On the 64th Anniversary of Nuking Japan

A haiku dedicated to the forced upon compulsory victims of all imperialist wars

Crimes against humnanity
flounce 
like timeless kamikaze

For the victims of serial wars, the world is as deadly a place now as it was 64 years ago.

More “war crimes” and crimes against humanity are being committed today by the security-military-industrial complex, through the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and NATO forces, than ever before…

Related Links:

• Nuking of Hiroshima: 63 Years On
• Japan Quake and The Duplicity of Baptist Church
• Canada, Racism, Genocide, and the Bomb
• Blame It On Tojo
•  A Mass Murderer Dies
• War Crimes, USA
• Top 10 Reasons Why Japanese Loathe Gaijin (Foreigners )

People Mean Nothing to Japanese Govt

In the previous post Houston, We Have a Problem! the author asked two simple questions:

• Is the Foreign Ministry in Japan a foreign interest entity?

• What about the welfare of Japanese people?

First Poisonous Gyoza, then Leaky Nuke Sub. What next?

Here’s the answer:

China behind ‘gyoza’ cover-up

THE ASAHI SHIMBUN – August 9, 2008

At Beijing’s request, the Fukuda administration withheld public disclosure of a poisoning outbreak in China involving frozen “gyoza” dumplings, Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura said.

“There’s nothing wrong with what we did,” Komura declared Thursday in an interview with The Asahi Shimbun and other media.

China’s Foreign Ministry informed the Japanese Embassy in Beijing in early July that several Chinese people fell ill in June after eating pesticide-tainted gyoza made by Tianyang Food, according to Komura.

The products had been recalled after Japanese consumers became sick from eating imported Tianyang Food gyoza products last December and in January.

Japanese media only learned this week about the incident in China.

According to Komura, Beijing asked Tokyo not to disclose the matter on grounds an investigation was under way and that revealing the information would hinder it. Chinese officials promised to provide more details as the investigation progressed.

In Japan, the information was shared only among officials at the prime minister’s office, the National Police Agency and the Foreign Ministry.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told reporters Thursday that he was informed of the poisoning case in China around the time of the July 7-9 Group of Eight summit in Hokkaido.

Fukuda met with Chinese President Hu Jintao on the sidelines of the G-8 summit, and Komura held talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in Singapore in late July.

Komura said the officials discussed, with the new information in mind, speeding up collaborative police investigation efforts.

Yukio Hatoyama, secretary-general of the main opposition Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan), criticized the government’s handling of the problem.

“Shouldn’t the government have insisted on disclosing the fact, even if China asked it to cover it up?” he asked at a news conference Thursday.

“The government is so weak-kneed, and from the way it has handled the situation, we can’t call it a government that shares the mind-set of consumers.” (IHT/Asahi: August 9,2008 )

Related Links:

• Lack of ‘gyoza’ disclosure leaves bitter taste

Houston, We Have a Problem!

Is the Foreign Ministry in Japan a foreign interest entity? What about the welfare of Japanese people?

U.S. says submarine leaked radiation in 3 Japan ports

TOKYO (Reuters) – A U.S. nuclear-powered submarine which has steadily been leaking a small amount of radiation for over two years stopped at three Japanese ports, as well as Guam and Pearl Harbor, the United States and Japan said on Thursday.

Japan was notified by the United States last week that the nuclear-powered USS Houston had been leaking water containing a small amount of radiation, but was told at the time that it was unclear when the leak had started.

A statement from the U.S. government on Thursday said the Houston had been leaking radiation from June 2006 to July 2008.

During that time, the Houston docked at the Japanese ports of Yokosuka, 45 km (30 miles) southwest of Tokyo and in the southern island of Okinawa, as well as at Sasebo, 980 km (610 miles) southwest of Tokyo, the U.S. statement said.

The Leaky USS Houston (SSN-713), a Los Angeles-class submarine. They say it is “safe!” USS Houston was launched on 21 March 1981 sponsored by Barbara Bush, wife of then Vice-President of the United States George H. W. Bush. Houston was commissioned on 25 September 1982. (Wikipedia)

Both the U.S. and Japanese governments said the radiation leak was too small to cause harm.

“We do not think that the amount of leakage would have any impact on humans or the environment,” a Japanese foreign ministry official said.

The Houston may have also released a small amount of radioactivity into Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and Guam, the U.S. statement said.

The radiation leak is a fresh blow for Tokyo and Washington, which has been planning to station a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in Japan, the only nation in the world to have suffered nuclear attacks.

Local residents and civic groups expressed concern over the deployment of the USS George Washington after a fire on the nuclear-powered warship in May. They called for more information about that fire.

Japan said the Houston’s radiation leak would not have any impact on the plan to deploy the George Washington at Yokosuka.

“The United States assures strict procedures and prevention systems for nuclear-powered warships coming into port, and Japan is also checking the radiation levels 24 hours a day,” the foreign ministry official said.

The Houston radiation leak caused a big media stir in Japan last week, with the foreign ministry criticized for failing to disclose the leak promptly to the government and the public. (Reporting by Yoko Kubota; Editing by Paul Tait). Copyright the author or respective news agency.

If radiation leaks were a bad thing, why would USS Houston be leaking for 26 months?

Related Links:

• U.S. Navy Fires Captain of Japan-Bound Nuclear Warship

• The Other Victims of GW Bush’s War Racket

Nuking of Hiroshima: 63 Years On

Hiroshima marks A-bomb anniversary

IHT/Asahi: August 6,2008

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200808060285.html

HIROSHIMA–Hiroshima marked the 63rd anniversary of its atomic bombing Wednesday with Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba saying he hopes the new U.S. president will support the elimination of nuclear weapons.

“We can only hope that the president of the United States elected this November will listen conscientiously to the majority, for whom the top priority is human survival,” said Akiba in his Peace Declaration.

“The only way to protect citizens from a nuclear attack is the total abolition of nuclear weapons,” he added.

Akiba delivered the declaration during a somber ceremony held in the Peace Memorial Park that was attended by about 45,000 people, including hibakusha atomic-bomb survivors, bereaved families and dignitaries.

This year for the first time, the average age of surviving victims topped the 75-year mark to reach 75.1 years. The number of hibakusha living in and out of Japan has declined to 243,692.

On Wednesday, the names of 5,302 hibakusha who died during the past year were added to those stored inside the park’s cenotaph honoring the A-bomb victims. The total number of the deceased now stands at 258,310.

Chased by the flame. A survivor painted the picture of memoir, thirty years after the bombing. (Source)

As the Peace Bell tolled at 8:15 a.m., the moment the U.S. atomic bomb dubbed “Little Boy” was dropped on the city on Aug. 6, 1945, participants at the Peace Memorial Park bowed their heads in one minute of silent prayer.

Representatives from a record 55 countries attended the ceremony, including those from China, which sent delegates for the first time.

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, attending the event for the first time since he took office last September, said at the ceremony, “Today, here in Hiroshima, I swear that our country will continue to adhere to the three nonnuclear principles, and that we will stand at the forefront of the international community toward the realization of the abolition of nuclear weapons, as well as of permanent peace.”

In April, the government set new certification standards for recognizing sufferers of atomic-bomb diseases. Since then it has lost four court cases in which plaintiffs not covered by the new standards won recognition as sufferers of radiation-caused illnesses.

Flames won!

As a result, public distrust in the government’s certification system continues to simmer.

“We will continue our efforts, so that we can assist as many people who are suffering as possible,” said Fukuda.

In his Peace Declaration, Mayor Akiba also called on the government to show more sympathy in recognizing A-bomb patients.

“Because the effects of that atomic bomb, still eating away at the minds and bodies of the hibakusha, have for decades been so underestimated, a complete picture of the damage has yet to emerge,” he said.

Akiba made a rare reference to the politics of the world’s sole nuclear superpower, expressing his hopes that the next American president will back nuclear abolition.

“Even leaders previously central to creating and implementing U.S. nuclear policy are now repeatedly demanding a world without nuclear weapons,” he said.

The statement was in a reference to recent proposals on the elimination of nuclear weapons by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other former U.S. political leaders. ( IHT/Asahi: August 6,2008 )

Related Video Links:

• US Bombing of HiROSHiMA, NAGASAKi
• WHY HIROSHIMA?

Recently publicized photos:

• Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives
  

Paying the price for free speech in Japan!

Would You Do This to the Japanese Living in Your Country?

More Criminal Damage [Again]: Author’s bike tire was slashed.

Civilized people do NOT behave this way; savages do!

Related Links:

• More Criminal Damage
• Foreigners Can Drive in Japan?
• Do Not Speak English in Japan!
  

• War Crimes, USA
• A Culture of Bullying, Sex, Suicide, Murder
• Fruits of a Repressed Culture

• A Culture of Bullying

Canada, Racism, Genocide, and the Bomb

Could the United States have dropped the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki if Canada had not supplied the uranium?

Canada, Racism, Genocide, and the Bomb

Is Canada any less guilty of the most egregious crime against humanity?

The Legacy of C.D. Howe

by KIM PETERSEN [Originally published in The Dominion, April 5, 2005]

It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe. ~ William Lyon Mackenzie King (uncensored diaries)

Few Canadians know of Canada’s link to Little Boy, the so-christened uranium bomb that exploded over Hiroshima, and Fat Man, the plutonium bomb that devastated Nagasaki. Not only were Japanese citizens expendable in the nuclear holocaust, but the “Canadian Genocide Machine” (see Robert Davis and Mark Zannis, Black Rose, 1973) wreaked long-lasting damage on the Original Peoples in the Arctic.

The first shipment of Uranium is transported on Sahtu
(Great Bear Lake) in 1931. Photo: Public Archives

Sahtu (Great Bear Lake) is the ninth largest lake in the world, famed for its record-size lake trout and Arctic graylings. The Sahtugot’ine (Dene First Nation of Sahtu) have traditionally carried out a subsistence livelihood following their food, mainly caribou and the fish, seasonally around Sahtu. A thriving community of 650 has settled in Deline. Previously called Fort Franklin after an English explorer, Deline means, “Where the water flows,” in the Slavery language.

The uranium mine was developed by the Canadian government to satisfy US needs for the World War II effort to construct an atomic bomb. From 1942 to 1960, the Sahtugot’ine worked at the mine in Port Radium, unknowingly polluting their massive freshwater resource and irradiating themselves. In the early 1960s, the danger became apparent. The Sahtugot’ine workers started to die from lung, colon, and kidney cancers — diseases previously unknown to them.

Cindy Kenny-Gilday is a Sahtugot’ine who has worked on the issue of uranium contamination of lands and people around Sahtu. About the lethal legacy of uranium mining, she stated in 1998:

Deline is practically a village of widows, most of the men who worked as laborers have died of some form of cancer. The widows, who are traditional women were left to raise their families with no breadwinners, supporters. They were left to depend on welfare and other young men for their traditional food source. This village of young men are the first generation of men in the history of Dene on this lake to grow up without guidance from their grandfathers, fathers and uncles. This cultural, economic, spiritual, emotional deprivation impact on the community is a threat to the survival of the one and only tribe on Great Bear Lake.

Declassified documents reveal that the danger from uranium was known during the mining operation. However, neither the Canadian nor US governments saw fit to make known the health dangers. The Sahtugot’ine were sacrificed for an effort that ultimately slaughtered hundreds of thousands.

“In my mind, it’s a war crime that has been well hidden,” said Kenny-Gilday. “We were the first civilian victims of the war.”

Canada and the Bomb

In 1930, Gilbert LaBine discovered uranium near Sahtu, but he shut down the mine at the outbreak of World War II. In 1942, Minister of Munitions and Supply C.D. Howe told LaBine to reopen the mine and instructed him: “Get together the most trustworthy people you can find. The Canadian government will give you whatever money is required. … And for God’s sake don’t even tell your wife what you’re doing.”

Hundreds of Canadian scientists collaborated with allied scientists on the atomic bomb program, for which Canada supplied the uranium and heavy water. Canada also had representation on the Combined Policy Committee that administered the atomic bomb program. Canada’s Howe was among the committee members who approved the use of the bomb on Japan.

On 6 August 1945, B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped [Little Boy] on Hiroshima, a city of 343,000, killing 100,000 people immediately and leveling the city.

Hiroshima City After the Bomb. Photo source: ibiblio.org

In 1998, six members of the Sahtugot’ine went to Japan to commemorate the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an atrocity that some Sahtugot’ine unwittingly had a hand in, a role they now regret.

Canadian Genocide Machine

On 22 March 1998, community evidence was presented to the Canadian government alleging “prior knowledge and ongoing complicity in the environmental crime” suffered by the Dene First Nation of Deline. Chief Raymond Tutcho said:

We, the Dene, have been subjected to over 60 years of horrible injustice because of apparent national interests. Our people have paid for this with our lives and the health of our community, lands, and waters. We have set out a ‘Plan for Essential Response and Necessary Redress.’

The six-point plan called for immediate crisis assistance, a comprehensive environmental and social assessment, full public disclosure, clean-ups and monitoring, acknowledgment of government responsibility, and community healing and cultural regeneration.

Tutcho’s call saw the formation of the Canada-Deline Uranium Table (CDUT) in 1999, which was charged in 2002 with putting together an action plan “to describe, scope and recommend studies and activities that, when completed, will provide information necessary to enable the CDUT to make informed decisions about long-term management of Port Radium site and any ongoing health requirement …”

Cathy Mackeinzo, manager of the CDUT, stated that “the community, leaders and community, had agreed to work with the federal government to address joint issues.”

“At that time people thought it was a good process,” she said. “It’s working out to date.”

A final report, due for completion in March 2005, has since been extended to June. Danny Gaudet, chief negotiator of the CDUT confirmed that no special treatment of radiation-afflicted people been undertaken “other than developing assessments of high risk patients.”

In response to the over “60 years of horrible injustice,” without compensation, without health treatment, and without an environmental cleanup, Mackeinzo admitted that there was “a lot of outstanding grieving” in the community and that she was only speaking in her managerial capacity.

The Deline Uranium Team’s November 2004 newsletter suggests frivolity. The newsletter detailed how 15 Deline community members and four CDUT staffers flew over for a tour of the mine, had a cup of tea, enjoyed the view from above, and felt “tired but satisfied” afterwards. While some speak of action, the noxious environmental and health risks linger.

Howe is eponymously memorialized by a right-wing think tank, but his name is also linked to enormous suffering.

FAIR USE NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed for research and educational purposes.

AMERICA CANNOT BE SAID TO BE GOOD

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

George W. Bush may indeed be the worst president ever, and Dick Cheney the worst vice-president imaginable but that does not exonerate the American people because Americans have the constitutional right and responsibility to remove miscreants from office.

The Bush-Cheney administration has not just given freedom a hollow ring, they have not just made a mockery of American democracy and human rights in the present, and they have not just put future generations at risk with reckless deficit spending, environmental degradation and the burden of war without end, but they have effectively caused the past to be rewritten as well. America is beginning to understand what it’s like to be on the wrong side of history.

This point was driven home to me when I read that respected American historian Herbert Bix, author of “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan” recently pointed out some striking similarities between Tojo’s Japan and Bush-Cheney’s America, particularly the willful disregard of international law, the pursuit of diplomacy by force and failure to account for war criminality.

Let’s consider for the moment that current US policy bears some eerie parallels to that of Tojo’s Japan. Is that a result of having judged militarist Japan unfairly, or has America gotten worse? Is that to say Japan’s criminal past was not as bad as we used to say it was, or is it still every bit as bad, only now, we, the American interlocutors, are debased in such a way that the moral distance is less distant?

Scholars have long been familiar with US lapses in civilized behavior, even in the great and just war carried out by the “greatest generation.” The enemy was understandably viewed with contempt for his actions, but improperly viewed with racist contempt. Indiscriminate killing took untold innocent life, nowhere more vividly than in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with equal cold-blooded consequences in the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka.

For decades now, scholars have been effectively challenging the Truman era myth that the atomic bombing was necessary and saved millions of lives. While reasonable interpretations differ, the twin atomic bombings remain a uniquely uncomfortable and awkward topic for Americans who subscribe to the otherwise generally positive national narrative that starts with the day of infamy, the day on which the peace-loving US was sneakily attacked at Pearl Harbor, and continues with a series of heroic battles for sea, sky and land control across the Pacific, followed by a generally enlightened occupation of Japan’s home islands.

Given the incessant mutual violence that the war extracted from both sides, epitomized by the brutal battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it took decades for ordinary soldiers on both sides to be viewed with sympathetic respect –basically unfree men following orders as required by the tragedy of the time. Last year Clint Eastwood did a remarkably even-handed job of conveying the equivalency of the rank and file on both sides of the Pacific with the twin films “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”

The US occupation of Japan saw many a samurai’s sword turned into treasured souvenir, if not plowshare. It was none other than US war hero Douglas MacArthur who set the tone for sanitizing and containing Japan’s war criminality at the elite level by letting the Emperor off the hook and selectively exonerating war criminals who were of utility to the US. But if it wasn’t the people, and it wasn’t the penultimate leader, then who takes the blame?

To blame everything on a few bad apples is bad history, incongruent with the complex, interactive way things usually happen, but it allows nagging, difficult-to-resolve issues to be buried or put on the back burner as happened at the Tokyo trials. The entirety of Japan’s war guilt was deftly shifted onto the shoulders of Tojo and a handful of “Class A War Criminals.

Scapegoating, even of the obviously odious, is not fair, but it is expedient because it staves off more damaging and nuanced reckonings. That’s not to say scapegoated Class A war criminals are innocent in the same way their hapless victims were; the criminality of the Class A men is clearly documented. But they were unfairly singled out and unfairly apportioned more of the blame than even their cruel shoulders could bear. They were made caricatures of evil in contrast to the aloof, doddering emperor and the witless soldier in the field.

George W. Bush publicity handlers take note; better to spin your client as a dodderer playing with something less than a full deck than have him be held accountable. In today’s America, as in wartime Japan, there is plenty of blame to be passed around, but no takers. It’s too hurtful to the American ego to even contemplate war criminality. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is not an option. The State Department has granted immunity to the criminally negligible including the thugs of Blackwater. Is this apparent benevolence not just another type of denial, that Americans don’t torture, Americans don’t commit crimes of war?

Eventually, narratives that blame no one have to round up a few suspects, and that’s where the bad apples come in. But this sort of selective justice unduly burdens middling war criminals with more historical agency than they ever possessed.

Does making Tojo an example of evil incarnate exonerate Japanese war veterans, among them mean-spirited soldiers who violated the conventions of war by gratuitously killing, raping and torturing non-combatant Chinese? And what about Japanese civilians on the home front, making weapons, churning out propaganda, feeding the beast? Blame it on Tojo?

What about people like Akira Kurosawa who worked uninterrupted with ample state support during a war that wreaked murder and mayhem on Japan’s neighbors under the guise of racial superiority? To hear Kurosawa tell it in his biography, his main beef with the Tojo authorities was over artistic control, not the insane politics of the time.

The bad apple school of thought thrives in national narratives because it aids and abets denial for proud individuals and powerful constituencies.

The problem with Japanese rightists, and America’s problem understanding them, is not so much the seemingly futile attempt polish up the bad apples, the futile attempt to make the class A Criminals shine. It’s not even the rightists’ dubious campaign to re-configure war criminals as honorable Shinto spirits at Yasukuni Shrine. The problem with the rightists is they are bound to honor the penultimate leader at all costs, which short-circuits all other arguments and prevents blame from being fairly apportioned.

The result of this implacable cognitive dissonance is denial. Denial is the worst thing about the Japan’s rightists, not their contrarian desire to challenge the America-centric narrative as articulated in the admittedly clumsy and compromised Tokyo War Crimes Trials.

Americans are starting to learn more about war crimes and denial they they ever dreamed of. The divisive words and belligerent actions of George W. Bush, the contempt for diplomacy, the lack of accountability, the tortured rhetoric and the rhetoric defending torture have caused America’s global prestige to drop to an unprecedented low. America is increasingly seen as the crux of the problem rather than a flawed but otherwise normal country, let alone a beacon of hope.

The horror of an unjust and unnecessary war is forcing Americans to confront the opacity of their own self-image, and in doing so, to seek lessons and parallels than now, in a way not possible even four years ago, make it possible to see Tojo and Japan’s war criminality in slightly more sympathetic way. This is not to exonerate but rather to heave a heavy sigh of understanding, to acknowledge that even the most refined and civilized of nations can be disfigured and disabled by the politics of fear and denial.

America has been diminished to such an extent under the Bush-Cheney “unitary presidency” that a crime like torture — once comfortably seen as beyond the pale because it was only associated with the most despicable of enemies– suddenly resonates in an uncomfortably familiar way.

Just as it should be acknowledged that the people of Japan share a certain culpability in Tokyo’s terrible war, a war that ravaged Asia and eventually Japan itself, Americans have to own up to Iraq. But it can also be said in defense of the average Japanese in the days after Pearl Harbor that there was much they didn’t know and couldn’t talk about; –the media was completely censored and the Kempeitai dealt brutally with domestic opposition.

When the day of reckoning comes for ordinary Americans to assess their culpability in the debacle of Iraq, a hideous and heinous war fought in view of a free media and in the context of relatively unfettered freedom to protest, what will the excuse be?

If Bush is unjust, if he is, as they say, the worst ever, then the free people who support, tolerate and enable him cannot be said to be good.

PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM TEACHES AT DOSHISHA UNIVERSITY IN JAPAN

FAIR USE NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed for research and educational purposes.

A Reply to America Cannot Be Said to Be Good: Blame It On Tojo

Top 10 Reasons Why Japanese Loathe Gaijin (Foreigners )

Top 10 Reasons Why Japanese Loathe Gaijin…

10. Little Boy
9. Fat Man

8. Missionaries

The Bombing of Nagasaki August 9, 1945: The Untold Story
by Gary G. Kohls

62 years ago, on August 9^th, 1945, the second of the only two atomic bombs (a plutonium bomb) ever used as instruments of aggressive war (against essentially defenseless civilian populations) was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, by an all-Christian bomb crew. The well-trained American soldiers were only “doing their job,” and they did it efficiently.

It had been only 3 days since the first bomb, a , had decimated Hiroshima on August 6, with chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military government and the Emperor had been searching for months for a way to an honorable end of the war which had exhausted the Japanese to virtually moribund status. (The only obstacle to surrender had been the Truman administration’s insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor Hirohito, whom the Japanese regarded as a deity, would be removed from his figurehead position in Japan – an intolerable demand for the Japanese.)

The Russian army was advancing across Manchuria with the stated aim of entering the war against Japan on August 8, so there was an extra incentive to end the war quickly: the US military command did not want to divide any spoils or share power after Japan sued for peace.

The US bomber command had spared Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kokura from the conventional bombing that had burned to the ground 60+ other major Japanese cities during the first half of 1945. One of the reasons for targeting relatively undamaged cities with these new weapons of mass destruction was scientific: to see what would happen to intact buildings – and their living inhabitants – when atomic weapons were exploded overhead.

Early in the morning of August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress called Bock’s Car, took off from Tinian Island, with the prayers and blessings of its Lutheran and Catholic chaplains, and headed for Kokura, the primary target. (Its bomb was code-named “Fat Man,” after Winston Churchill.)

The only field test of a nuclear weapon, blasphemously named “Trinity,” had occurred just three weeks earlier, on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The molten lavarock that resulted, still found at the site today, is called trinitite.

With instructions to drop the bomb only on visual sighting, Bock’s Car arrived at Kokura, which was clouded over. So after circling three times, looking for a break in the clouds, and using up a tremendous amount of valuable fuel in the process, it headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.

Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. Not only was it the site of the largest Christian church in the Orient, St. Mary’s Cathedral, but it also had the largest concentration of baptized Christians in all of Japan. It was the city where the legendary Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, established a mission church in 1549, a Christian community which survived and prospered for several generations. However, soon after Xavier’s planting of Christianity in Japan, Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests began to be accurately perceived by the Japanese rulers as exploitive, and therefore the religion of the Europeans (Christianity) and their new Japanese converts became the target of brutal persecutions.

St. Mary’s Cathedral, aka Urakami Cathedral (Japanese: 浦上天主堂 Urakami Tenshudō) a Roman Catholic church located in the district of Urakami, Nagasaki.

Within 60 years of the start of Xavier’s mission church, it was a capital crime to be a Christian. The Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their beliefs suffered ostracism, torture and even crucifixions similar to the Roman persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. After the reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity had been stamped out.

However, 250 years later, in the 1850s, after the coercive gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government – which immediately started another purge. But because of international pressure, the persecutions were soon stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. And by 1917, with no help from the government, the Japanese Christian community built the massive St. Mary’s Cathedral, in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.

Now it turned out, in the mystery of good and evil, that St. Mary’s Cathedral was one of the landmarks that the Bock’s Car bombardier had been briefed on, and looking through his bomb site over Nagasaki that day, he identified the cathedral and ordered the drop.

At 11:02 am, Nagasaki Christianity was boiled, evaporated and carbonized in a scorching, radioactive fireball. The persecuted, vibrant, faithful, surviving center of Japanese Christianity had become ground zero.

Nagasaki Temple: “a graveyard with not a tombstone standing”

And what the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, American Christians did in 9 seconds. The entire worshipping community of Nagasaki was wiped out.

The above true (and unwelcome) story should stimulate discussion among those who claim to be disciples of Jesus. The Catholic chaplain for the 509^th Composite Group (the 1500-man Army Air Force group, whose only job was to successfully deliver the atomic bombs to their targets) was Father George Zabelka. Several decades after the war ended, he saw his grave theological error in religiously legitimating the mass slaughter that is modern land and air war. He finally recognized that the enemies of his nation were not the enemies of God, but rather children of God whom God loved, and whom the followers of Jesus are to also love. Father Zabelka’s conversion to Christian nonviolence led him to devote the remaining decades of his life speaking out against violence in all its forms, especially the violence of militarism. The Lutheran chaplain, William Downey, in his counseling of soldiers who had become troubled by their participation in making murder for the state, later denounced all killing, whether by a single bullet or by a weapon of mass destruction.

. . .

As a lifelong Christian, that comment stung, but it was the sting of a sad and sobering truth. And as a physician who deals with psychologically traumatized patients every day, I know that it is violence, in all its myriad of forms, that bruises the human psyche and soul, and that that trauma is deadly and contagious, and it spreads through the families and on through the 3^rd and 4^th generations – until somebody stops continuing the domestic violence that military violence breeds.

One of the most difficult “mental illnesses” to treat is combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In its most virulent form, PTSD is virtually incurable. It is also a fact that whereas most Vietnam War recruits came from churches where they actively practiced their faith, if they came home with PTSD, the percentage returning to the faith community approached zero.

This is a serious spiritual problem for any church that (either by the active support of its nation’s “glorious” wars or by its silence on such issues) fails to teach its young people about what the earliest form of Christianity taught about violence: that it was forbidden to those who wished to follow Jesus.

If a Christian community fails to thoroughly inform its confirmands about the gruesome realities of the war zone before they are forced to register for potential conscription into the military, it invites the condemnation that Jesus warned about in Matthew 18:5–6: “And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believes in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

The purpose of this essay is to stimulate open and honest discussion (at least among the followers of Jesus) about the ethics of killing by and for one’s government, not from the perspective of national security ethics, not from the perspective of the military, not from the perspective of (the pre-Christian) eye-for-an-eye retaliation that Jesus rejected, but from the perspective of the Sermon on the Mount, the core ethical teachings of Jesus in Matthew 5, 6 and 7.

Out of that discussion (if any are willing to engage in it) should come answers to those horrible realities that seem to immobilize decent Bible-believing Christians everywhere: Why are some of us Christians so willing to commit (or support and/or pay for others to commit) homicidal violence against other fellow children of a loving, merciful, forgiving God, the God whom Jesus clearly calls us to imitate? And what can we Christians do, starting now, to prevent the next war and the next epidemic of combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorder?

What can we do to prevent the next round of these atrocities, all of which have been perpetrated by professed Christians: the My Lai Massacre, Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps, Dresden, El Mozote, Rwanda, Jonestown, the black church bombings, the execution of innocent death row inmates, the sanctions against Iraq (that killed 500,000 children during the 1990s), the military annihilation of Fallujah and much of the rest of Iraq and Afghanistan, the torturing of innocents at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay plus the many other international war crimes (albeit un-indicted to date) perpetrated by the current “Christian” administration of the United States. And what is to be done to prevent the next Nagasaki?

A large portion of the responsibility for the prevention of military atrocities like Nagasaki lies within the organized Christian churches and whether or not they soon start teaching and living what the radical nonviolent Jesus taught and lived.

The next Nagasaki can be prevented if the churches finally heed Jesus’ call to nonviolence and refuse their government’s call for the bodies and souls of their sons and daughters.

August 6, 2007

Gary Kohls, MD, an associate of Every Church a Peace Church, is a practicing physician in Duluth, MN.

Copyright © 2007 Gary G. Kohls, MD [Emphases were added by Gacuette.]

Related Link: Canada, Racism, Genocide, and the Bomb

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War Crimes, USA

War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, USA

Top 10 Reasons Why Japanese Loathe Foreigners, Especially the Americans:
.10. Little Boy
9. Fat Man

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after detonating Little Boy.

Sixty-2 years ago today (August 6, 1945), in a shameful act of mass murder, United States of America under President Harry S. Truman dropped the nuclear weapon “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima killing up to 80,000 people instantly. Three days later on August 9, 1945 the US detonated another nuclear bomb the “Fat Man” over Nagasaki.

The Fat Man mushroom cloud resulting from the US nuclear explosion over
Nagasaki rises 18 km (11 mi, 60,000 ft) into the air from the hypocenter.

According to some estimates the total death toll was 237,000 for Hiroshima, and 135,000 for Nagasaki including diseases from the aftereffects based on hospital data.

The overwhelming majority of the deaths in both nuclear attacks were civilians.

The Manhattan Project, led by General Groves and physicist
Oppenheimer, developed the first atomic bombs used in WWII.

The Manhattan Project developed the first nuclear weapons,
and the first-ever nuclear detonation, called the Trinity test.

The Baptist President, Truman – 33rd US President –
the psychopath who authorized the nuclear attacks on Japan.

Other Players: MacArthur and Hirohito

The photo files are from the Wikimedia Commons.

The twin nuclear attacks on Japan was much more than the war crime of ‘collective punishment’; it was a crime against humanity!

Related Link:

• Canada, Racism, Genocide, and the Bomb

Possibly related links:

• Japan: New Challenges, NO Fresh Ideas!
• Oligarchic Govt: Conspiring against Japanese people