Hiroshima Diary
...] and…studied it” (Atwan/McQuade 33) immediately after the pika, for some reason, my perception of the event changed drastically. What I had believed before was that, like mentioned above, people too close to the hypocenter immediately died, and all others suffered prolonged internal effects later in life, years after the bomb, like tumors or terminal diseases. Lacerations, people burned beyond recognition, and an entirely destroyed city didn’t match my idea of the relatively calmer chaos where live people didn’t generally suffer immediate pain and injury. Finally, the last forsaken misconception, and the most damaging to my idea of the American identity, was that I had been raised to believe that Japan as a whole had been warned of an attack, that civilians had been given a warning, possibly even one to evacuate. Reading the conservations and speculations that were recorded made me realize that this was blatantly untrue. No one knew what was coming. Though the aftermath shocked me, this simple misrepresentation made me question the supposed “objectivity” of the Western study of history. More personal, unintentional biases were revealed to me as I went through the reading. While reading through the stories of the destruction, I found myself automatically imagining the victims as Caucasian. I was disgusted at the realization of the assumption and am ashamed to admit it. Undoubtedly every character in Hachiya’s accounts was Asian in heritage, but it has been statistically proven that you relate more easily to those who look like you. I would like to state that I am not racist, either intentionally or consciously, and my image of the scene was not a conscious attempt to relate to a people that I otherwise would not because of physical differences. My imagining Caucasians in place of Asians was completely subconscious and I believe inadvertently showed me that I was not as freely tolerant as I’d like to be, possibly caused by my Americanized identity. A different type of personal embarrassment was imposed upon me when I read some of the reactions of the Japanese to American troops in the days following the bombing. Hachiya, after meeting with troops at his hospital, relates in his diary how impressed they were with the American troops’ light-heartedness, friendliness and warmth. Hachiya even stated that he got the impression that they were citizens of a great country. At this statement, I stopped reading in awe. America was responsible for the destruction of his home, and the death of many people that he cared about! I had naturally assumed that he would feel enraged at and resentful of any representation of the destructive force, no matter how uninvolved these representations were in the actual bombing. Immediately after this thought, I asked myself why I should assume that he was wrong to forgive. It revealed a lot about the way I see the world and human nature when I expected him to assume that the officers were guilty-by-association, whether or not they personally did anything to Hachiya himself. At this point I was amazed by his ability to accept and acknowledge that simply because they are American, that doesn’t mean they are responsible for his situation. I discovered a personal subconscious belief of human nature in the idea that no one forgives an atrocity like the one at Hiroshima, and the realization disturbed me. I received yet another life lesson from the reading: I completely understood the sentiments of the Japanese civilians of World War II. The simple fact is, no matter what side you’re on, your sentiments are probably similar to those of the people of your “enemy.” For the first time ever, I felt that some aspects of the atom bombs in Japan were worse than that of Pearl Harbor, simply because I was looking from a non-American perspective. I understood the hopes for retaliation, the “burning question [of] what the new weapon was” (Atwan/McQuade 37), and the disappointment at the surrender. Throughout my study of American and European history, I had always looked at the Japanese of 1945 as people of the opposing side. Now, I saw myself on their side, relating to their experiences, and the fact of the matter is that they are people with emotions and reactions just like ours. I never believed that the Japanese weren’t people; I had just assumed that the citizenry during World War II had different hopes and ideals than the citizens of the Allies. After all, wasn’t that why our countries were at war? The fact is that they really did not. A surprising incident that I found myself relating to was one of a horse who had been blinded by the radiation. He had been adopted by the partially destroyed hospital and its injured staff, and kept safely in the hospital garden. For some reason, this touched a particular part of my heart, and the care given to the horse reminded me that, instead of being seemingly fictional characters from an increasingly distant past, these were human beings, who, even in the face of disaster, were capable of caring for a simple animal, exactly like me. They did for the horse what I would have done, and the similarity of response means more to me than the similarity of ideals or expectation. The latter is what you desire; the former is who you are. Experiencing their world in a diary involved me in their hopes for retaliation, as well as their personal experiences. They wished to see the flare of victory through the smoke of Hiroshima, the same way Americans did after Pearl Harbor. To these civilians, Hiroshima was not just equal devastation in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. Though many citizens, like Hachiya himself, wer...