What will we remember about August 6th?
A good day for reflecting on the creation of collective memory
Tomorrow, I’m going to pull myself out of bed a lot earlier than I typically like to on a Sunday.
It will be August 6th, the anniversary of when the United States bombed civilians in Hiroshima. Just a few days later, August 9th will likewise mark the bombing of Nagasaki. Thus Sunday morning I’ll be heading to a community vigil in the nearby park, to remember those who died the only time nuclear weapons have ever been deployed by one country against another.
I’ve been to variations on the yearly vigil before. They’re often small affairs, put together by the regulars in peace activist spaces—Quakers, Buddhists, and the like. Some cities, though, like Seattle, hold bigger gatherings.
Sometimes my attendance has been accidental; I’ve walked by, seen what was happening, and stopped to join. This year, I’m going with more intention. It feels important, in a summer when Oppenheimer has been dominating headlines, to show solidarity with those on the receiving end of the long chain of events documented in that film.
In Japan, Oppenheimer has yet to screen, and it’s unclear if it will—not because of any official ban, more simply out of general cultural sensitivity toward the topic. While those living in the U.S. may tend to focus on the two hundred thousand or so who died in the immediate blasts, in Japan there is much more awareness of the additional hundreds of thousands who lived with ongoing radiation sickness, whose families see this not as some distant past event but as one that continues to shape their lives. (This includes Japanese-Americans who were in the two cities at the time, something there’s probably even less awareness of.) As an example of how this is guiding public response to the film in Japan: there was backlash when the #Barbenheimer meme first began to appear there, to such an extent that Warner Brothers (the distributor of Barbie) had to do damage control and removed various posts from official Barbie accounts.
My mind’s not made up about seeing the film yet; it seems important for the sake of understanding how history is being shaped in the popular imagination just now, but three hours is a long time in a theater seat.1 And then there’s this question of where one’s cultural allegiances lie. I decided, if I was going to go sit through another representation of the “we had to kill a bunch of people to stop killing a bunch of people” argument, I’d only do so after dedicating a similar amount of time to remembering the true consequences of that logic. I.e., I’d go to a vigil.
In a way, I was prompted by some of what we explored earlier this summer, in the post “Can We Reconcile After War?” Looking at the long reach of the harms from the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, we concluded with this:
Naming a park “Reconciliation” doesn’t mean reconciliation has necessarily taken place. Nor is remembering and honoring the past—either those who suffered or those who fought bravely—a guarantee of healing. But in each of these responses to the difficult history of Mni Sota Makoce, we see the possibility for healing that grounds itself in full remembering.
We choose to forget by many means: by denial of the past, be it a refusal to hear the stories of others that might differ from our own tellings, or the blocking out of our own memory; by the trivialization of its effect on the present; or by the simple failure to learn or engage. None of these forms of forgetting can help with collective healing. No, the starting point of healing is almost always honest remembering. This is especially true when we’re talking about harms inflicted by one person or group upon another. Consider the basic structure outlined for international forms of repair and reparations, which begins with “cessation and assurance of non-repetition.” You can’t truly commit to ceasing a harm that you have failed to recognize exists. Naming, remembering, is the first step in repair.
While many of us practice honest remembering through solitary learning—reading a book, say—when it comes to collective trauma, it’s the broader collective memory that’s important. This is the role of something like a vigil. Done in public space, it has the potential to expand the reach of such honest remembering.
I said I attended a Hiroshima-Nagasaki observance accidentally. This was back some time in college or shortly thereafter. I wasn’t walking by just any ordinary place that day. No, I was walking by here:
This sculpture—“Nuclear Energy,” by Henry Moore—marks an important site: it’s where physicists produced the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction. It all happened in makeshift labs under stands on the football field at the University of Chicago (which has made sure to hype its quick cameo in Nolan’s film).2
The sculpture is a fascinating example of how much forgetting we do on a daily basis. Any number of students walk by it each day without taking much of a second look; it’s just another big impressive piece of stone on a campus full of big impressive stone buildings. I think sometime during my tenure on that campus I had stopped and read the plaque and knew the sculpture’s reason for being, but I had generally let it slip into the back of my mind. Until I walked by one August 6th, and stopped because there were people gathered and listening to someone speaking, and this was unusual. Hence my first Hiroshima vigil, at one of the places that helped birth the atomic age.
Until that moment, I’d never considered that there was any role that I might play with regard to this particular topic. The bombings were a tragic event that I believed morally unjustified, but like plenty of other historical happenings, they seemed completely separate from me in my present reality. They’d taken place a long time ago; the event seemed finished, done. I’d read John Hersey’s Hiroshima in high school and felt the devastation that piece is meant to induce, but the only way that I could see really apply anything I learned from that experience was to advocate very generally against the creation and use of nuclear weapons. Which, at the time, would have practically come down to a willingness to sign a petition in favor of anti-proliferation treaties, had someone asked. And I don’t know if anyone ever asked.
But here were folks suggesting that I might have a role, not just by having some general attitude towards general policies and actions of governments that may or may not bother to pay attention to public sentiment on the matter. The role was that of active rememberer: one who made sure the memory of the specific harms to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t disappear in the way those people themselves horrifically did.
There’s a long tradition of “bearing witness” in Quakerism; and as I mentioned, it’s pretty easy to find Quakers at such events. To bear witness can mean many different things, but I think you could say I learned about one small aspect of that practice from that event, which is the potential for quietly showing up and insisting that our fellow humans—no matter where on the globe they happen to live—deserve not to be harmed by the excesses of war. To do that we must remember that war is an excess of our violent forces, not some glorious achievement of the human mind. Though there are those who will take that as the ongoing lesson of Hollywood WWII productions, even one focused on the man who himself doubted the righteousness of such achievements.
I didn’t realize the impact of that first event for a long time. I left that day before it was even finished. Some editor from a progressive political magazine got up and spoke, and he was all bombast and heavy-handed ideology, red in the face and railing against George W. Bush. He seemed to be missing the point, I thought, and using the day only as fodder for contemporary political battles. My companion and I stood whispering to one another for a moment, then shrugged our shoulders and left. We probably made some disdainful comments about party politics on our way to a pleasant summer afternoon and didn’t dwell on it much further.
I didn’t really think about it again for a long time until someone asked if I would help pass out fliers for the yearly event in Seattle, and I found myself saying, “oh, of course,” without having to think—the uniqueness of which was impressed upon me by the surprised facial expression of the asker, who was a community member I was constantly refusing, what with his many asks for his many projects for which he was always seeking help. And then I realized that the 20-30 minutes I’d taken by the Moore statue in Chicago had done something, as had the one or two other very brief events I’d attended since then; that they’d conspired to make me feel in some way responsible for being one of the many people keeping the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in collective memory, in a culture that otherwise loves to forget.
How much do we love forgetting? The Moore sculpture has a plaque explaining its presence. It reads:
December 2, 1942
Physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues established the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear reaction in makeshift laboratories constructed under the grandstands of Stagg Field Stadium on December 2, 1942. The success of this experiment ushered in the atomic age, opening tremendous potential to modern science.
The sculpture was commissioned in the early 1960s, not even twenty years after the 1945 bombings. The Cold War was escalating, people palpably afraid of nuclear war. And yet the meaning of the Manhattan Project’s work? The “tremendous potential to modern science.” Not a word about the dead humans as the end result of all that “tremendous potential.”
Collective memory is made and remade daily—in films and other art forms, and in all our casual habits of looking or not looking at what’s right in front of us. By its very nature, this shared memory is a collective project, meaning we all can find roles for shaping and stewarding it. This is the informal stuff of everyday conversations with friends, as well as more formal choices—running for school board, say, to make sure folks have access to books. (Hersey’s Hiroshima, notably, has been banned or censored at various times, though less so in the U.S.; though it also had to overcome many obstacles from the U.S. military to be written.)
I’d point you to August 6th vigils as a way to encourage you to attend, but they tend to be run by a hodgepodge of local groups; there’s no centralized website that I know of to share, to help you find one near you. But certainly a web search or a scan of events in the local paper would get you the info you need should you be interested in attending one.
Maybe this event isn’t the particular one that stirs you to stand as a witness, to take ownership over keeping past harm present for the broader public, to better assist the possibility for collective remembering and repair. But now’s as good a time as any to reflect upon which portions of our difficult shared history as humans each of us is willing to help hold and carry forward, and how. How are we helping to set the groundwork for healing and repair between others? What shall we make sure is not forgotten?
Thanks for reading Unsettling this week. More on collective remembering and repair coming up soon.
Until next time,
Meg
Also, as an appreciator of film scores, the one thing I’ve heard universally praised—in a rather extensive read of the film’s reviews, which are otherwise divided in their opinions—is its score. I’d rather get to really listen, which likely mean seeing it at home. Popcorn crunching through moments of quiet dramatic tension is high up there on my list of pet peeves. A warning for anyone daring to suggest we watch a movie together.
If you’re looking at this photo and wondering why it doesn’t feel like it’s under some stands on a football field, that’s because UChicago disbanded its football program for a time, tore down the field, and in its place built the strange brutalist structure that is the Regenstein Library (as seen in the second photo), and then later, in another curious architectural choice, sat next to the library the only non-gray building on campus, the bright orange Max Palevsky dormitories.