Hiroshima (or, the Groundlessness Spreads)
Chapter II, Part II - The Myth of the 20th Century
She: Listen to me. I know something else. It will begin all over again. Two hundred thousand dead. Eighty thousand wounded. In nine seconds. These figures are official. It will begin all over again. There will be ten thousand degrees on the earth. Ten thousand suns, they will say. The asphalt will burn. Chaos will prevail. A whole city will be raised from the earth and fall back in ashes…1
The first place engulfed by the groundlessness America unleashed was Hiroshima, Japan.
At 8:15am on August 6th, three weeks after the Trinity Test, America detonated an atomic bomb in Hiroshima’s skies. Fire filled the air. Everything vanished in the blinding light. For a moment, nothing. Then a ravaged land unlike anywhere on Earth appeared as the brightness cleared.
Reasons strategic, economic and geopolitical underwrote the strike. America needed to win the war, officials said. The nuclear strike ensured this end. Critics nonetheless claimed they razed the city in their bid for post-war hegemony. A ruined country would need reconstruction; America could control Japan by financing its recovery. Others still argued that America wanted to terrify the Soviets with their dreadful show of omnipotence. It was an atrocity, in any event—hundreds of thousands were killed, wounded or condemned to die in a smattering of seconds, a flash of time. Three days later, America repeated the violence, levelling Nagasaki with a second rip of light and heat.
Like the Trinity Tests, these atomic blasts were not only physically destructive. They were also a violence against the psyche, the spirit. With a weapon born of 20th century physics, of material science’s triumphs, America staged a vast human sacrifice with metaphysical ends. Traceless erasure and unimaginable desolation were the bomb’s effects on bodies and things. The blasts in Japan seared these ideas into the public imagination where they would soon gain a near-religious significance.
Survivor testimonies and photography ensured that the Hiroshima bomb’s aesthetic effects were well known after that day. A ‘noiseless flash’ first filled the sky. A ‘sheet of sun’ was drawn over the city; a ‘shooting star the size of hundreds of suns’ blazed through the air.2 Those subjected to the blast then experienced a moment of extreme contradiction and confusion. A character in Masuji Ibuse’s 1965 novelisation of the day, Black Rain, sees ‘a ball of blindingly intense light’ when the bomb explodes; simultaneously, they are ‘plunged into total, unseeing darkness.’3 One survivor described in John Hersey’s 1946 New Yorker article, ‘Hiroshima,’ went ‘out of his mind’ for ‘a few seconds or minutes.’ Inexplicably, the man soon found himself wandering his garden in his underwear, the day darkening as the ash covered the sun.4 Bizarre things soon happened to the weather. Black rain fell from the sky ‘in streaks the thickness of a fountain pen,’5 staining the skin of the living and dead. At the same time a vast ‘funnel of flame’ reached into the sky above the city, drawing up and devouring the ‘pillars and beams’ of houses before scattering them across the city.6
When people returned to their senses, they found their bodies and buildings transformed in terrible, strange ways. Any account of the day is filled with images of skin burning, peeling, bleeding, and corpses torn and scattered across the land. Roads melted. Buildings either vanished completely, combined strangely, or, improbably, stood. One character in Black Rain observes a ‘chunk of wall’ hanging in the air, ‘suspended from a thick strand of the metal reinforcement.’ Others see shops ‘blasted out of existence’ and houses ‘knocked flat, covering the ground with an undulating sea of tiles.’ The story’s narrator, Shigematsu, notices that his neighbour’s kitchen had been blown entirely into his bathroom.7 (A most postmodern renovation.)
The very act of witnessing the blast deformed people, too. Ibuse describes the babies’ eyes clogged with ash,8 while a survivor interviewed by Hersey encountered a group of ‘about twenty men’ whose faces, turned skyward when the bomb exploded, were all ‘in the same nightmarish state:’ ‘their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.’ Like a writer who rips the paper he presses with his pen, the bomb’s heat was so great that it burned away the medium on which it left an impression—the human eye. These blind men could only know the blast by the erasure, the eternal darkness the light delivered them to.
Nearer the explosion’s hypocentre, the blast occasionally left traces of the life it eradicated. Nuclear shadows darkened the light-bleached pavements in places where people once stood. Yet most of those close to the blast did not live on even as ashen spectres. They were erased from the world without a scar, mark or trace that could testify to their life or its loss. Only pure absence, the erasure of erasure, remained, with black rain falling from the sky.
Fire is in everything; reality is made from what would disintegrate it; groundlessness opens out from the heart of the world. Or in Heraclitus’ words: ‘For Fire, everything is an exchange and Fire for everything, just as for gold, money and for money, gold.’ This was the metaphysical image of erasure and destruction given to the world when the bombs fell, when light consumed a city and heat turned people into nothingness. No matter one’s religious beliefs, this image wrote itself indelibly into the 20th century imagination. For people everywhere, it became a kind of god, a vision—a profound meaning that deformed languages and dreams. In Black Rain, stricken people cried for help as the skies burned; the sounds that emerge in their ‘nameless dread,’ though, are ‘no intelligible human speech.’9 Their words are made meaningless after the blast; their babbling, their speech in tongues, reveals their conversion to a religion where meaning has no ground. Other broken characters wander past the desolate shrines of their city. The ‘worship hall’ in front of the Yokogawa Shrine ‘had vanished, leaving only its clay foundation, a bare and ugly hump.’ ‘Nothing was left of the Hakushima Shrine,’ Ibuse writes later, ‘but its stone wall.’ Elsewhere, in ‘Tera-machi, the “temple quarter,” not a single temple was standing. All that remained was clay walls crumbled and collapsed till they were barely recongisable.’ The Honganji temple, once ‘famed as the greatest temple building in the whole quarter, had vanished without a trace.’10
Hiroshima’s desacralisation was absolute. Ibuse’s characters, their skin stained by the black rain, visit ornamental ponds blasted into pools of ‘blackish mud’ to rinse themselves of the day’s nothingness, to wipe away the vaporisation of their faith. ‘However many times [they] go to the ornamental spring’ to clean their bodies, though, ‘the stains from the black rain wouldn’t come off.’11 They are forever inscribed with the black ink of nothingness that streaked down from the sky swirling with the ash of their people and city, that wrote Hiroshima’s truth upon the bodies of those that survived.
At the edge of being yet threatening to swallow it whole, Hiroshima’s black rain said, there was nothingness, erasure, absence. A godlike force of white heat could wipe us out without a trace. Marked forever with a memory of the light that could annihilate everything, the bombing redefined power in humanity’s imagination. It changed our language, our religion. Afterwards, and anxiously babbling as we imagined wars that could never come, visions of force and heat, nothingness and desolation, all manmade, filled our dreams. Plagued by these terrible fantasies, the very thought of nuclear war, of Hiroshima’s repetition, would soon start to change the world.
He: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.12
References
Duras, M. (1961) Hiroshima, Mon Amour. New York, Grove Press.
Hersey, J. (1946) Hiroshima. The New Yorker, August 23rd.
Ibuse, M. (1969) Black Rain. London, Kodansha International.
Footnotes
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, p.24.
Black Rain, p.21.
Black Rain, p.37.
‘Hiroshima,’ by John Hersey. See https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
Black Rain, p.34.
Black Rain, p.81.
Black Rain, pp.38, 45, 76, & 84.
Black Rain, p.45.
Black Rain, pp.39 & 87.
Black Rain, p.44, 99, & 108.
Black Rain, p.35.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, p.18.