their stories and experiences at the forefront. In this presentation of history, both the personal sufferings of the victims as well as the museum’s overarching message, that of peace, are better able to shine through.
Despite more than a half-century passing since the ending of the war, the events memorialized at both museums touch on parts of Japan’s history that are still contentious, if not occasionally controversial. Within East Asia, the Japanese government’s non-committal acceptance of responsibility for things such as the comfort women, a system of military orignazied sexual slavery or the Nanking massacre has been met with outrage amongst Koreans and Chinese. As recently as 2015, intergovernmental squabbles between the ostensibly aligned government of Japan and S. Korea have erupted over the issue. The 2023 release of the biopic Oppenheimer has also sparked debate in the West over the use of the Atomic bombs and whether their use was a tragedy, or an inevitable catastrophe. Though it is often said history is written by the winners, it is often the losers who choose the manner in which the histroy is framed and presented.
I was born in New York, but moved to Europe as a teenager. I am currently a second year BEMACS Student. I enjoy writing as a means by which to record and disseminate the things I find interesting such as politics, history and culture.
