Writeside Review: Remembering Nagasaki

How do you depict the unspeakable? How do you remember the unthinkable?

Although Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been household words for half a century now, it is reasonable to wonder exactly how the nuclear bombings which occurred there 50 years ago are remembered today. For most Westerners, the names of these cities have long been reduced to icons; nuclear weapons have long been reduced to distant abstractions, unlikely to intrude—if that's the word—upon the everyday routine of our lives. As the notes to the stark "Remembering Nagasaki" World Wide Web exhibition hosted by San Francisco's Exploratorium remind us, "we see history through the filters of current agendas and the lens of contemporary culture."

"Remembering Nagasaki" strips away those filters. Part of a major Exploratorium research and development project on the theme of memory, the exhibition is based on "Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata," an exhibit concurrently on display in Nagasaki, New York and San Francisco. Yamahata, a Japanese Army photographer, roamed Nagasaki on the day after the bombing—August 10, 1945—to take these pictures. They remain the most direct evidence of the bomb's effects on human beings.

There is a natural tendency to rebel against these photographs. We want to rationalize them, to strip them of their power by imposing an "explanation," a "context": these are war photos, atrocities, like so many others we have seen. Even Yamahata seemed to want to deny the experience he was recording:

It was perhaps unforgivable,

but in fact at the time,

I was completely

calm and composed.

In other words, perhaps

it was just too much,

too enormous to absorb.

Something of Yamahata's benumbed calm is captured in these old black-and-white photos. But the cumulative power of the images is undeniable—once seen, they cannot be forgotten.

(Reviewed August 7, 1995)

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