Truman Library Joins With Hiroshima Survivors in Forum on Nuclear Weapons

Harry Truman is not known to have ever second-guessed his decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Monday night, the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Mo., and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan have arranged a symbolic meeting between him and the victims of those bombs, in an event billed as "Mr. Truman Meets Hiroshima on the Future of Nuclear Weapons," a live video-conference between American scholars and hibakusha -- survivors of the bombings. According to the organizer of the webcast, Professor Roy Tamashiro of Webster University in Webster Groves, Mo., the hibakusha were initially "panicked'' by the library's involvement.

"I got goosebumps'' at the idea of holding the event at the Truman Library, in front of a live audience, with questions for participants coming in online as well, Tamashiro said. "Everyone said no way, this is impossible, there's too big a philosophical difference'' between the library, which is an archive and research institution, and the anti-nuclear activists in Japan. Yet as it turned out, the keepers of Truman's legacy agreed immediately, and the survivors nearly balked. "When we said we had the Truman Library'' onboard, Tamashiro said, "they panicked; they weren't sure. They were fearful this event would turn into a debate'' on the justification for dropping the bomb, instead of on the road to nuclear disarmament ahead of a May Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference (NPT) in New York.

Not that the historical debate has been settled; estimates of the lives that would have been lost if Truman had not used the bomb to force Japan's surrender were questioned even within the U.S. military at the time. (In "The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953-1956: A Personal Account," Truman's successor Dwight Eisenhower recalled that "Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. . . . The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.' The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude.")

Yet it's not Tamashiro's purpose to re-litigate Truman's decision, and his own family's complicated story makes him the perfect bridge between the unlikely co-participants in tonight's event. His father, Tokujin Tamashiro, was born in Hawaii to Japanese parents who moved back to Okinawa, as they had long planned, when he was in the second grade. When he was 16, as the Japanese were preparing to invade China, he was drafted into the Japanese army. "His father said, 'Be a good Japanese and join,' and his mother said, 'Get out of here.' ''

Preferring his mother's advice, he moved back to Hawaii to live with his older sister, was there when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and was subsequently drafted into the U.S. Army.

"He felt more sympathetic with the American side,'' so he went willingly, and was assigned to the highly decorated 442^nd Regimental Combat Team of Japanese-Americans, some of whom had been drafted out of internment camps. He was serving in France on VE day, and only after arriving home to a ticker-tape parade learned that both of his parents had been killed in the American invasion of Okinawa in 1945. "He said he was glad he hadn't known until then.'' Now 90 and living in a nursing home in Hawaii, he knows about Monday night's event, and feels his son is closing a circle in bringing together these two sides, both of them his own.

Below is a short video interview with Frank Kelly, a former Truman speechwriter, which will be shown at tonight's forum: