80 Years After Hiroshima Bombing, Art Needs ‘Courage to Be Afraid’

HIROSHIMA, Japan — For a few years, now, I’ve been turning over in my head one brief scene in a beautiful movie.

It comes two hours into “Drive My Car,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning 2021 masterpiece of bereavement and artistic inspiration, when a troupe of actors steps outside the theater to rehearse in the fresh air. It is autumn. Leaves crunch beneath the feet of two actresses as they play one of the tenderest scenes of “Uncle Vanya.” They’d been struggling, up to now, as they recited Chekhov’s lines about sorrow and stagnation: lives not lived, dreams squelched and dreams maintained. But here in the park something clicks. We must live. The show must go on.

It’s never made explicit why this outdoor rehearsal unlocks the core of Chekhov — how this park, for these actors, opens a whole universe of grief and endurance. For a Japanese audience, at least, there was no need.

The park is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, designed in 1954 by the great modernist architect Kenzo Tange. On Aug. 6, 1945 — 80 years ago this week — a new kind of bomb detonated, almost silently, some 1,900 feet overhead. The scene from “Drive My Car” came back to me when I stood, in a pouring rain, on the spot where it was filmed. Anyone standing there in 1945 was killed immediately; then came the fires, and the fallout. It started raining in the first days after Aug. 6 as well: viscous black drops, heavy with soot and debris. The survivors drank it desperately in the ruins of Hiroshima. The raindrops were radioactive.

“A scientific event,” wrote the painter Wassily Kandinsky in 1913, “removed one of the most important obstacles from my path. This was the further division of the atom. The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the collapse of the whole world.” At the start of the last century, after Ernest Rutherford, Pierre and Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein began to unravel the mysteries of nuclear physics, a periodic table of artists, authors and philosophers grew fixated on this new science’s cultural repercussions. Suddenly, the permanence of matter (the permanence of history, perhaps) appeared like an industrial relic. Objects that seemed stable actually vibrated with energy. Nuclear physics was confirming a suspicion, one at the core of modern art and literature, that the things we see are less solid than they look.

“Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial,” Kandinsky had said.

I had come to Hiroshima to try to see, and to feel, where that argument led. The Peace Memorial Museum, crowded but quiet, showed the side of atomic power Kandinsky could not have envisioned. Metal fused with debris in ungodly heat. Singed student uniforms; singed children’s dresses. There is a six-panel folding screen, donated just recently by a Hiroshima family, whose gold expanses are streaked by black rain: the most terrifying abstract painting I have ever seen.

Modern art’s atomic optimism vanished outside a bank building in this city, about 850 feet from the hypocenter — its steps darkened by the permanent shadow of someone who died there, instantly, in heat that reached 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit or more. When the painter Yves Klein saw those steps in a documentary, he was moved to create one of his ghostly impressions of bodies in his signature blue. In a panorama called “Hiroshima” (circa 1961), the bodies of his models have receded from bright blue to ashy white. Flesh became negative space. “Everything physical and material could disappear from one day to another,” said Klein, “to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.”

The ultimate abstraction: It is closer than you think.

In the decades after Aug. 6, 1945 — and the second bomb, dropped three days later on Nagasaki — the domains of painting, cinema and literature committed to envisioning the doomsday scenarios of mutually assured destruction.

“On the Beach,” following the last survivors of a third world war waiting for the radiation to reach Australia, turned melodrama into a radioactive genre. “Dr. Strangelove,” literalizing the paranoia and psychosis of nuclear confrontation, confirmed our daily survival as nothing but a black comedy. George Orwell, Philip K. Dick and Kim Stanley Robinson imagined life, or what was left of it, after atomic Armageddon. They were nuclear Cassandras. They found our institutions, our leaders, as unstable as plutonium.

Now, 80 years after Hiroshima, we have blundered into a new age of nuclear perils. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that the planet faced the greatest risk of nuclear confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Earlier this year President Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, warned that we stand “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” drawing a rebuke from the president. The U.S. and Israel bombarded Iran’s nuclear development sites in June. North Korea continues to modernize its nuclear-capable forces, while China is expanding its own arsenal so swiftly that students of deterrence must now account for three, not two, nuclear superpowers. The last arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia is set to expire in just six months. The very principle of arms control may die with it.

All this with remarkably little outcry: little in our politics, less still in our culture. There were no “Daisy Girl” or “3 a.m. phone call” ads during last year’s presidential campaign. The bookshops and streaming studios fob off the burden for our own extinction onto outside antagonists: zombie invasions and errant asteroids and, most recently, killer A.I. There remain an estimated 12,000 nuclear warheads on earth today, per the Federation of American Scientists, and yet we have let the bomb be absorbed back into World War II dad history. An endless river of Manhattan Project dramatizations has conveyed some morally serious works, like John Adams’s opera “Doctor Atomic”; more often, from the TV series “Manhattan” to the self-satisfied “Oppenheimer,” I struggle to distinguish Hollywood offerings from Department of Energy propaganda.

I needed to come here, to Peace Memorial Park, to learn again how artists envisioned what we have been refusing to face — how they put into words, and images, our intertwined capacities for self-destruction and self-delusion. This is a city whose very name once authoritatively established a “nuclear taboo,” which was the political scientist Nina Tannenwald’s term for the implicit norm in all nuclear states not to launch a weapon. But the name “Hiroshima” has grown fainter, its impact weaker, and last month the Japanese health ministry reported that the number of survivors of the attacks here and in Nagasaki dropped below 100,000 for the first time.

To survive this second nuclear age we are going to need models from the first one: artists who faced up to what the bomb did, and what the bomb made of us.

Immediately after V-J Day, Americans looked to Hiroshima more in awe than in anguish or anger. The fundamental form of Aug. 6 was the mushroom cloud: an abstract amazement seen from miles above, miles away. Artists and scientists alike had misgivings about the Truman administration’s justifications for the destruction of Hiroshima, to say nothing of Nagasaki. But the bomb itself was a thing of wonder.

Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, would argue that Hiroshima was a moral summons with an aesthetic corollary: to boil art down to its tragic essence. The bomb, wrote Newman in 1948, “has robbed us of our hidden terror, as terror can exist only if the forces of tragedy are unknown. We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us.”

Detail would dissolve. The picture would become speechless. Newman, Rothko, de Kooning, Reinhardt: American postwar painting took on techniques of amorphousness and disintegration, laden with humanistic and universalist rhetoric, in part as a mirror of the bomb. Asked to justify his canvas-covering drips, Jackson Pollock told an interviewer in 1950, “The modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.”

With the exception of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” a work of reportage published as a special issue of The New Yorker in 1946, nuclear destruction was initially seen at a bird’s-eye view. Which was hardly just a matter of squeamishness. From 1945 to 1952, American occupying forces strictly censored images of the two destroyed cities. U.S. Army photographs of Hiroshima were clinical, depopulated documents. What civilians endured could not be seen; the photographer Yosuke Yamahata, who rushed to Nagasaki in the first hours after the attack, did not publish his records of blackened corpses and shellshocked children for seven years.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained invisible, in those first years, not only because of what the bomb did but what the bomb announced: a new stage of history, in which technology had removed human survival from human will.

Atsuyuki Matsuo was a high school teacher in Nagasaki, and in his leisure time he wrote haiku in a modern style that did not conform to the typical structure of five, seven, five syllables. On Aug. 9, 1945, he was exposed to the second bomb while working at a food distribution site by the port. He made it home, through the fires, at midnight. Two of his children had already died. A third succumbed the next day. His wife died within the week. Yet when he tried to publish his poetry about the blast in a Nagasaki journal in 1946, the editors told him no.

The occupation’s press codes were only the half of it. In the “dark era” of the first postwar decade, hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”) received no official recognition, and no medical relief. Survivors faced social discrimination for decades. To read Matsuo’s haiku, then, with its autumn clouds, its meager rice rations, its dragonflies buzzing above his dead sons and daughter, was to fear that the Japanese language itself had been irradiated — as if the poet’s invocations of the moonlight or the changing seasons divulged a larger contamination of literature and history.

So what Matsuo was doing, in his “A-Bomb Haiku,” was less public testimony than private grief work. He took the distanced gaze of the verse form, which poets since Basho had used to transcend the passions, and turned it in 1945 into a strategy for survival. Matsuo was keeping faith, in the privation of the postwar landscape, with the rigor and precision of language. He was wrenching uncontainable anguish into the strictures of Japanese poetry, in the hope that, through art, a ruined life might be still livable.

For almost a decade, Matsuo and Japan’s other artist-survivors worked in shadow. What made their grief politically palpable was another nuclear explosion, conducted once again by the Americans, a thousand times more powerful than the two they had survived. That was Castle Bravo, the disastrous U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, which spewed radioactive fallout — “ashes of death,” as the Japanese said — across 7,000 square miles. Twenty-three crew members of a Japanese fishing vessel succumbed to acute radiation sickness. In Japan, just two years after the end of American occupation, the outrage of Castle Bravo spurred a nationwide movement to ban nuclear weapons, and led to the first World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, in Hiroshima in 1955.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in other words, re-emerged in Japanese art in the shadow of a third mushroom cloud. Matsuo’s “A-Bomb Haiku” finally went into print in 1955. The painters Iri and Toshi Maruki, in the same year, added a folding screen of anti-nuclear demonstrators to their series of “Hiroshima Panels.” “Still, It’s Good to Live,” directed by Fumio Kamei in 1956, was the first documentary of life in postwar Hiroshima, intercutting orphanage rehabilitation programs with rallies against nuclear proliferation.

Three years later, the French director Alain Resnais would borrow footage from Kamei’s documentary for the opening sequences of his first feature, “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” The movie lingers over the scorched girders in the new Peace Memorial Museum as its French and Japanese lovers embrace and argue. It pauses before the bank steps with the shadow of the vanished man. It was the film that launched the French New Wave. The cinema was reborn, in 1959, from radiation.

Across the river from the Peace Memorial Park, I stood in the rain in front of the most recognizable monument in Hiroshima: the steel-ribbed A-Bomb Dome, or what remains of the only building that remained standing this close to the hypocenter. You see it in the last moments of “Drive My Car,” a symbol for living on through the void, sheathed in scaffolding as the sun sets over the river. For 80 years now it has stood alone by the riverside, its denuded dome appearing like the canopy of an umbrella.

These days, you can’t go inside. But the young photographer Kikuji Kawada walked into the dome in July 1958, while on assignment here for a newsmagazine. He saw a collection of anomalous stains burned into its exposed walls — the stains of its carbonized occupants, turned now into swirling, roiling whirlpools on the stone. Unsettled, spellbound, gripped by a duty to witness, Kawada would return for years afterward to the A-Bomb Dome, photographing the stains in the raw, high-contrast black-and-white that would come to characterize Japanese photography.

The stains form the core of Kawada’s “Chizu (The Map)”: a book of photos first published in 1965, and to my eye one of most monumental achievements in 20th-century art. The images ripple and puddle, full of fear and formlessness, but they’re interwoven with mementos of Japanese families and records of the American occupation. (A crushed box of cigarettes in Hiroshima reads “Lucky Strike,” a brand name with a dreadful double meaning.)

His photographs, which illustrate this essay, took on the impossible task of mourning inconceivable death, but there was a more universal topography in Kawada’s “Map,” a vision of extinctions still to come. The stains bled outward, onward, into what Kawada, now 92, called “one big world I found in Hiroshima.”

In America, by contrast, the bombs that gripped artists in the 1960s and 1970s were not the ones the nation had dropped but the ones aimed its way. “Seven Days in May,” a 1962 novel and 1964 movie, proposed a too-plausible American coup d’état by generals opposed to U.S.-Soviet disarmament. “Fail Safe,” Sidney Lumet’s 1964 thriller of an accidental nuclear war, begins with a miscommunication and ends with the incineration of New York City. Like “On the Beach” and “Dr. Strangelove,” these were prospective nightmares, in which popular entertainment took on the moral responsibility that government seemed to have abdicated.

Later on, in the Reagan era, American artists and writers who had spent their school days hiding underneath desks came to the forefront of campaigns against nuclear weapons. Jessye Norman and Itzhak Perlman performed against nukes on the stage of Avery Fisher Hall. A genre-spanning coalition of Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament — Trisha Brown and Meryl Streep and Harry Belafonte — staged rallies and plays for arms abolition. The animated films of Hayao Miyazaki, now classics in both Japan and the United States, brimmed with antinuclear sentiment. Even cheesy popcorn movies seemed like acts of deterrence, whether “WarGames” (1983), with the young Matthew Broderick as a hacker who nearly triggers World War III, or “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace,” in which Christopher Reeve faced off with Nuclear Man.

Much of that ended when the (first) Cold War came to a close, and practically disappeared after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, downsized the nation’s anxieties from 25-megaton yields to 3 ounces of liquids. But nuclear weapons do not permit easy divisions into us and them; if destruction is mutually assured, then we must all live together or die together. I suppose that was what I was looking for, as I trundled through the rain from the cenotaph to Hiroshima Bay: the universal vulnerability that painters and writers and filmmakers discovered in this city, and turned from an incapacitation into a driving purpose. You begin from the past deaths you cannot represent. You confront the present absurdity you cannot even understand. You discover a future life still worth fighting for.

You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. On the bullet train down from Tokyo, I started reading the work of Günther Anders, the foremost philosopher of humanity after Hiroshima. Too little known in the English-speaking world (you may know him as Hannah Arendt’s first husband), Anders was one of many German Jewish intellectuals who found refuge in the United States — and he was in New York on Aug. 6, 1945, when he heard the news on the radio with total incomprehension.

For years after he could not write. On one day, with one act, the core inquiry of philosophy for 2,500 years, the matter of how to live a good or righteous life, had been invalidated. “The basic moral question of former times must be radically reformulated” after Hiroshima, Anders would argue. “Instead of asking ‘How should we live?’, we now must ask ‘Will we live?’”

Anders came to conclude, in books such as “Hiroshima Is Everywhere,” that modern man had fallen into “a Promethean gap”: a chasm, grown wider by the year, between what our technologies can do and what we think they can do. Before Hiroshima, a Leonardo or a Voltaire could close his eyes and imagine futures far beyond contemporary capacities. The novelist, the opera composer, or the filmmaker could picture the end of the world as a low-risk cleansing fire presaging some purer rebirth. But as our destructive abilities have multiplied and Big Science got bigger, our cultural faculties failed to keep pace. “We are psychically unequal to the danger confronting us,” Anders wrote as early as 1956. And our principal moral failing, after Hiroshima, has been to neglect the development of our imagination — in the face of, or out of fear of, our final end.

The development of the imagination: This is one of art’s only functions. Generations of Americans were raised to fear fear itself. The writers and photographers and filmmakers who came to Hiroshima saw fear instead as a muse: saw how fear can draw universal dictates from a haiku’s specific adversities, how fear elevates a movie romance from a sob story into a call for action. As we slip into this second nuclear age, we have to put that fear in the service of something — to have “the courage to be afraid,” as Anders had it, and broaden our imagination to the scale of our arsenal. The alternative is to reduce our survival over the last 80 years to just dumb luck, and to tell the last remaining hibakusha, as some already are, that what they have endured and we still might is too much to imagine.