In 1960 I was 16 and I had fallen heavily in love with opera.  That 
romance, unlike most in my life, has never ended.  I became part of the 
standing room line at the original Metropolitan Opera House at 1411 
Broadway.  Each day (my day was Saturday unless school was out) I'd join 
the line, drink coffee, chat with other standees, and hear wonderful 
stories from old guys who'd actually seen and heard some of the legends 
like Caruso and Farrar.

But this isn't about opera.

One cold Saturday morning I was on line and some Japanese tourists 
walked by in a cluster.  Sorry, but they had the stereotypical tourist 
cameras around their necks: probably Nikon rangefinders, old reflexes, 
stuff today considered collectible.

It was 1960.  The war had been over about 15 years.  Veterans were still 
relatively young men.

The Japanese men looked at us with curiosity.  Some guy a few people 
behind me stepped out of line and said things like "Hey, remember Pearl 
Harbor?  Corregidor?  Remember the Philippines?  Saipan and China?  
Don't pretend you don't understand me, you little bastards, you 
understand every word I'm saying.  So how'd ya like Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki?!"  This not some drunken street bum, he was an opera-lover 
like the rest of us, but the sight of those Japanese men threw a switch 
deep inside him.  It was mortifying.  The Japanese men either didn't 
understand him or they pretended not to; though they surely knew the 
sound of rage even couched in sarcasm.  They kept walking.

I haven't thought of that standee and his fury in years.  Some of us 
were really afraid he was going to attack the tourists.

The war had been over 15 years.  For this guy, assuming he was in it, no 
forgiveness was possible by that time in his journey, no forgetting.  
Something so horrible had happened (at least) inside him that his soul 
was wounded if not broken.

I don't know if Harry Truman's decision was right.  Militarily it 
worked: it stopped a terrible war that could have become even worse and 
brought a lot of people home who would other surely have died, Americans 
and Japanese both.  Morally?  I cannot speak to the mood of this country 
at the time.  I've read about the "demonstration" theory, i.e., fire a 
nuclear weapon off the Japanese coast so they could see what we were 
capable of doing.  But who knows if they would have bought it?  _I was 
not there_.  I cannot speak to the justification or lack of same for the 
bombings, any more than I can speak for or against what the RAF did at 
Dresden in April '45.  Horror is answered by horror.  Nobody is 
blameless even if there is a scale of monstrous conduct that is 
unquestionable: or, put another way, is what we did at Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki worse than what the Germans did in their extermination camps?  
At the risk of being dreadfully inflammatory, sorry, I don't think so.  
We were not attempting the extinction of the Japanese people.

I never thought to end with Realpolitik or some variant thereof, but 
you'd best not start a fight unless you are able to finish it, or the 
person who absorbed the first blow may get up and demolish you.  That 
could be Germany and Japan in WW2.  It could be us now, in Iraq.  I 
don't like the odds and I am not especially fond of the company.

Ken

-- 
Kenneth Wolman                        http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------
"Poetry is tribal not material....this is where you can remember the good
times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst,
else you cannot be healed."--C. D. Wright




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