It was taken at Nagasaki after WW2 by Joe O’Donnell for the US military.
His description:
“I saw a boy about ten years old walking by. He was carrying a baby on his back. In those days in Japan, we often saw children playing with their little brothers or sisters on their backs, but this boy was clearly different. I could see that he had come to this place for a serious reason. He was wearing no shoes. His face was hard. The little head was tipped back as if the baby were fast asleep. The boy stood there for five or ten minutes”.
“The men in white masks walked over to him and quietly began to take off the rope that was holding the baby. That is when I saw that the baby was already dead. The men held the body by the hands and feet and placed it on the fire. The boy stood there straight without moving, watching the flames. He was biting his lower lip so hard that it shone with blood. The flame burned low like the sun going down. The boy turned around and walked silently away”
Yeah in fact I was browsing for material about Grave of the Fireflies when I can across this. I am sure there were thousands of such stories and probably thousands such stories today in places with wars and famines.It’s rare to see a photo which captures it so powerfully though.
What gets me is how dignified and brave the boy was. I can’t help wondering what happened to him. If he was the only one alive in his family, his immediate survival prospects were probably not great. However if he did survive he might even be living today, at around 85 years old.
It’s not entirely clear which forum this should go in. On the one hand, it’s about a historical event, which would probably put it in MPSIMS. On the other hand, it’s about a photo of a historic event, and the photo could be considered art.
Given this ambiguity, I will defer to leaving it where the OP put it, here in Cafe Society.
Despite growing up around a lot of Great Generation people who never forgave Japan for what they did in the war - and then later, being around a lot of my girlfriend’s Chinese relatives who REALLY never forgave Japan - I’ve always had some empathy for what happened to Japan in that war. Because, for most of Japan’s history, they were an examplar of what a good country should be - namely, keeping to itself and not causing problems for anyone. They were sequestered from the rest of the world for hundreds of years - during eras when, it should be noted, the Western world was engaging in an orgy of colonialism and conquest, including in Japan’s own backyard (the Philippines, Indonesia, etc). For most of Japan’s long, long history, they were content to leave the rest of the world alone. Their own flirtation with imperialism failed miserably, and they gave it up and moved on. While they committed HORRIFIC atrocities in World War II, these were a blip on their overall timeline. So in the final analysis I would say Japan’s history has been more positive than negative.
Yet, in more recent memory, it’s associated so much with death and destruction. And it’s not the fault of the Japanese population that their country was hijacked by what amounted to an imperialist cult. I like to THINK that the war could have been ended without dropping the bombs on them, but maybe it truly was the only way. I don’t know. But it was certainly the darkest chapter in that nation’s history.
Mmm. Japan closed itself off from the rest of the world more due to an extreme xenophobia than any high-minded rejection of colonial conquest. Even today, they are pretty casually racist for a developed nation.
And I have absolutely no doubt that the Algonquin, the Salish or the Miqmak would be too, if they had the benefit of a defensible island nation. The world is a big place and not every culture is required to be multicultural.
You can like to think that all you want. But dropping those two bombs was absolutely the correct ethical course of action, and it saved millions of lives compared to the prospect of invasion. The Japanese refused to surrender until the second bomb, and any other course of action would have lead to far more Japanese deaths, even ignoring Allied casualties.
The Japanese people had a choice at every stage, and the Japanese people themselves were entirely to blame for the heart-rending photo in the OP. The millions of civilians who died as victims of Japanese war crimes across Asia did not have any similar choice in the matter.
Your contention that
…implying that the Japanese populace were themselves unfortunate victims of a small number of evil men is wildly inaccurate. There was a civilian militia of 28 million prepared to defend the home islands from Allied invasion.
I’ve never understood the soft revisionism that seems to have been happening with respect to Japan. They committed a LOT of atrocious stuff- at pretty much every turn, if there was a better and a worse way to do just about ANYTHING involving occupied civilians or POWs, they chose the worse path. And they weren’t even particularly good to their own soldiers, which is unusual for a state like theirs. There are lots of reports of starving Japanese soldiers and terrible treatment of their wounded, etc… Or of expectations to fight to the death for no other reason but honor- there wasn’t any military reason not to surrender in most cases.
But for some reason, the Germans were essentially forced to confront their history and atone for it, but the Japanese never have been. And that’s how you get stuff like the Japanese crying foul about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite the fact that THEY started the war, and they kept it going at pretty much every stage, up to and including Nagasaki, at which point they finally realized that the jig was up, and that there wasn’t any way to pull it out, because we’d just nuke them into oblivion, and there was no way for them to fight that. That last bit is important- they were fully willing to fight out an invasion of the home islands, but once the prospect of having entire cities vaporized at a blink, and that there was literally nothing they could do to prevent it, surrender became the only option left.
Hirohito and all members of the imperial family implicated in the war such as Prince Chichibu, Prince Asaka, Prince Takeda and Prince Higashikuni were exonerated from criminal prosecutions by MacArthur, with the help of Bonner Fellers who allowed the major criminal suspects to coordinate their stories so that the Emperor would be spared from indictment. Some historians criticize this decision. According to John Dower, “with the full support of MacArthur’s headquarters, the prosecution functioned, in effect, as a defense team for the emperor” and even Japanese activists who endorse the ideals of the Nuremberg and Tokyo charters, and who have labored to document and publicize the atrocities of the Showa regime “cannot defend the American decision to exonerate the emperor of war responsibility and then, in the chill of the Cold War, release and soon afterwards openly embrace accused right-winged war criminals like the later prime minister Nobusuke Kishi.” For Herbert Bix, “MacArthur’s truly extraordinary measures to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war.”
From this Wikipedia article
It’s obvious why there are peace memorials at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because of the horrific significance of these weapons for mankind.
But in terms of what actually transpired in WWII? Any implication that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were the nadir of human tragedy in that war is completely wrong. It would also have been appropriate to convert the Imperial Palace into a peace memorial, to reflect the true cause of what happened rather than just the tragic consequences. And, of course, to memorialize the vastly greater numbers of Chinese and other civilians across Asia who died or were brutalized at the hands of Japanese soldiers.
This thread is about a particular incident and photo not about Japanese history and their guilt though let me just say that there is a lot of guilt to go around in WW2 including several brutal European empires not to mention the atrocities perpetrated by the US against its own populations. If you want to continue debating Japanese guilt please start your own thread.
What “particular incident” are you talking about? Do you think the bombing of Nagasaki can be discussed in isolation?
It’s asking a bit much to describe a photo as “the saddest thing I have ever seen”, and then to expect that people won’t want to discuss the context of the tragedy and why it happened; and indeed whether other sad or sadder things transpired in that war, since your title implies that none did.
The incident is a small boy who has to bury his own brother. It happens to have been at Nagasaki but it could have been in many other places and times. Frankly it strikes me as fascinating that this photo pushes so many buttons that people react to it by furiously denouncing Japanese war guilt. Are you unable to react to the humanity of the moment captured despite whatever you feel about the larger political context?
I did not post in response to the impact of the photograph. I posted in response to Lamoral’s comments on the context - although I don’t think the scope of his comments were at all unreasonable or unexpected given your OP.
Again, your own OP described it as “the saddest thing I have ever seen”, which can obviously be read as part of a narrative that Nagasaki was the worst thing to happen in that war.
If you want some kind of narrower debate, maybe frame more clearly what you want the scope to be, and I’ll be happy to abide by that. But it’s far from clear from your OP what you want the range of discussion to be, and I don’t accept that anyone has a right to portray a one-sided narrative without challenge.
This is not a debate. When I said it was perhaps the saddest thing I had ever seen it was obviously a personal opinion. I think it’s perfectly possible to appreciate the human tragedy depicted without indulging in a heated political argument and I feel sorry for anyone who feels otherwise.
That’s really it- you can’t post a photo of suffering civilians in a war without implicit condemnation of the opposing side and in the case of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, of the combat use of nuclear weapons.
It just strikes me as kind of crappy, in that the Japanese were entirely responsible for the war- at every turn, their actions prompted a US/Allied response. Even the freezing of their assets and cut-off of their oil supply was due to their predations in China and the rest of the Pacific/Asia.
But people seem perfectly ok to condemn the US for ending that war in the most expedient AND least bloody way possible at the time, simply because we used nuclear weapons, and by extension condoning, or at least not fully condemning the actions of the Japanese. And most of the time, that condemnation takes the place of pictures and commentary just like the OP’s.
To put some numbers behind it, the Pentagon expected somewhere on the order of a million US dead and at least twice that in wounded for both invasions (Coronet and Olympic) of the home islands. And something like 10 times that for the Japanese, all based on the experiences at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, both considered to be part of Japan by the Japanese.
So with those numbers in mind, it was absolutely the right thing to do to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even if the casualties from both raids was upwards of 200,000 people.
The child in the picture was not responsible for the war.
His having been in effect betrayed by his own government seems to me to make the picture sadder, not less so.
If the thread title were ‘the saddest thing anybody has ever seen’, there’d be lots of room for argument, because the human world is unfortunately full of a godawful lot of sad things, many of them made more so by the bad behavior of humans. If the OP thinks it’s the saddest thing they personally have ever seen, I don’t really see how that’s arguable.
I don’t see how that’s a thread. Should we all just say, “Yep, that’s a sad picture”? Should we post our own sad pictures? Besides arguing about the war, what’s there to say?