History. 80 years since the bombing of Hiroshima: How Japan went from executioner to victim

No one leaves the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum unscathed. Views of burned bodies, videos of victims recalling the trauma of the explosion, charred objects like the tricycle of a three-year-old boy who died on impact, photos of survivors forever scarred in their flesh... Then rooms on nuclear weapons, their manufacture and distribution. And a stated objective: "To convey to the world the horrors and inhuman nature of nuclear weapons."

The atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, at 8:16:02 a.m. local time. It killed 75,000 people immediately, and 50,000 more in the following weeks. The total number of victims, which cannot be precisely established, is estimated at 250,000.

But why this bomb ? The debate has never ceased on this question. Was it a war crime by the United States, or was it a necessary terror to force an end to the war in the face of Emperor Hirohito's proclaimed will to fight "to the last Japanese"?

The Memorial Museum avoids the question. It moves from pre-war Hiroshima to the horrors of August 6, with nothing about the wars waged by Imperial Japan—the brutal colonization of Korea in 1910, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese at Nanking in 1937, the surprise US attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, all justified by a nationalism glorifying the superiority of the Japanese race. Nothing in the Hiroshima Memorial about Japan as the executioner of the peoples of Asia, just Japan as the victim of the bomb.

Victim, even absolute victim, incomparable. The writer Kenzaburo Ôé describes at length in his Notes from Hiroshima (Folio), published in 1965, the terrible consequences of "the cruelest experience known to man in the 20th century." A human disaster, according to him, "of a magnitude at least equivalent to that of Auschwitz" (more than a million victims). The pacifist activist, however, has not a word about Japanese militarism.

This unambiguous view of the conflict continues today. Until 2013, the Japanese Prime Minister visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo every year, where the remains of soldiers convicted of war crimes for their actions during World War II are buried. Since then, the Prime Minister has simply sent an offering—but what would people say if the German Chancellor were to pay tribute to Nazi war criminals in this way? For Japan, this is not a matter of debate, at least not in Europe: China and Korea, which are still waiting for an official apology from Japan for the atrocities of the imperial regime, never fail to protest.