In Kafka op het Strand van Haruki Murakami wordt verhaald over een incident dat plaatsvond op het einde van de tweede wereldoorlog in een niet nader genoemde stad. Een lerares gaat met een aantal kinderen het bos in om paddestoelen te plukken. Ze zien een B-29 overvliegen. Even later vallen de kinderen in onmacht. De meesten herstellen ogenschijnlijk, maar een van hen, Nakata, komt het incident niet te boven en wordt gek. Het verhaal is een understatement, nergens wordt de atoombom vermeld, maar het is duidelijk dat dit gaat over Hiroshima en Nagasaki. En sourdine. De werkelijkheid wordt benaderd via de fictie. Tactvol. Schroomvol.
De bombardementen op Hiroshima en Nagasaki behoren tot de meest gewelddadige en absurde gebeurtenissen in onze wereldgeschiedenis. Net als het platleggen van Dresden dat enkel bedoeld was om de fabrieken, wapenfabrieken en dergelijke en alle infrastructuur onbruikbaar te maken voor de aanstormende Russen. De werkelijkheid wordt vaak geweld aangedaan. Het zijn de Russen die het fascisme overwonnen hebben. Op het einde van de oorlog zag de VS de Sovjet Unie als een nog grotere bedreiging en om indruk te maken op de Russen werd de atoombom ingezet. Als aanval op burgers waren de bombardementen op Hiroshima en Nagasaki een misdrijf tegen de mensheid. Dat wil niet zeggen dat alle Japanners onschuldige slachtoffers waren, maar die bombardementen waren onnodig. Japan is verslagen, verward, verweesd. Murakami schrijft daarover. Verhalen, niet de wetenschap, zijn volgens hem de manier om de wereld te beschrijven. Ons leven is een persoonlijk verhaal, en enkel door al deze verschillende verhalen te verweven kunnen we de eenzaamheid en absurditeit in deze wereld overwinnen.
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." - Dwight Eisenhower - Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..." - Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. " - "The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages." - William Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman - I Was There, pg. 441.
NewScientist: "The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.
According to the official US version of history, an A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later, to force Japan to surrender. The destruction was necessary to bring a rapid end to the war without the need for a costly US invasion.
New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman's main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.
'He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species,' says Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC, US. 'It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity.'
According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was 'looking for peace'. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb."
'Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality.'
Underground – Haruki Murakami