Somewhere behind this bolt is a dimly perceived, demonized America, although not nearly so demonized as the bomb itself, which seems to have had a mind of its own, like a wrathful god. Part of the Hiroshima myth is that the bomb simply happened, like a deus ex machina, a blinding bolt from the sunny sky of August. On the lid of the coffin the following words, composed by one Professor Saika, are inscribed: “Please rest in peace, for the error will not be repeated.” It is a simple replica of an ancient clay hut, shielding a coffin that contains a register of the names of people who died because of the bomb. Hiroshima’s Cenotaph does not celebrate God, King, and Fatherland. It is a pity that Mosse finds no room for Hiroshima in his book, for it is a curious spot in every respect a sacred place of a new civil religion, but not of the same type as the Madeleine, or the Hessendenkmal in Frankfurt, the memorial to Germans who fell against Napoleon. Hiroshima’s Peace Park, in the center of the city, under the epicenter of the A-bomb, is not such a place. Remembrance of the glorious dead will rejuvenate the nation and spur it on to renewed greatness. Ghastly death in the slimy mud of trenches is transformed, in solemnly manicured cemeteries, into a symbol of transcendental beauty. As he puts it: “War was made sacred, an expression of the general will of the people.” Mosse traces the myth to the French Revolution, but also to Christian images of death and resurrection. The myth presents war as a glorious drama in which men sacrifice their lives for the nation. In his latest book, Fallen Soldiers, George Mosse describes war cemeteries, especially those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as “sacred spaces of a new civic religion.” The religion is based upon what he calls the Myth of the War Experience.
When a girl asked him whether he could stop war by simply sitting, he answered, “A chain reaction of spiritual atoms must defeat a chain reaction of material atoms.” 1 Then there are the ubiquitous groups of uniformed Japanese schoolchildren who, like little missionaries, approach foreign visitors with the question: “Do you love peace?” There is a retired professor of philosophy, known as the “Human Reactor,” who sits for hours, sometimes days, praying for peace in front of the Hiroshima Cenotaph. There used to be an old Hiroshima woman who became a Shinto priestess to defeat the dark power of the bomb with special herbs. Nuns gather there to pray, and foreigners dressed as Buddhist monks recite mantras, fingering their beads. The center of peace activity is Hiroshima Peace Park.
It has become recognized throughout the world as the mecca of world peace.” It is as a mecca of world peace that Hiroshima causes that embarrassing urge to giggle-a nervous giggle, of the kind that afflicts some people at funerals, where the seriousness of death can be rendered slightly comical by an exaggerated air of reverence, of ceremony, of awe, where what ought to be moving becomes sentimental, and so seems absurd. Visitors to the city are informed by the Hiroshima Peace Reader, a pamphlet published by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, that “Hiroshima is no longer merely a Japanese city. The fourth industry is Peace, or nuclear disarmament, or, as irreverent Japanese sometimes call it, the pikadon shobai, the flash-bang business, pikadon being an onomatopoeic phrase describing the effect of the A-bomb, which exploded over Hiroshima at 8:15 AM, August 6, forty-five years ago. They make cars in Hiroshima, as well as ships and Buddhist altars.
The pride of the city is its baseball team, the Hiroshima Carps, and the gastronomic speciality of the region is oysters. It is in almost every respect a normal Japanese city, so normal, in fact, that marketing people like to test new products there, for what they like in Hiroshima, it is thought, they like everywhere else in Japan. This was not because there is anything especially comical about Hiroshima. On both occasions I had the embarrassing, inappropriate, even offensive urge to laugh. “Cannon and firearms are cruel and damnable machines I believe them to be the direct suggestion of the devil.”