Volume 37, Number 16 · October 25, 1990
The Devils of Hiroshima
By Ian Buruma
Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars
by George L. Mosse
Oxford University Press, 264 pp., $22.95
The Bomb
by Makoto Oda
Kodansha International, 216 pp., $18.95
The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat
by Robert Jay Lifton, by Eric Markusen
Basic Books, 346 pp., $22.95
I have visited Hiroshima twice. On both occasions I had the embarrassing, inappropriate, even offensive urge to laugh. This was not because there is anything especially comical about Hiroshima. It is in almost every respect a normal Japanese city, so normal, in fact, that marketing people like to test new products there, for what they like in Hiroshima, it is thought, they like everywhere else in Japan. The pride of the city is its baseball team, the Hiroshima Carps, and the gastronomic speciality of the region is oysters. They make cars in Hiroshima, as well as ships and Buddhist altars. The fourth industry is Peace, or nuclear disarmament, or, as irreverent Japanese sometimes call it, the pikadon shobai, the flash-bang business, pikadon being an onomatopoeic phrase describing the effect of the A-bomb, which exploded over Hiroshima at 8:15 AM, August 6, forty-five years ago.
Review, 6490 words
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