Hiroshima: For a few years, now, I’ve been turning over in my head one brief scene in a beautiful movie.
It comes two hours into Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning 2021 masterpiece of bereavement and artistic inspiration, when a troupe of actors steps outside the theatre to rehearse in the fresh air. It is autumn. Leaves crunch beneath the feet of two actresses as they play one of the tenderest scenes of Uncle Vanya. They’d been struggling, up to now, as they recited Chekhov’s lines about sorrow and stagnation: lives not lived, dreams squelched and dreams maintained. But here in the park something clicks. We must live. The show must go on.
It’s never made explicit why this outdoor rehearsal unlocks the core of Chekhov — how this park, for these actors, opens a whole universe of grief and endurance. For a Japanese audience, at least, there was no need.
The park is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, designed in 1954 by the great modernist architect Kenzo Tange. On August 6, 1945 — 80 years ago this week — a new kind of bomb detonated, almost silently, some 1,900 feet overhead. The scene from Drive My Car came back to me when I stood, in a pouring rain, on the spot where it was filmed. Anyone standing there in 1945 was killed immediately; then came the fires, and the fallout. It started raining in the first days after August 6 as well: viscous black drops, heavy with soot and debris. The survivors drank it desperately in the ruins of Hiroshima. The raindrops were radioactive.
“A scientific event,” wrote the painter Wassily Kandinsky in 1913, “removed one of the most important obstacles from my path. This was the further division of the atom. The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world”. At the start of the last century, after Ernest Rutherford, Pierre and Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein began to unravel the mysteries of nuclear physics, a periodic table of artists, authors and philosophers grew fixated on this new science’s cultural repercussions. Suddenly, the permanence of matter (the permanence of history, perhaps) appeared like an industrial relic. Objects that seemed stable actually vibrated with energy. Nuclear physics was confirming a suspicion, one at the core of modern art and literature, that the things we see are less solid than they look.
“Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial,” Kandinsky had said.
I had come to Hiroshima to try to see, and to feel, where that argument led. The Peace Memorial Museum, crowded but quiet, showed the side of atomic power Kandinsky could not have envisioned. Metal fused with debris in ungodly heat. Singed student uniforms; singed children’s dresses. There is a six-panel folding screen, donated just recently by a Hiroshima family, whose gold expanses are streaked by black rain: the most terrifying abstract painting I have ever seen.
Modern art’s atomic optimism vanished outside a bank building in this city, about 850 feet from the hypocenter — its steps darkened by the permanent shadow of someone who died there, instantly, in heat that reached 3,871 degrees Celsius or more. When the painter Yves Klein saw those steps in a documentary, he was moved to create one of his ghostly impressions of bodies in his signature blue. In a panorama called “Hiroshima” (circa 1961), the bodies of his models have receded from bright blue to ashy white. Flesh became negative space. “Everything physical and material could disappear from one day to another,” said Klein, “to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable”.
The ultimate abstraction: It is closer than you think.
In the decades after August 6, 1945 — and the second bomb, dropped three days later on Nagasaki — the domains of painting, cinema and literature committed to envisioning the doomsday scenarios of mutually assured destruction.
On the Beach, following the last survivors of a third world war waiting for the radiation to reach Australia, turned melodrama into a radioactive genre.
Dr. Strangelove, literalising the paranoia and psychosis of nuclear confrontation, confirmed our daily survival as nothing but a black comedy. George Orwell, Philip K. Dick and Kim Stanley Robinson imagined life, or what was left of it, after atomic Armageddon. They were nuclear Cassandras. They found our institutions, our leaders, as unstable as plutonium.
Now, 80 years after Hiroshima, we have blundered into a new age of nuclear perils. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that the planet faced the greatest risk of nuclear confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Earlier this year, President Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, warned that we stand “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before”, drawing a rebuke from the President. The US and Israel bombarded Iran’s nuclear development sites in June. North Korea continues to modernise its nuclear-capable forces, while China is expanding its own arsenal so swiftly that students of deterrence must now account for three, not two, nuclear superpowers. The last arms control treaty between the US and Russia is set to expire in just six months. The very principle of arms control may die with it.
All this with remarkably little outcry: little in our politics, less still in our culture. There were no Daisy Girl or 3am Phone Call ads during last year’s presidential campaign. The bookshops and streaming studios fob off the burden for our own extinction onto outside antagonists: zombie invasions and errant asteroids and, most recently, killer AI. There remain an estimated 12,000 nuclear warheads on earth today, per the Federation of American Scientists, and yet we have let the bomb be absorbed back into World War II dad history. An endless river of Manhattan Project dramatisations has conveyed some morally serious works, like John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic; more often, from the TV series Manhattan to the self-satisfied Oppenheimer, I struggle to distinguish Hollywood offerings from department of energy propaganda.
I needed to come here, to Peace Memorial Park, to learn again how artists envisioned what we have been refusing to face — how they put into words, and images, our intertwined capacities for self-destruction and self-delusion. This is a city whose very name once authoritatively established a “nuclear taboo”, which was the political scientist Nina Tannenwald’s term for the implicit norm in all nuclear states not to launch a weapon. But the name Hiroshima has grown fainter, its impact weaker, and last month the Japanese health ministry reported that the number of survivors of the attacks here and in Nagasaki dropped below 1,00,000 for the first time.
To survive this second nuclear age we are going to need models from the first one: artists who faced up to what the bomb did, and what the bomb made of us.
Immediately after V-J Day, Americans looked to Hiroshima more in awe than in anguish or anger. The fundamental form of August 6 was the mushroom cloud: an abstract amazement seen from miles above, miles away. Artists and scientists alike had misgivings about the Truman administration’s justifications for the destruction of Hiroshima, to say nothing of Nagasaki. But the bomb itself was a thing of wonder.
Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, would argue that Hiroshima was a moral summons with an aesthetic corollary: to boil art down to its tragic essence. The bomb, wrote Newman in 1948, “has robbed us of our hidden terror, as terror can exist only if the forces of tragedy are unknown. We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us”.
Detail would dissolve. The picture would become speechless. Newman, Rothko, de Kooning, Reinhardt: American postwar painting took on techniques of amorphousness and disintegration, laden with humanistic and universalist rhetoric, in part as a mirror of the bomb. Asked to justify his canvas-covering drips, Jackson Pollock told an interviewer in 1950: “The modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.”
With the exception of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a work of reportage published as a special issue of The New Yorker in 1946, nuclear destruction was initially seen at a bird’s-eye view. Which was hardly just a matter of squeamishness. From 1945 to 1952, American occupying forces strictly censored images of the two destroyed cities. US Army photographs of Hiroshima were clinical, depopulated documents. What civilians endured could not be seen; the photographer Yosuke Yamahata, who rushed to Nagasaki in the first hours after the attack, did not publish his records of blackened corpses and shellshocked children for seven years.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained invisible, in those first years, not only because of what the bomb did but what the bomb announced: a new stage of history, in which technology had removed human survival from human will.
Atsuyuki Matsuo was a high school teacher in Nagasaki, and in his leisure time he wrote haiku in a modern style that did not conform to the typical structure of five, seven, five syllables. On August 9, 1945, he was exposed to the second bomb while working at a food distribution site by the port. He made it home, through the fires, at midnight. Two of his children had already died. A third succumbed the next day. His wife died within the week. Yet when he tried to publish his poetry about the blast in a Nagasaki journal in 1946, the editors told him no.
In America, by contrast, the bombs that gripped artists in the 1960s and 1970s were not the ones the nation had dropped but the ones aimed its way. Seven Days in May, a 1962 novel and 1964 movie, proposed a too-plausible American coup d’état by generals opposed to US-Soviet disarmament. Fail Safe, Sidney Lumet’s 1964 thriller of an accidental nuclear war, begins with a miscommunication and ends with the incineration of New York City. Like On the Beach and Dr. Strangelove, these were prospective nightmares, in which popular entertainment took on the moral responsibility that government seemed to have abdicated.
You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. On the bullet train down from Tokyo, I started reading the work of Günther Anders, the foremost philosopher of humanity after Hiroshima. Too little known in the English-speaking world, Anders was one of many German Jewish intellectuals who found refuge in the US — and he was in New York on August 6, 1945, when he heard the news on the radio with total incomprehension.
For years after he could not write. On one day, with one act, the core inquiry of philosophy for 2,500 years, the matter of how to live a good or righteous life, had been invalidated. “The basic moral question of former times must be radically reformulated” after Hiroshima, Anders would argue. “Instead of asking ‘How should we live?’, we now must ask ‘Will we live?’”
Anders came to conclude, in books such as Hiroshima Is Everywhere, that modern man had fallen into “a Promethean gap”: a chasm, grown wider by the year, between what our technologies can do and what we think they can do. Before Hiroshima, a Leonardo or a Voltaire could close his eyes and imagine futures far beyond contemporary capacities. The novelist, the opera composer, or the filmmaker could picture the end of the world as a low-risk cleansing fire presaging some purer rebirth. But as our destructive abilities have multiplied and Big Science got bigger, our cultural faculties failed to keep pace. “We are psychically unequal to the danger confronting us,” Anders wrote as early as 1956. And our principal moral failing, after Hiroshima, has been to neglect the development of our imagination — in the face of, or out of fear of, our final end.
New York Times News Service