When I was in primary school we were taught about a little Japanese girl named Sadako Sasaki and her paper cranes. She was one of the many victims of the Hiroshima atomic bomb blast, dying after the initial detonation from radiation sickness. One of many thousands who would die painfully in the days, weeks, months and years following the bombs explosion. We learned that in the time before her impending death, she had set a goal of making 1,000 paper Origami cranes. She died at 644. We even learned a song, and a group of ten year old Australian sang and put on a play, pretending to be Japanese children who died from the blast. Then we were told that the bombings were necessary. That the babies, children had to die. The greater good. Collective punishment. We were educated. Killing Sadako saved American lives. Next subject. The next dance to be performed to Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits. The ten year old’s forgetting Sadako.
It’s that time of year, when the anniversary of the atomic bombs of Japan are upon us. It’s a period where the culmination of all bombings, on every belligerent city is justified. We are taught that the fascists bombing Guenica or the blitz on London was wrong, the enemies intentional bombing of civilians an evil act that validates their evil status as an enemy. When the Allies bombed French, Italian, German, Romanian, Phillipine and Japanese towns and cities we are told it was a necessity. The Axis were evil. The babies, children included. Even those in occupied nations.
An American GI in Vietnam was quoted as saying, “We need to burn down the village in order to save it.” Perhaps one needs to murder millions in order to save them.
The Japanese empire was evil, it murdered millions, raped, tortured. The ancient Chinese capital of Nangking is forever to be associated with what the Japanese soldierrs did to it’s inhabitants. Like a blight, the empire of Japan savaged Asia, embracing a colonialism which was allowable for Europeans decades earlier. This was the twentieth century, the Japanese could not have such an empire. At least not at the expense of the British, Dutch, French or US empires.
Then the US bombed Korea, to the point that the Air Force ran out of targets. Destroying the North, wooden hut or bridge it did not matter. Millions died. Biological weapons were even dropped. Those developed by the sinister Japanese scientists who had become US assets. The very Japanese military torturers many use to justify the nuking of little Sadako, shared their putrid secrets with Uncle Sam who then used them on Koreans and Chinese. The Japanese had done that too. Though at the time, North Korea was not known as a pariah entity, not to the point of Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. Communist imperialism was a danger that needed to be opposed, opposed by murdering the people it enslaved. Every enemy leader was the next Hitler, while millions of the next Sadako’s suffered.
Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam would follow in the decades after Korea. More bombs were dropped on Laos, than were dropped in all of World War Two. “They just kept sending us more bombs,” an Air Force man said when asked why. More bombs were dropped on South Vietnam, the allied side, than were dropped in the North, the enemy side. Millions died. Even to this day, the chemicals used to obliterate nature and human life poisons generations later. Bombs and mines randomly explode, shredding mostly the young to death or maiming them for life. All those bombs and lives taken to free the Vietnamese? Save American lives? Freedom? To preserve the Union?
Hundreds of thousands of Sadako’s suffered. Blown to pieces, burned to death, maimed, born into mutated agony all so that men in uniform could enforce policies for men in suits. When the war was over those places became historical chapters, the mass death down played or ignored. It was after all how the greatest nation on Earth learned to wage war. Killing them all. Tokyo fire bombings, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, ‘saved American lives and ended the war’. A war that was ending long before the Los Alamo tests. A war that all but ended when the Japanese had been suing for peace, months before. A war that was allowed to end the moment the Soviet Union destroyed the Japanese forces in North China, Korea and Manchuria. The Allies now needed a healthy Japan to curtail the next enemy, Soviet imperialism.
It’s all complicated I suppose. Blowing up children, wiping out families. Strangers who have no say in policy, individuals who never stabbed a woman in China with their penis or bayonet, babies not even born when Pearl Harbor was attacked, they are all Japs. All the same race, from the same nation. So goes the collectivist rationale. Sadoko may as well have been Tojo or a Japanese swordsman beheading prisoners. Do collectivists allow that reasoning to reverse? That their babies, their children should also be fair game should the national government they either support or have no love for does evil? Or is it more primal than that. Despite the facade of order, justice, civility the savage and ancient supremacy, to conquer and wipe out the other. Sadako is thus inferior. Kill them all! We have the facade, and the reality. Silver B-29’s may as well be horseback archers churning up the steppes in blood.
On my computer, I have this image of a mother, her body burned to impossible recognition. Beneath her, still attached is an umbilical cord that leads to a baby. As her body was burned in napalm, she gave birth. Perhaps natures instinct, to save the child as the mother dies. A last ditch hope of life. Instead mother and new born baby lay as burned remnants among a city full of burned remnants. Scientists tinkered to perfect chemicals and metallurgy, engineers conceived machines and mechanisms that trained war fighters could fly and use so that mother and child may lay lost to history, as burned images on a screen. I stare at such a photo knowing out there are many who will remind me that the mother and child deserved to die. They needed to die. The killers, scientists, engineers, are heroes. The baby, not even named, an enemy. It takes a love of government or some form of nationalism to think that way. To hate a mother and baby so much, that they should be burned to death as little Sadako dies from the bombs radiation.
Unfortunately little Sadako did not make enough cranes to save herself, or anyone else for that matter. Though her killers did build more bombs and planes. No one wants paper cranes, making them doesn’t pay very well, if at all. Next August it will be the same, the bombs loved. The dead, deserving of their fate. Perhaps humanity is at it’s 644 paper cranes, “May the crane of peace fly everywhere!” This is our cry, this is our prayer, “Crane of peace fly everywhere!”
August, 2024
