Nagasaki’s Impact

August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima. Complete devastation. Yet Tojo of Japan did not stop the war. Unbeknownst to most, there was another bomb being prepped at Tinian Island while the world watched the aftermath of Hiroshima. Which city would it be? Kyoto, Yokohama, Kokura. All of these were sites with military influence or strategy. For Nagasaki, it was housing important military facilities, including shipyards, steel, and arms factories to make weapons and supplies for the Japanese military. So, at 11:02, August 9, 1945, the second bomb, deemed “fat boy”, was dropped. Like Hiroshima, complete devastation.

As I walked through the atomic bomb museum in Nagasaki, I learned about how the blast raised the temperature thousands of degrees melting or bubbling all in its path. I read how the pressure change exploded and leveled everything in a second. How the fires erupted and tore through miles of land, buildings, and bodies…there were thousands of souls charred and statued similar to the molten casts on Pompeii…they littered the ground. Then I saw the displays that told of skin melting off some of the survivors as people tried to help them up, the radiation poisoning that killed those that were not burnt, the cremation of multiple family members by survivors, and how the hospital that should have been a first responder was instead blown out and rendered useless. Help could only come from those not killed in the bomb. Their faces and stories were shown throughout the museum to explain all the horrific effects. I found myself pausing at the map of the bomb blast radius and that’s when I noticed all the schools. These were civilians getting ready for lunch. Children learning math at their school desks. They were doctors checking on patients. These were not armed soldiers. These were the innocent bystanders killed in an instance due to decisions made in government and military offices miles away. Yet, were these souls complicit in the war effort than needed their labor for military ships and weapons? My head was spinning as my heart was aching.

The kids and I have been studying Eastern History and we are currently in Japan. We just read how imperialism rose in Japan in 1895, a bit more than a generation away from this bomb. They attacked China, Russia, and Korea simply to gain more land and resources. Millions of civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese. They conquered Taiwan and Okinawa. In fact, we toured Hacksaw Ridge in Okinawa and all the tunnels and caves the Japanese dug during WWII. We read the stories of how they used the native Okinawan people (including children) as suicide bombers, shields, and chaff. They told the Okinawans that the Americans were there to torture, kill, and rape them and in order to avoid that, hundreds of Okinawans jumped off a cliff to their death. You can google other atrocities if you are interested as they are too horrible to list here. The nation of Japan was evil, and it seems the people helped their armies in war, rather than revolt against it.

The term shock and awe keeps going through my brain. When my kids are out of control at the homeschool table, I have been known to loudly slam the table in front of them to shock them into listening. I often ask myself if it is too much and violent as I rub my red and stinging hand? Am I out of control, would a gentle answer turn back the wrath? Then I remember that I had been warning them over and over again and they hadn’t changed their behavior. The gentle didn’t work. Yet a table slap is not an atomic bomb.

We finished our book on Japan today and it had paragraphs about how the US stayed to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure, write a constitution, and restore order and peace in Japan. This is still going on today. In fact, Barrett toured the Japanese war ship docked oppositive the USS America yesterday. The people have gone from imperialistic nationalists to a peaceful, polite, and orderly society. The book mentioned how there is Japan before WWII and Japan after WWII. On paper, the bombing worked. In my heart, there is sadness over ALL the death caused by this nation and others during war. In an odd sense of timing, the Nobel Peace Prize winners this year were a group of people who survived the bombing of Hiroshima. They have been working toward peace for years and were finally noticed by this society. Yet I know that lasting peace won’t come until Christ returns as King. So this tug in my heart of anger and sadness from the effects of war will remain. I will not ignore or sugar coat the complexities that the sin curse displays, but I will fix my eyes on Jesus, the Conquering King who will reverse the curse and restore peace forever.