• Chronicle The 'traitor' kamikaze who managed to survive Hiroshima ... and his own destiny

El Ejido, 1972. Essayist, journalist and columnist for EL MUNDO,

Fernando Palmero

is co-author with

Ana Arias

of the book 'Hiroshima.

Sun, silence, forgetfulness' (Confluences), which is presented this Wednesday at the Antonio Machado bookstore in Madrid.

What echoes resonate from Hiroshima even today?

The echoes of postwar propaganda still ring out. What happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II is still being studied as if time had stood still. For this reason, the United States continues to justify that the substitution of conventional weapons for atomic ones served to save lives and Japan continues without recognizing the genocidal policies that it carried out for 15 years in Southeast Asia.


What can we learn in 2021 from that?

That beyond the fact that some want to take advantage of the politics of memory, it is necessary for History to make its way and the facts to be placed above the interested interpretations. And there governments must assume that they cannot treat citizens as if they were minors. What were reasons of state 80 years ago are no longer so, and the archives can help reconstruct the causes and consequences of what happened in the past.


How do you assess the justification for the atrocities on both sides, the American and the Japanese?


What happened in the battles of the Pacific, where some of the wildest episodes of the War took place, had the same motivation on both sides: racism. The enemy had been dehumanized, objectified, and from then on all the justifications are superfluous. Japan, like Germany, needed a vital space to develop economically and, under the slogan Asia for Asians, began an expansionist strategy to end Western colonialism. Incidentally, he annihilated more than 19 million Chinese, whom he considered despicable beings. For its part, the United States, which described the Japanese as a cursed race, wanted to inflict exemplary punishment on them. Under the argument that the emperor refused to surrender, they decided that the only way to end the war was to drop the atomic bombs. In that waythey sent a clear message to Stalin's USSR, that it did not have such weapons. Because the US was no longer thinking about World War II, but about the next one, in which Japan would be an essential piece to curb Soviet influence in Asia. It is not by chance that the first great confrontation of the Cold War took place in Korea.


How would you describe US racism towards the Japanese?

Since the massive emigrations of Asians in the early 20th century to the United States, the Japanese and the Chinese were treated as inferior people. After the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, hatred intensified, and within two months the 120,000 Japanese living on the West Coast (more than half of them US citizens) were locked up in concentration camps under military jurisdiction. A decision made by Democrat Roosevelt and passed in Congress without a vote against.


Why do you think the US emphasizes what happened in concentration camps in other countries when it locked up US citizens of Japanese origin in its own territory?


Few countries, unless they are forced to do so by the international community, as happened to Germany, recognize their miseries and accept their guilt. In addition, the outcome marks everything. We do not know what the US intention was, what they wanted to do with those people, whether to deport or exterminate them, but the truth is that the Supreme Court, after three years, ruled that this was illegal and they had to release them. Ronald Reagan did acknowledge what happened and even gave some financial compensation to the victims.


Would you say that, compared to 1945, the way we dehumanize one another has changed?

The human condition changes little. After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag, there have been genocides such as the Cambodian, the Rwandan or the one sentenced by the international courts in Yugoslavia. Right now, in Burma, genocidal actions are taking place against the Rohingya minority.


Now that you mention it, how about the current use of the word "genocide"?

It is true that there is a trivialization of the term and practically genocide has become synonymous with massacre. But it is not the death toll that characterizes a genocide, but its nature. Until now, the legal definition established by the UN is the one that has been operating to qualify an act as genocidal, but I believe that it is necessary to get out of the strictly legal framework of the concept and analyze some passages of history from that point of view. What Japan did in China was a real genocide. And the atomic bombing, at best, a war crime.


Why, as happened in Chernobyl, is there this sense of absurdity, of meaninglessness, given the effects of radioactivity?

In the case of the United States, in order not to recognize that the atomic bomb crossed a red line with unforeseeable consequences. In order not to assume its guilt, the United States decreed that the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were limited to those who perished on the same day of the bombing, in such a way that such a condition was denied to those who died during the following years from cancer (leukemia, especially ) or other diseases. And in Japan, the survivors, the 'hibakushas', were always considered plagued.


Do you think that a situation like that can help us understand this other one that surpasses us, that of the pandemic?

I don't think they have anything to do with it, they are phenomena of a different nature, even considering that the covid may have had some bacteriological warfare. China still does not provide explanations or details of why and how the virus emerged and spread at that speed.


What are the chances of an atomic war today?

As long as atomic weapons exist, the risk is there. And there are many powers that have it or aspire to have it. It is true that the devastating effects of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as an example to see the consequences of a possible nuclear war, but humans are an eminently warrior species. And with little memory.


At what point would you say humanity is with respect to the militarism / pacifism poles?

Goodwill very often has more dire effects than bad intentions. The war has marked, since historical records are had, the lives of men. To think of a world without wars is to want to build a utopian paradise that has little to do with reality. Regulating and trying to limit these outbreaks is perhaps the only thing we can hope for, for the war to remain in the space of politics, which is its more or less civilized form.


How do you rate the current debate on atomic energy?

The debate, in Spain, is quite hypocritical. On the one hand, it warns of the risks of nuclear energy, which has them, and many, but nothing is said about our country buying energy from neighbors like France, who do have their plants at full capacity. On the other hand, it is true that greenhouse gases are not emitted in the generation process, but the pollution is not only in the air. And nuclear waste is not easy to store. The risk is inescapable, yes, but the short-term benefits, too.


At the end of the book they describe how Japan deals with situations like typhoons in an organized and methodical way. Do you think it would be desirable for Spain to focus on Japan in these organizational aspects?

We were surprised by the way in which all the institutions and agencies were perfectly coordinated to minimize the effects of a typhoon.

They are common there and have managed to establish very effective maximum security systems.

It is also true that the entire population collaborates.

I don't know if these methods could be implemented here.

When an autonomous community denies help or delays sending it to another community to put out a fire, for example, we realize that we are far from Japanese efficiency.


According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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