In early August, Japan commemorates several wartime anniversaries, culminating mid-month with a sombre ceremony marking the nation’s surrender in the second World War in 1945. It is a period of painful national reflection about what historian John Dower called a “war without mercy”. That war reached its horrific denouement 80 years ago with the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
US footage of the destruction of those cities, first filmed in 1945 by Monaghan man Daniel A McGovern, was buried by military censors for decades. “They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done at a time they were planning on more bomb tests,” said McGovern, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who had emigrated with his family to the US from Carrickmacross.
The bombings created a new class of people called hibakusha. These were victims who often died in great pain in the days, months or years afterward. John Hershey, the American journalist who famously penetrated the censorship wall to profile six hibakusha, described Hiroshima’s living dead: faces burned, eyesockets hollow, “the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks”.
This year, reflection on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is tinged by controversy over a once-unthinkable question: should Japan possess The Bomb? During last month’s House of Councillors election in Japan, several politicians talked publicly about joining the nuclear arms race. Saya, running for the far-right Sanseito party, said “nuclear armament is one of the most inexpensive and effective measures to ensure safety.”
RM Block
The party’s leader, Sohei Kamiya, appeared to be open to the idea. “I do not think we should immediately possess them,” he said. “But we must not shy away from a discussion.”
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Saya and Kamiya were among 14 Sanseito politicians who won seats in the July 20th upper house election. A survey by The Mainichi newspaper subsequently found that half of them, along with three other lawmakers, now support possessing nuclear weapons.
That’s still a small fraction of the National Diet’s membership. However, openly expressing such thoughts in the only country where the weapons were used lowers the bar to someday using them again, says Terumi Tanaka, co-chair of the Japanese Confederation of A-and H-bomb Sufferers Organisations. A politician who did more than most most to open up this path of public discussion in Japan was former prime minister Shinzo Abe.
In 2022, before his assassination, Abe said Japan should consider a Nato-style arrangement to share and host nuclear weapons. He urged the country not to avoid a discussion on security realities because of the “nuclear taboo”. Always in the background during Abe’s second term (2012 to 2020) was growing tension with China and the newest member of the world’s nuclear club, North Korea.
Abe sought and won from Washington a renewed and unwavering commitment “to defend Japan through the full range of US military capabilities, both nuclear and conventional”. A year later, in 2018, his government unequivocally welcomed the Nuclear Posture Review of the Donald Trump administration. Among other things, it proposed diversifying America’s nuclear stock and creating new, smaller atomic bombs.
A senior Japanese foreign ministry official, speaking anonymously, explained that: “While the belief in nuclear abolition is important as an ideal, this is not the time for it . . . It is a fact that during the eight years of the administration of president Barack Obama, China and Russia increased their military capabilities and nuclear and missile threats by North Korea grew.”
Underlying the ambivalence about nuclear weapons among the Japanese political class, Abe’s Nato suggestion was immediately shot down by his successor, prime minister Fumio Kishida, whose family is from Hiroshima and who grew up listening to hibakusha stories. In 2022, Kishida became the first Japanese leader to address a conference of the United Nations’ nuclear non-proliferation treaty review.
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Shigeru Ishiba, the current prime minister, is more on the fence, announcing in February, for example, that Japan would not attend the third meeting of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The vast majority of Japanese people – 75 per cent – want him to join the treaty, which Japan has so far neither signed nor ratified. That anti-nuclear sentiment could be shaken in the coming years, however, by two factors.
One is the growing fear that Japan’s long-standing security treaty with the US is increasingly hollow. Just 15 per cent of Japanese people believe Washington under Donald Trump will protect Japan in the event of a military emergency, according to a poll published in April. This makes it easier for politicians to stoke the fear that Japan will be on its own in a war with China or Russia, and therefore needs a strong deterrent.
The second factor is the passage of time and with it, the fading of direct memories of the bombings. The average age of hibakusha is 86. Their experiences imbued the anti-nuclear movement with a unique moral authority. What happens when they are gone?
