Hiroshima: Director of Center for Faulkner Studies pays a visit

For the past two months I have been teaching in Japan, and last week Kaye and I traveled to Hiroshima, where I presented a lecture on "William Faulkner and Southern Culture" at Hiroshima University and we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and its adjacent park.

Faulkner visited Japan as a cultural ambassador in 1955 under the auspices of the United States Information Agency and President Eisenhower's People-to-People Program. While he did not travel to Hiroshima -- and in all likelihood had been counseled by U.S. government officials not to talk about the atomic bomb -- one can be reasonably sure that the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very much in his consciousness as he stepped onto Japanese soil. He had alluded to the bomb in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1950, and his now-famous utterance, "I decline to accept the end of man. I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail," was his answer to the universal Cold War fear that the world might be destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. Faulkner continued to refer to the bomb in his subsequent speeches, essays and novels, including his 1954 Pulitzer Prize novel, "A Fable." And only months before his visit to Japan, the black rain from the American explosion of another atomic bomb at a Pacific test site killed a Japanese fisherman and injured several others.

Today's Hiroshima offers a telling example of Faulkner's faith in humanity to endure and prevail. It is a marvelously beautiful city, one of the loveliest that Kaye and I have ever seen. Sitting in a basin surrounded by lush, blue-tinted mountains, it is graced by six rivers flowing through its center. It is clean and bright and modern, having been completely rebuilt after being destroyed by the bomb. And there are flowers everywhere: tulips, irises, azaleas, dogwood and cherry blossoms. It was first feared that it might take 75 years for plant life to return to Hiroshima following the searing blast, but the very next spring trees and shrubs and flowers began to put forth new growth. Each year their seeds are planted throughout Japan and in other countries in commemoration of both the terrible tragedy and the resiliency of the human spirit.

Walking through the memorial park and museum, you get vivid and horrific reminders of that fateful day, Aug. 6, 1945, when all of the clocks and watches stopped at 8:15 a.m. and the world ended for nearly an entire city and more than 100,000 of its inhabitants. You begin at the A-bomb Dome, the remains of the Prefecture Industrial Promotions Hall, a steel-reinforced brick building that was one of only a half-dozen buildings near the epicenter to survive the blast. All of the other damaged buildings have since been removed, but the skeleton of this one -- with its broken dome, its missing windows, its partially collapsed walls, its clutter of bricks at its base -- is now preserved in perpetuity as a symbol of the widespread destruction caused by the explosion.

Next you pass the Children's Peace Memorial, a poignant sculpture sponsored by the schoolchildren of Japan in memory of Sadako Sasaki, a junior high school student who died in 1955 from leukemia contracted from the Hiroshima blast when she was only 2 years old.

You walk on, down an impressive mall much like the one that fronts the U.S. Capitol in Washington, past the flame of peace, which will be extinguished only when all nuclear weapons have been eliminated, and past the memorial cenotaph, a stone coffin with a Japanese inscription that says, "Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil."

In the museum you see shocking, unforgettable images of the atrocious damage caused by the bomb: photographs of bodies, dead and living, burned beyond recognition; of human bones mixed with debris; of a three-mile cityscape reduced to rubble; of charred streetcars and other vehicles; of outlines of human figures and objects left on buildings and sidewalks by the radiation; of immense steel girders bent and broken like toothpicks. And you read and listen to the testimonies of the survivors, many of whose bodies still carry the shards of glass or metal or the scars from burning or the infected blood -- and who live with the ever-present memories of lost relatives and neighbors.

In the context of this chaos, misery, and grief, you read -- at first in amazement and then in anger and shame -- of the secret discussions and strategies for the dropping of the bomb. You find here copies of American government documents, but the facts they tell are not the ones you learned in school. Of how it was coldly calculated to suspend conventional bombing of potential targets in order to have an accurate test of the results of the bomb. Of how the intended targets should include civilian as well as military sections -- again, in order to measure the full impact of the bomb. Of how Secretary of War Stinson joked in his personal diary that if the Air Force didn't lighten up on the bombing of Japanese cities, there wouldn't be any clean targets left for the A-bomb. Of how the fear of embarrassment (and Congressional investigation) that would result if the bomb failed to explode contributed to the decision not to alert the civilians in the target area. Of how government officials were adamant that the $2 billion spent on the development of this weapon of mass destruction required its use, American taxpayers being accustomed to getting their money's worth. Of how it was argued that a demonstration of the tremendous power of the bomb would benefit the United States in its competition with Russia for military and political supremacy in the post-war world. Of how all of these things were so secret (and suspect?) that knowledge of them was kept even from Vice President Truman, who learned about the bomb and its intended use only after he was sworn in as president.

And this -- which, in retrospect, may be the most surprising and disturbing fact of all: Each of the key government officials who were involved in the decision to develop and then employ the bomb -- President Roosevelt, Secretary Stinson and President Truman -- was absolutely convinced their decisions were right. Then, as now, politicians were not wont to consider even the possibility that their judgments might be mistaken.

In Hiroshima, as perhaps nowhere else in the modern world, one is reminded of the sad reality that the march of history in every time and place is a long, painful trail of tears -- all too frequently made more cruel and heartless by the crass ratiocinations of those leaders, bureaucrats, generals and intellectuals who put abstract ideas and speculations, the development of technology, nationalistic pride, and, worse, personal desire and ambition ahead of immediate concerns for the lives and welfare of simple, ordinary people, whatever their race or nationality. If Hiroshima today stands as evidence of Faulkner's belief that the human race will endure and prevail, its history -- and much of the world's history since Hiroshima became a familiar name to every tongue -- seems, sadly, to reinforce G.F.W. Hegel's claim that "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history."

Visiting Hiroshima, one experiences a strong, paradoxical feeling that Faulkner and Hegel were both right.

Robert Hamblin of Cape Girardeau is a professor of English and director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.