John Jefferson
On August 9, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress Bockscar opened her bomb bay doors in the skies over Nagasaki, a heavily Catholic city in Kyushu, southwestern Japan. Out of Bockscar’s belly slipped a plutonium atomic bomb, nicknamed “Fat Man.” After practice runs dropping dummy atomic weapons on American deserts and Japanese cities to test the accuracy of so massive a hunk of metal and machinery in freefall, Bockscar’s pilot, Major Charles Sweeney, and bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, were fairly certain that Fat Man would drop through the atmosphere as sighted through the bomb scope.
At two minutes after 11 that Thursday morning, Fat Man’s outer mechanism imploded, compressing the plutonium and triggering a chain reaction that unleashed the latent power of the radioactive material at the weapon’s core. Urakami Cathedral, one of the jewels of Christianity in Asia, was badly damaged in the explosion. It was still standing, however, which was more than could be said for almost every other structure in the blast zone. Some forty thousand people died in that moment, many of them incinerated, some vaporized, in a flash of ungodly light and heat. Tens of thousands more would die over the coming weeks and months as radiation destroyed their bodies from within. American triumph in Asia was and res inseparable from barbaric cruelty.
For decades, American ambassadors and other dignitaries avoided Nagasaki on the anniversary of the atomic bombing. The logic is obvious. Criminals may sometimes return to the scene of their crimes, but higher-level psychopaths know that it is better to stay away. Discrete absence from Nagasaki in mid August was not just good policy; it also saved Americans in Japan from a great deal of explaining concerning the finer points of Washington’s impeccably brutal empire. In 2024, however, Rahm Emanuel, the current American ambassador to Japan, stayed away from the Nagasaki ceremony for another reason. He wanted to teach the mayor of Nagasaki a lesson about morality.
Mayor Suzuki Shiro had offended Ambassador Emanuel over invitations to the 2024 Nagasaki commemoration. Suzuki had dared not to invite the ambassadors of Israel, Russia, and Belarus to the ceremony. The reason he gave for not inviting the ambassadors of Russia and Belarus was that those two nations are waging war in Ukraine. Emanuel expressed no objection to this non-invitation. The Israeli ambassador, however, Suzuki said, was excluded due to concerns about security.
Emanuel interpreted this snub differently. The Israeli ambassador was being excluded because of the war in Gaza, Emanuel believed. So Emanuel stated that he would not be attending—no one who is not a friend of Israel can be a friend of Washington’s. Not even the mayor of Nagasaki gets to dispute this, or even lodge an exception. Five of Emanuel’s six counterparts in the G7—none of whose nations have good historical track records vis-à-vis non-European civilizations—joined Emanuel. The American ambassador to Japan did not go to Nagasaki on August 9, because, according to Emanuel, Washington occupies the moral high ground.
In sitting out the Nagasaki event, Emanuel was, in one sense, simply returning to a status quo ante. John Roos, President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Japan from 2009 to 2013, attended the August 9 Nagasaki ceremony in 2012, becoming the first American ambassador to do so. (Roos had earlier attended the 2010 annual ceremony honoring the victims of the Hiroshima bombing.) Washington had learned a new trick. Instead of studiously avoiding being associated with its genocide against the Japanese people, Washington’s men (and women) in Tokyo turned that genocide into a PR coup. Don’t avoid the scenes of past genocides. Go, instead, and pretend to be in solemn solidarity with your victims. Obama himself had shown up at Hiroshima in 2016, hugging a hibakusha (bomb survivor) named Mori Shigeaki in a move that seemed to signal reconciliation after 71 years of estrangement.
Or maybe it signaled a desire to be done with the historical sandbagging and get on with the murderous game of geopolitics as usual.
At Hiroshima in 2016, Obama offered no apology for his government’s actions. But what he did offer was a new level of access to Washington power. The Japanese prime minister at the time, Abe Shinzo, was busy expanding Japan’s presence in Asia and the Pacific, ambitions which played perfectly into Washington’s need to cultivate a new enemy in Beijing. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, comprising Japan, the United States, India, and Australia, was one of Abe’s bold forays into big-league diplomacy. His Free and Open Indo-Pacific was even bolder, joining the Indian and Pacific oceans and their respective maritime countries into a loose group of freedom-seeking powers. China was on the rise, and the past with Japan, however ugly, had to be left behind in order to meet new enemies looming over old battlefields. Washington saw Japan as, increasingly, a vital junior partner in a new civilizational war against a near-peer competitor. Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the other ghosts of near-peer competitor pasts got sacrificed on the twin altars of expediency and hypocrisy.
Emanuel has missed no opportunity to stoke fear of China while goading Japan to become ever more reliant on Washington. Why should he, when he has such a captive audience in the pro-Washington establishment here? Prime Minister Kishida Fumio had taken the Washington-is-Tokyo’s-friend bait—hook, line, and sinker. In April 2024, Kishida prostrated himself before the Washington elite, declaring himself, his government, and his country America’s “global partner.”
Kishida declared recently that he will not seek re-election to re leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), thereby effectively announcing his resignation as prime minister come the next election. But the LDP is a creature of the CIA and is Washington’s most faithful servant, so whoever takes Kishida’s place will be merely a hood ornament on Washington policy, as Kishida now is.
Emanuel was not wrong to read the atomic tea leaves as he did, either. In May 2023, Joe Biden was in Hiroshima for the G7 summit held there. Although himself a Tokyo pol through and through, Kishida’s political family is rooted in Hiroshima, and Kishida himself is re-elected into the Diet via the Hiroshima LDP machine, dominating Election District 1. Kishida, however, did not, while standing at the atomic bombing memorial with the American president in 2023, mention the Hiroshima horror of 1945 to Joe Biden. He did not press the American president for a word of remorse. So Emanuel’s reading of Japanese politicians as weak and easily bullied by Washington was in no way inaccurate. Especially, improbably enough, when it comes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tokyo is even more eager to let genocidal bygones be bygones than Washington is.
And Emanuel was also not wrong to assume, if, as it seems, he did, that he had the political and chattering class in Japan sufficiently under his thumb to get his way in Nagasaki. In the summer of 2023, Emanuel forced Prime Minister Kishida to suspend usual parliamentary procedure in order to ram an ideological LGBT bill through the Japanese Diet. The American ambassador revealed himself last summer to be a governor-general whose whim was law. The Japanese people fumed and hollered at the interference by a foreign power in their domestic politics. Jolted out of their postwar complacency of simply letting the Americans run their country, a handful of otherwise thoroughly unmanly politicians, feet held to the fire by a riled-up Japanese electorate, put on a show of thumos for a change and pretended to stand up to the Americans. It all came to nothing. Japan’s lapdog “conservative” media eventually ran cover for Emanuel.
It was in this tradition of what-I-say-goes that Emanuel chided the mayor of Nagasaki for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel on the one hand and Russia and Belarus on the other. Japan’s worshipful Washington-serving press agreed. It was the height of Washington’s scrupulous barbarism. We leveled your city 79 years ago. We turned Japanese women and children and elderly into ash in an atomic instant. We irradiated the ground, poisoned the air, filled the water with corpses. It was all for your own good anyway. And now we are bringing Washingtonian enlightenment to Kiev, and, from there, to Moscow. Nuclear armageddon in Eastern Europe? Yes, as with the last time, the possibility of the end of humanity must be considered. It is we, the Washington few, who draw moral equivalences, not those whom we have once bombed into submission. And Israel was founded in 1948 on a stretch of empty land, as was the United States in 1789.
But reality, and history, always have the final word. Nagasaki looks different when one’s grandmother was blown into particles by Washington’s mighty justice in 1945. The moral equivalence Washington wants to draw between itself and its victims, while excepting the sins of its protectorates, is too much for the wretched of the earth to bear. The outrage in Nagasaki this August seems to have been the final straw for a great and growing segment of Japanese people finally grown heartily sick of Washington. Or maybe it was the rather astonishing fact that the subservient Japanese media defended Emanuel and criticized the mayor of Nagasaki.
At any rate, a dam has broken. The American ambassador to Japan, it is now rumored, will leave his post in November—angling for a sinecure in a Harris administration, probably. But before he goes, a protest in front of the American Embassy on August 15—the day of Japan’s 1945 surrender—should be understood as part of the big turning of the political tide here. I was at that protest, having been invited by the organizer, Sato Kazuo, to attend. Sato is a friend. Orimoto Tatsunori, a Chiba prefectural politician who spoke at the protest, is a friendly acquaintance. The Japanese people are not remotely anti-American. They are, however, pro-truth and anti-hypocrisy. There is only so much scrupulous barbarism that they, or I, can take. Israel bombs innocents in Gaza. Emanuel cloaks that genocide with another, vintage 1945. Emanuel works for one cruel government and covers for another, both expert in civilian immiseration. Oblivious to the unfortunate moral equivalence between Washington and Tel Aviv, Emanuel, representing the world’s only atomic aggressor, lectures the world’s only atomic victim on the finer points of political morality. And he does so, indirectly, in furtherance of his government’s equally indefensible campaign against Russia.
No, this will not fly. The people of Japan can take only so much. They have had enough of Emanuel and his Washington lies. The Japanese political and media establishment are shown to be Washington’s playthings. The Japanese people, increasingly wise to this fraud and unable to forget history as easily as Washington does, are left with a gaping hole in their futures if America leaves the Indo-Pacific to fend for itself in an emerging post-Washington world order.
But “good riddance” seems to be the mood. The uncertainties coming our way are much better, people here seem to be thinking, than the price that Washington has extracted in exchange for eight decades of foreign domination.
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