Dark Night

Many faces of a once ruined city

I said a bad word as my alarm went off. It felt like I'd just gotten to sleep, but it had been five hours. I levered myself out of bed and swore again as I looked the mirror in the bathroom. I'd forgotten to take off the false eyelashes and one of them had migrated down to my cheek. I peeled them both off and hit the shower. I was ready when Grandpa came to get me for breakfast, and we met my parents and went to eat. "You look tired, Delia," my mom observed. "Didn't you sleep well?" 

"Slept like a log," I said as my coffee was served. The restaurant didn't have Red Bull, I'd checked. "But when we got back to our rooms, the studio called and asked if I could come and do the interview then."

"What did Stan say about his leg?" Dad asked.

"He had stress fractures in that foot before and one of them broke completely." Everybody winced. We're an expressive family. "And somehow the landing from the last jump messed up his ankle. He'll have more tests done today, but he did get a nap in. He was on crutches, it's not a walking cast."

"He'll be disappointed to miss Worlds," Grandpa said and we nodded like bobbleheads.

"At this point, though, I think he's kind of glad to be done. It's not like he never managed to win Worlds," I pointed out. "You can't really do better than an Olympic gold." My phone vibrated, and I checked it quickly. "He's got some diagnostic tests scheduled in less than an hour and he'll let us know the results. Then more press this afternoon, then he's pretty much done since the pairs are skating  tonight. He wants to know if we're free for dinner." I looked at Grandpa.

"We'll be back by seven," he said. "But that might be a little late." I texted the information. A pause.

"He says that's fine," I said, and we arranged to meet at Nemuro Hanamaru, a sushi place. Grandpa and I hadn't had sushi yet. Breakfast over, we split up, and Grandpa took me to the regional airport. Two hours later, we arrived at Hiroshima, where we were greeted by our tour guide. Our first stop would be the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I brought up the website and read the visitor guidelines; no talking on cell phones, be quiet and respectful, don't touch the exhibits, no flash photography. Can do.

We went into the museum and began touring the exhibits. There were recorded testimonies of survivors and exhibits of artifacts from the city after the bomb. There were exhibits about the dangers of nuclear bombs and a history of Hiroshima.  Then we walked across the street to the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Exhibition Hall, now known as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the ruined building with the haunting exposed metal dome. It was cold and overcast, and visitors were few. "What do you think, punkin?" Grandpa said eventually.

"The museum is really impressive," I said after a moment of thought. "It could have been a monument for pity, look what happened to us, but instead it uses this event to show why nuclear weapons should never be used again. It's pro-peace, anti-war. I don't see how anybody could fail to have empathy for the survivors. It's very powerful."

"But?" he prodded.

"I'm conflicted," I admitted. "There are a lot of different opinions about whether the bombs should have been used at all, the morality of it all, what the real takeaway is, things like that. Bear with me." I tried to organize my thoughts. "In the beginning of WWII, the US was neutral, the Congress isolationist despite Roosevelt's efforts to get it to intervene in the war in Europe on the side of its allies. We were sitting pretty in our part of the world, untouched by conflict. Suddenly Japan attacks Hawaii. It wasn't even a state at the time, it was a territory until the late '50's. And suddenly we had a war on two fronts. The war in the Pacific was really brutal, even for war. The Allies won the war in Europe, but Japan was still fighting. They'd lost the war, they knew it, and our forces were clawing ever closer to the home islands. The Japanese chose to keep fighting. Roosevelt died, and Truman finds out about the Manhattan Project only after he becomes president. Not using the bomb wasn't really a choice; they had a probably viable weapon that had cost over two billion dollars back then, which is like 22 billion dollars today. He had four choices. Continue conventional bombing of Japanese cities, invade the home islands,  demonstrate the bomb in an unpopulated area--detonation in Tokyo Bay was an option, I think, or drop the bomb on an inhabited Japanese city. Conventional bombing wasn't working. They firebombed Tokyo, a much larger city, almost completely destroying it, and they still wouldn't surrender. Invasion of the home islands would have been a disaster. Estimations of American casualties were really high, reaching  over a million, conservatively one in three US troops wounded or killed. The Japanese casualties would have been horrific. There were expectations that the civilians would take up arms against invaders; there are pictures of kids being taught how to use farm tools as weapons. And that's just the physical toll. What would the emotional toll be on the invading ground forces, having to kill kids, women, the elderly, who were attacking? That's not what soldiers are supposed to do. Americans like to think that we're the good guys. The Japanese plan was to make the defense so ferocious that the US would call for a cease fire and everybody would quit with the territory it had acquired, and they could protect the emperor and avoid prosecution for war crimes.