国際シンポジウム2004「エノラ・ゲイの閃光 ――戦争と破壊の象徴 1945~2004」 Reflections of the Enola Gay: Symbolic Representations of War and Destruction, 1945-2004

English Below

日時2004年7月31日(土) 13:30~17:00
場所広島国際会議場 地下2階 ヒマワリ
(広島市中区中島町1番5号 平和記念公園内)
主催広島市立大学広島平和研究所
後援(財)広島平和文化センター

※シンポジウムの内容は報告書のPDFファイルでご覧いただけます。


■パネリスト

トニー・コーディー(オーストラリア メルボルン大学教授)
ローレンス・ウィットナー(米国 ニューヨーク州立大学教授)
ローラ・ハイン(米国 ノースウェスタン大学教授)
川本 隆史(東京大学大学院教授)

■モデレーター

田中 利幸(広島平和研究所教授)

Reflections of the Enola Gay: Symbolic Representations of War and Destruction, 1945-2004

International Symposium on July 31, 2004

The Hiroshima Peace Institute held an international symposium in Hiroshima on July 31, 2004. The symposium, which was open to the public, was entitled "Reflections of the Enola Gay: Symbolic Representations of War and Destruction, 1945-2004." Five panelists including overseas experts participated.
  

Panelists:

Tony CoadyProfessor, University of Melbourne, Australia
Lawrence WittnerProfessor, State University of New York, United States
Laura HeinProfessor, Northwestern University, United State
Takashi KawamotoProfessor, University of Tokyo, Japan

Moderator: 

Yuki TanakaProfessor, Hiroshima Peace Institute, Japan
Date:July 31, 2004
Venue:Himawari Room, second basement (B2) International Conference Center (Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park)
Host:Hiroshima Peace Institute
Support:Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation

Program:

 The Enola Gay Exhibits and the Peace Movement in the United States (Lawrence S. Wittner)
 American Museums and Their Audiences since the Enola Gay Controversy (Laura Hein)
 Caring for Memories and Sharing of Memories: A Critical Note on the Smithsonian Enola Gay Controversy (Takashi Kawamoto)
 The Enola Gay and the World of Terror (Tony Coady)
 Summing Up (Yuki Tanaka)
 Panel Discussion / Questions and Answers 

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Lawrence S. Wittner
Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He has a Ph.D. from Columbia University and specializes in American diplomatic history.

The Enola Gay Exhibits and the Peace Movement in the United States 

In 1995 and again in 2003, the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, a very large U.S. government museum complex, opened exhibits featuring the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Both of these exhibits stirred up substantial public controversies centered on the atomic bombing of Japan. 

In the first controversy, hawkish forces -- veterans groups, military lobbyists and conservative politicians -- succeeded in using nationalism to browbeat Smithsonian officials into eliminating pictures and portions of the museum script highlighting Japanese suffering and the nuclear arms race, and had them replace these items with new sections emphasizing Japanese wartime villainy. However, these changes deeply disturbed two key constituencies: historians and peace movement leaders. As a result, these groups protested against the reduction of the exhibit to little more than nationalist propaganda and secured a few small concessions from the Smithsonian staff. Outraged, the hawkish groups succeeded in forcing the museum director to resign and stripping down the exhibit to merely a plaque identifying the B-29, an upbeat film about the crew, and a cardboard cutout showing the crew members.

The issue resurfaced in 2003, as the Smithsonian was making plans for another Enola Gay exhibit. By this time, the Smithsonian leadership and staff had been thoroughly purged or tamed, and the new museum director promised that the Enola Gay would be displayed "in all its glory as a magnificent technological achievement."

Peace activists and anti-nuclear academics once again responded. Under the banner of the Committee for a National Discussion of Nuclear History and Current Policy, they demanded that the exhibit also discuss the effects of the atomic bombing. They petitioned, staged a public protest meeting at American University and held a demonstration at the opening of the exhibit.

Despite these efforts, the 2003 protests did not generate broad popular backing. The public meeting and the demonstration were both rather small-scale events, and once again there was a strong expression of support for the atomic bombings.

This failure to mobilize substantial criticism of the Enola Gay exhibits reflected the strength of nationalism in American life. Polls show that over the years most Americans have continued to support the atomic bombing of Japan. This support is not based upon a fondness for nuclear weapons, for, since World War II, peace groups have managed to turn a majority of Americans against them. However, most Americans cling to the notion that they are the citizens of a uniquely virtuous nation and therefore dislike exhibits that undermine this belief.

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Laura Hein
Laura Hein is Professor of History at Northwestern University. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and specializes in Japan's international relations in the 20th century.

American Museums and Their Audiences since the Enola Gay Controversy

In December 2003, the National Air and Space Museum opened a permanent exhibit featuring the Enola Gay. Like the 1995 exhibit, it celebrates the technical details of the plane without acknowledging the human suffering that it caused. The exhibit is chilling evidence of the militarization of American culture. Similarly, much of the U.S. government's motivation for going to war since 1945 seems to have been aimed at making Americans feel good about using military power again. For example, the 1983 war on Grenada was staged largely for the effect it would have on domestic audiences, and glorification of American wars was the real goal of the conflict.

This is the reason why it is so disturbing to see that one effect of the controversy over the 1995 Enola Gay exhibit has been to make museum curators more willing to censor themselves. Nonetheless, wider trends in curatorial practice over the last two decades still offer opportunities for museum professionals who wish to question the costs of wars. Museums have worked hard to overcome the impression that they are irrelevant to the lives of most Americans. Curators now believe that museum exhibits should be open-ended and also should reflect a multiplicity of views about a given subject. Therefore war exhibits everywhere now feature foot soldiers and civilians at least as much as generals. The main museum strategy is to evoke a variety of memories among museum-goers without trying to integrate them completely -- collecting memories rather than collectivizing them. Far more challenging for museums is representing the larger social categories that shape peacetime lives as well: nationality, of course, but also race, gender, region, class, religion, etc. Nonetheless, simply by collecting a variety of individual experiences about an individual conflict, it has become impossible to choose one white soldier to stand in for everyone involved in it.

While growing increasingly sensitive to the feelings and sensibilities of all Americans, however, it seems that most Americans, including those working in museums, are still relatively uninterested in representing the experiences of foreigners. Yet, many Americans have never been comfortable with the official A-bomb narrative because it seems not to support the idea that the United States fights only for the right reasons and only when it must. Indeed, people come to look at the Enola Gay airplane at the National Air and Space Museum because they already see it as a complex symbol of many things. If, as museum professionals now emphasize, visitors are bringing their own meanings to exhibits, display of the Enola Gay will forever provide an invitation to debate the moral and strategic legitimacy of the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945.


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Takashi Kawamoto
Takashi Kawamoto is Professor at the Graduate School of Education, University of Tokyo. He entered the doctoral program in the Graduate School of Humanities at the University of Tokyo, earning Litt.D. He specializes in social ethics.

Caring for Memories and Sharing of Memories: A Critical Note on the Smithsonian Enola Gay Controversy
Introduction: The Aim and Scope of Presentation

At the time when the first controversy over the display of the Enola Gay had reached its final stage in 1995, John Rawls, an American moral philosopher, explicitly stated that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been morally wrong. I translated into Japanese this courageous and cogently argued article, "Fifty Years after Hiroshima," (Dissent , Summer 1995) and had it published in the February 1996 issue of the liberal Japanese magazine Sekai (World). Subsequently, I gave a talk on A-bomb survivors' memories jointly with Etsuko Nakatani, a member of the Association of Second-Generation Atomic Bomb Victim Teachers (Hibaku Nisei Kyoshi no Kai). Our talk was televised under the title of "Caring for Memories." In the program, Nakatani and I attempted to loosen the fixed ideas, i.e. myths, held by both Americans and Japanese about the meaning of the atomic bombings and correct distortions in their memories. As the permanent exhibit of the Enola Gay in the Smithsonian Museum shows, however, it is difficult to say that Japanese and Americans have succeeded in sharing their memories of the atomic bombings.

The First Enola Gay Controversy (1994-1995) and Diverse Memories

Differences between the Japanese and American "myths of the atomic bombs" surfaced during the first controversy over the exhibition of the Enola Gay. Simply put, there remains a strong myth in the U.S. that the use of the atomic bombs brought about an early conclusion to World War II and saved the lives of a great number of American soldiers. In Japan, on the other hand, the atomic bombings were accepted as a kind of terrible "natural disaster," which finally ended World War II. Japanese also tend to forget their responsibility for the war of aggression they had launched against other Asian countries. Although both Americans and Japanese hold on to their own myths that underscore their national and cultural backgrounds, memories relating to the atomic bombs are not monolithic in either country. For instance, there is a movement within Japan that rejects the characterization of Japan simply as "the only nation in the world that has ever been subjected to atomic bombing" and insists on incorporating in its collective memory the record of its own aggression against Asian countries. Similarly in the U.S., some citizens and scholars dispute the prevailing "A-bomb myth."

"Stories of Individual Victims," "The Dialectics of Memory," and "Overlapping Consensus"

Considering these diverse memories, I would like to explore a path towards "sharing of memories" by way of "caring for memories." In my opinion, there are three possible ways to follow such a path.

First, we can start from a consideration of the person: an individual with his/her proper name and body, and relationships between him/her and others. My thought in this regard has been prompted by the article entitled "Commemoration and Silence: Fifty Years of Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan" by Laura Hein and Mark Selden published as a chapter in Living with Bomb : American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age in1997. This article focuses attention on "the story of individual hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors)," which might be used to challenge or even undermine "the official stories."

Second, there is an approach that Risa Yoneyama calls "the dialectics of memory." Yoneyama has conducted research into A-bomb survivors' involvement in testimony-giving activities based on their personal experiences. She describes, for example, the process of transformation experienced by the testifier (shogensha) such as Suzuko Numata, whose self as well as memories changed as a result of speaking of her experiences as an A-bomb survivor while carrying out research into other survivors' experiences.

Third, we can attempt to find "overlapping consensus," to borrow John Rawls' technical terminology, between our differing views, even between multiple conflicting and competing memories, and generate partial and overlapping agreements step by step. I believe that this approach has much in common with the proposals put forth out in the "Hague Appeal for Peace 1999" by Tadatoshi Akiba, Mayor of Hiroshima. For example, in order to condense the messages of hibakusha into the highest moral principle and to make it the overwhelming rallying point of world public opinion, Akiba proposed as a possible first step adherence to the straightforward principle: "One should not kill non-combatants in war or similar conflicts."


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Tony Coady
Tony Coady is Professor of Applied Philosophy at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied philosophy.

The Enola Gay and the World of Terror

The symbolism of the hijacked airliners exploding into the World Trade Center in New York needs to be juxtaposed with the image of the Enola Gay above the mushroom cloud rising from Hiroshima. It is important today to view the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the background of the current war on terror and concern with the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Both the atomic bombings of Japan and the September 11 attacks in the United States were acts of terrorism if we define terrorism, as I think we should, as "the organised use of violence to attack the innocent (or their property) for political purposes." These were qualitatively similar crimes, although the scale of destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was much greater.

Both attacks constitute moral crimes because they employed a tactic that violates a deep principle of just war theory: that which prohibits direct attacks upon non-combatants (the "innocent" in the special sense of the word meaning those not engaged in executing harmful acts that might justify a violent response). In my definition of terrorism, both states and non-state agents can perpetrate terrorist acts.

Some have argued that there is no moral point in distinguishing between non-combatants and combatants, but these arguments are flawed. In particular, the idea that modern warfare or insurgency cannot distinguish between combatants and non-combatants is unsustainable in light of the fact that in any war there remain millions of people who cannot plausibly be seen as being involved in the enemy's lethal chain of agency. There are, for instance, infants, young children, the elderly and infirm, large numbers of tradespeople and workers, not to mention dissidents and conscientious objectors. It is simply obscene to claim that there is no moral difference between shooting a soldier who is shooting at you and gunning down a defenseless child who is a member of the same nation as the soldier.

Terrorism is often justified by both state and non-state actors as a necessary means of achieving critical goals. The United States claimed its terrorism was required to bring the war to an end more quickly and with lower loss of life; other terrorists claim their deeds are justified by their contribution to the end of foreign occupation or to the exposure of vulnerabilities of an imperialist power. Not only is this sort of explanation often weak in its own terms, but more significantly, it ignores the inherent wrong in terrorism.

The legitimate campaign against the spread of weapons of mass destruction is hampered by the fact that its principal promoter, the United States, has itself used such weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki and continues to possess huge stockpiles of them. The legitimate campaign against terrorism also needs to acknowledge the existence of state terrorism, especially the readiness of major powers to use nuclear weapons.

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Yuki Tanaka
Yuki Tanaka is Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Western Australia. He specializes in comparative analysis of Japanese war crimes during World WarⅡ.

Summing Up
What Can We learn from the Enola Gay Exhibition?
Since December 2003, the "Enola Gay," the B-29 bomber which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, has been on permanent display in the new wing of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. This exhibition is seen by American World War II veterans and politicians as evidence of the military might as well as the technological supremacy of the United States, but it makes no reference to the nuclear holocaust that resulted in horrific mass killing and the total destruction of Hiroshima city, as well as long-term damage done to survivors and the environment by the bomb's radiation.

Yet, it was a common practice already during World War II to regard aerial bombing campaigns as proof of a nation's (military) strength or as a way to demonstrate a nation's ascendancy over the enemy to its own people by exploiting images of aerial bombings. In Britain, for example, there is a wartime propaganda poster in which a large number of Lancaster bombers, looking like a huge swarm of dragonflies, are pictured showering bombs on a German city. Similarly, immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima, a popular American magazine, Life, published a special edition, with a large imaginary picture of the bombing of Hiroshima by the Enola Gay spread across its cover page. The irony of an illustration depicting the instant killing of 70,000 people splashed across the cover page of a magazine entitled Life cannot be ignored. Interestingly, however, the picture itself was not that of a gigantic mushroom cloud, as we know the detonation of the Hiroshima A-bomb actually produced, but simply an enlarged version of an explosion typically caused by a conventional bomb or an incendiary bomb. This implies that the common understanding of an atomic bomb by those on the attacking side was that it was simply a mammoth conventional bomb. Indeed, this view is still held by most American veterans who do not clearly perceive the difference between atomic bombs and conventional bombs. 

According to Professor Lawrence Wittner, while the majority of Americans are now against the development of nuclear arms and the conduct of nuclear wars, they still regard the use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki as justifiable acts. It seems that their anti-nuclear sentiment derives from a wish not to become themselves the victims of a nuclear attack. In other words, the fundamental point of American anti-nuclear sentiment lies in the desire to defend the lives of American citizens, with little concern for the lives of people of other nations. Clearly, this problematic attitude stems from the fact that the memories of the A-bomb victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not widely and deeply shared with the American people.

In any war, it is almost inevitable that the "enemy's faces" are dehumanized. This leads to the dehumanization of the civilian population of the enemy nation as well, even though these civilians' faces are similar to those of one's own people. If one wishes to prevent the dehumanization of citizens of any country and thus to reduce acts of violence and terrorism throughout the world, it is most important for each of us to examine such acts from the viewpoint of the victims. To comprehend the problems of violence as seen in the eyes of the victims means that one must listen to the individual stories of the victims, to re-experience their psychological pain, and to internalize such pain as one's own. As Professor Takashi Kawamoto claims, "sharing memories" in the true sense becomes possible only through this process of re-living and internalizing the pain of others.  The intense desire of American parents to protect their own children against air raids was vividly expressed in a propaganda poster produced in the U.S. during World War II, using a picture of an innocent girl's face looking apprehensively up at the sky. A recent photograph of an Iraqi father carrying his severely wounded daughter strikes us by conveying the indescribable sorrow of this man. Both of these images capture the essence of "individual stories" of victims. By focusing attention on these individual stories, the scope for "sharing memories" begins to widen, as they force one to think about the fundamental question of universal humanity.

How can we, the citizens of Hiroshima, help American citizens share the memories of the A-bomb victims? What changes are needed to make the present exhibition of the Enola Gay a symbol of "sharing memories" between the Japanese and Americans?  It is impossible to achieve this goal of sharing memories simply by criticizing the Americans' one-sided way of maintaining their memories of the bombing of Hiroshima. We must also change our own way of storing our memories, so that they can be shared with many people throughout the world. To this end, it is necessary, for example, to design and restructure the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum so that it may provide a venue where all people can share common memories of Hiroshima, regardless of nationality, race, religion, and political ideology. Such a change should be the result of extensive discussions from a wide range of viewpoints and perspectives. In addition, as Professor Laura Hein lucidly argues, there seems to be much that can be learnt from the recent changes at some American museums, which have occurred since the first Enola Gay Exhibition controversy in 1996.

It is indeed indisputable that the central message of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum must be opposition to nuclear weapons. Yet, we also need to find our own unique way to continually deliver to the entire world a powerful message of rejecting any type of violence anywhere in the world.

The core philosophy of this message must include the conviction emphasized by Professor Tony Coady, that any form of indiscriminate killing of civilians amounts to an act of terrorism, whatever the motivation and whoever the perpetrator. Seen from this point of view, it is clear that indiscriminate mass killing is a crime against humanity, common both to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Moreover, "sharing memories" becomes possible between the Japanese and the Americans if we listen carefully to the individual stories of the victims in both cases.

No matter what the reason, killing civilians -- including those of enemy nations -- is one of the most serious violations of fundamental human rights. One inevitably brutalizes oneself by violating those rights, and such an act eventually leads to the disintegration of one's own humanity. Similarly, by violating the fundamental human rights of citizens of other nations, the perpetrating nation corrupts its own democracy and contributes to its own eventual destruction. We Japanese learnt this important lesson from our own experiences in the 15-year Asia-Pacific War, although it seems that Japanese politicians are now forgetting this lesson. Today the U.S. seems to be embarking upon a path similar to that which we commenced more than 70 years ago. In the eyes of the citizens of Hiroshima, the body of the plane, the Enola Gay, displayed simply to symbolize the supremacy of American military power and technology, is seen as a warning sign against the danger that American democracy faces.


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Questions and Answers

Question: I believe that comparing the bombing of Hiroshima with the attack on the Twin Towers would be hardly acceptable in the United States. Considering the strong nationalistic sentiments currently prevalent in the U.S., I believe that there should be changes both in the way the American government perceives its own actions and in the way the American people perceive their own actions. How can we face  this difficulty and appeal to ordinary Americans at the same time? 

Answer (Prof. T. Coady): There are several American intellectuals, outstanding intellectuals like Michael Walzer and John Rawls, who regard the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as immoral acts on the same grounds that I have been arguing. Walzer gets very close to calling it terrorism and he certainly calls the bombing of German cities terrorism. That is getting as close as you can to saying that it is on a par with September 11th. He probably does not say that publicly at the moment, but certainly in the United States there are a lot of philosophers who take a somewhat similar line to mine about terrorism. I think that the only thing one can do is to keep repeating these views and writing about them, and being as brave as possible about confronting people with them. 

Question: I understand that thanks to American multi-culturalism, American museums have also become more open-minded towards a variety of differing views that exist within their own nation. However, it is often pointed out that while this growing tolerance brought about through multi-culturalism accepts and appreciates differences within domestic culture, it fails to extend such an outlook to foreign culture. Does there exist any trend that seeks to make American multi-culturalism more truly universal? 

Answer (Prof. L. Hein): American multi-culturalism is a new phenomenon. When I was a child and in school, there was no mention of the internment of Japanese Americans in our  textbooks. I didn't learn about it until I went to college. I have looked at this closely and all the textbooks that are used widely in the United States now discuss this event and take the view that it was a terrible wrong that harmed not just Japanese Americans but everyone else. It harmed the Constitution; therefore everyone's rights were affected. And Japanese Americans should be praised for insisting that their views be incorporated into the national point of view; that represents something that has changed in my lifetime. In the city of Chicago where I live now, about a third of the children speak a language other than English in their homes. These are mostly American citizens, and even among those who currently are not, the majority will ultimately become citizens. The line between American and foreigner for many people has become blurred also because children who were born in the United States automatically become American citizens. There are many families that include both citizens and non-citizens. Therefore, when I am feeling optimistic, the situation I see is one of an expanding community of people whose perspective is considered legitimate. However, at the moment, we are at  the point where the imagination of many Americans gets stuck and I spend a lot of my time trying to get it unstuck.