JAPAN-ASIA: Museum Shows Nagasaki’s Horror, Hides Nanjing’s Pain

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

NAGASAKI, Japan, Apr 4 1996 (IPS) - The official opening of new Atom Bomb Museum commemorating the bombing of this south-western port city, has aggravated still festering wounds stemming from Japan’s colonisation of Asia more than 50 years ago.

The museum was opened earlier this week to much official fanfare and drew immediate criticism from Beijing which protested the omission from its display of pictures depicting the slaughter of hundreds of Chinese civilians at the time of Japan’s invasion of China in 1937.

The opening also came as regional groups representing the interest of thousands of women raped during the Pacific War, stepped up their demands for Tokyo to apologise to the victims and to individually compensate them for war atrocities.

Liberation to much of East and South-east Asia under Japanese occupation came after Tokyo surrendered to the Allied Forces following the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Three days earlier, U.S. warplanes had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima which is already home to a Peace Museum.

More than 140,000 were killed instantly in the nuclear blasts and many others died in the following months. The indiscriminate bombing also killed some allied prisoners of war (POWs).

“The museum is a symbol of Nagasaki which was ravaged on the day the atom bomb was dropped on the city. May the world never share the same sorrow,” said Nagasaki mayor Ichuo Ito at the opening.

Beijing is however unimpressed by Tokyo’s attempt to commemorate the black mark in its history, and through its consulate in Nagasaki, lodged an official complaint about the section in the museum addressing Japan’s invasion of China.

Even before the opening, China had last week published a statement attacking the withdrawal of photos showing the “Rape of Nanjing” — the city where Beijing says 300,000 civilians were massacred by invading Japanese forces.

Nagasaki officials who took reporters on a tour of the multi- million dollar museum that provides graphic displays of the aftermath of the atomic bomb, say that the pictures referred to by Beijing were not exhibited because they were “too gruesome”.

The picture that is on display in the section of the museum simply titled ‘Japan’s war with China’ is a nondescript black and white photo showing Chinese civilians being dragged by Japanese soldiers.

“The decision (not to showcase the massacre) was made not under pressure from outside groups, but because we decided the former photograph was too gruesome for public display,” a prefectural government official said.

Before reaching the ‘Japan war with China’ section however, visitors are taken through the horrors of the atomic bombing with pictures of radiation burnt and mutilated men, women and children telling the grisly story of death and destruction caused by the nuclear blast.

This fact was not lost on various activist groups.

“The voice of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is accepted with very little confidence,” read a statement handed out by a citizen’s group outside the museum.

“The reason is this — the Japanese government and Japanese people have not modestly, faithfully and clearly recognised and apologised and compensated for the various crimes which they committed before their suffering from the atomic bombs,” the statement added.

Museum officials took the criticism in stride.

“There are different interpretations on Japan’s colonisation of Asia,” one official said. “As there is no national consensus, Nagasaki city has based its interpretation on official textbooks.”

Japanese history textbooks have always been a bone of contention between East and South-east Asia and Japan.

In the mid-1980s, under tremendous pressure from South Korea and China, the Japanese government agreed to delete references to Japan’s “advance” into Asia and replace them with “aggressive” military attacks where relevant.

A more recent inclusion into Japanese school textbooks has been the reference to “comfort women” — young Asian women forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese army.

Still, the Atom Bomb Museum does through its exhibits, provide more critical insights into its history than does the Hiroshima Peace Museum.

For instance, videos offer a two minute show of the invasion into much of Asia and the suffering of people under Japanese rule. Notably however, the audio only refers to the torment of “some women” rather than the estimated 200,000 reported to have been forced into sexual slavery.

“It is a pity,” says Sake Shimomura, 63, an atomic bomb survivor who was on hand for the opening. “Survivors believe that Japan’s war in Asia cannot be separated from the atomic bombing.”