Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Old Man by the Bells

The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum doesn’t shy away from any of this. It is one of the most honest museums I have ever been to, which is a complicated thing to say about a place that deals in horror of this magnitude, but honesty feels like the right word. The exhibits trace the decision to use the bomb beginning with the agreement signed in Hyde Park, London, on the eighteenth of September 1944, when Churchill and Roosevelt decided in principle that nuclear weapons could be deployed against Japan. The Manhattan Project, the programme that produced the bombs, cost two billion dollars and employed a hundred and thirty thousand people, a figure that helps explain why there was political pressure to use the result. The scientific community was less united than the programme’s momentum suggested; letters of protest from physicists and chemists arrived in considerable numbers, concerned about what they were helping to produce. Einstein himself, who had written to Roosevelt in 1939 alerting him to the possibility of German nuclear weapons, later said his letter was the greatest mistake of his life.

The decision to drop, when examined closely, reveals layers of justification that sit uneasily together. The official rationale, ending the war quickly and avoiding a land invasion of Japan that would cost enormous casualties on both sides, is real but incomplete. The desire to establish American nuclear superiority before the Soviet Union could develop its own weapon was a consideration. Records from a congressional hearing the following year suggested that Japan was moving toward surrender in any case, that the bombs may not have been the deciding factor in the war’s end. These are uncomfortable things to sit with in a museum in a city that was destroyed partly by chance and partly by political calculation, surrounded by photographs of what a city looks like when a nuclear weapon detonates above it.

I arrived in Nagasaki not entirely knowing what to expect, having only the shape of the history from school and several decades of secondary reading. The hotel situation began badly. The pod hotel I’d been tipped off about in Tokyo I found only after wandering out of the station and asking at the first hotel I came to, where a woman at the reception desk phoned around, found me a room, and booked me a taxi, which is either exceptional service or simply the standard of courtesy that Japan operates at and which still produces a small jolt of surprise each time it happens.

The pod hotel was attached to a spa. I didn’t know this until I went looking for a shower the following morning and tracked an elderly gentleman out of his pod, across the corridor, down the stairs, through the changing room where eight naked Japanese men were styling their hair with apparent seriousness, and into a steam room containing a jacuzzi, a sauna, a spa pool, and more naked Japanese men. The showers turned out to be small stools, at primary school height, in front of individual shower heads and bottles of shampoo, at which you sit and wash in what I could only interpret as a highly practical arrangement. I used the spa twice a day for three days and found it clarifying in a way that is difficult to articulate but probably has something to do with stillness.

Hiroshima is a larger city than Nagasaki, more rebuilt, more oriented around the fact of what happened there, in a way that is understandable given the scale of the destruction but which gives the peace park a slightly different quality than Nagasaki’s equivalent, more visited, better signposted, the tragedy more thoroughly processed into something accessible. The Memorial Centre has a wall of 140,000 tiles, one for each person who died on the sixth of August 1945, and computer terminals where you can search the names. The A-Bomb Dome, the skeletal remains of the Industrial Promotion Hall, stands a few hundred metres from the hypocentre as a world heritage site, preserved specifically because its partial survival is itself a kind of evidence.

I had dinner in Hiroshima with a Swiss man called Felix who spoke passable Japanese and had been to Japan several times and knew what to order. He was good company, easy in the way that people who travel frequently tend to be, adaptable and unfussy, willing to sit with things they don’t fully understand.

Leaving for Kyoto the following morning, I tried to articulate to myself what the two cities had given me beyond what I already knew, and the best I could manage was this: that reading about the bombs and being in the places where they fell are different kinds of knowledge. One is information and the other is something closer to comprehension. I understood, standing in those parks, why the old man keeps coming back to stand by the bells. Some things can’t be filed away neatly. Some things you have to keep returning to, standing in the same place, trying to understand why the cloud broke when it did and what that means about everything that followed.