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In any conversation about autism, the word empathy comes up repeatedly. The process of learning about autism, and how to survive in the world, has led to an examination of empathy - what it is, what it isn't, and examples of it in practice. However, my examinations also bring me smack up against humanity's mass failures of empathy - wartime atrocities such as the holocaust, and crimes of cruelty such as murder and rape.
This month marked the 63rd anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like most Americans, I grew up knowing that "the bomb" had been dropped on these cities, ending World War II, but, for me, that knowledge was just sentences on a page. I did not truly grasp of the actual nature of the event.
My first real appreciation of the true horror of the bombing, came when, in the course of my language studies, I rented Shohei Imamura's movie Kuroi Ame (Black Rain). The images shown were nothing like I even could conceive - a mother cradling her blackened baby, a young boy so terribly burned that he must beg his brother to recognize him, and relatives weeping because they cannot free their children from the rubble.
Through it, I also learned of the painful social cost to the hibakusha (the survivors of the bomb), who faced discrimination and ostracism from their own people. The subject of widespread ignorance regarding the effects of the bomb, they were treated as "untouchables." They struggled to find jobs, marry, or simply to be accepted in society.
More recently, I viewed Stephen Okazaki's award winning documentary, "White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." While Kuroi Ame was disturbing, I found the accounts in Okazaki's film appalling. With Imamura's film, there was always the consoling thought that, while based in truth, it was fiction.
Not so with White Light Black Rain, a documentary. The accounts of these people were real, and absolutely unthinkable. Most affecting to me was that, at the time of the blast, all but a few of these individuals were children. Children who suffered through suffering I cannot even imagine.
The interviewees talk about their experiences, where they were when the bomb hit, and what they saw.
(Warning - these stories are disturbing.)
Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old. When the bomb hit, she and her sister thrown through their home and passed out. When they awakened, they called for their mother. No one answered. In the yard they found her, able only to identify her by her gold tooth. Before their eyes, her body disintegrated into ash. Her sister, who contracted radiation sickness, later committed suicide by stepping in front of a train.
Keiji Nakazawa was 6 years old, lost his father, sister and younger brother when their home collapsed and burned in the wake of the bombing. His sister was killed immediately, but he and his mother had to endure the screams of his 4 your old brother, as he burned to death inside the house. He later published an account of his experience in a comic book series called "Barefoot Gen."
The terrible stories go on and on. The emotional strength it must have taken to survive the terror of the events the survivors recall is staggering to me. Many were subjected to unbearable pain through disfiguring burns and injuries. Others are tormented by grief and survivor's guilt. Their stories are made all the more powerful and disturbing through historical footage of the aftermath which, in several cases, includes footage of the interviewees themselves.
As Okazaki states, "I realized that surviving is not just about physically surviving. It's more about spiritually surviving. I've met people who were not physically hurt by the bomb, but who were really destroyed by what they went through.
When you do a film like this, you're getting the story of the people who've survived in all ways, not just physically. I mean, there are people in the film who live in constant pain. One of the survivors in the film had to take breaks every couple of hours so she could rest and take her morphine."
Several members of the American crew who conducted the mission to drop the bomb were also interviewed. They speak with focus of their mission, but distance from what was happening on the ground. One states, "Our endeavor in using these bombs was to win the war. End the war as soon as possible and win the war. No sympathy, no, uh, regrets." Another states, "It had worked as designed, but it had done what war does, it destroys people." 
Several members of the American crew who conducted the mission to drop the bomb were also interviewed. They speak with focus of their mission, but distance from what was happening on the ground. One states, "Our endeavor in using these bombs was to win the war. End the war as soon as possible and win the war. No sympathy, no, uh, regrets." Another states, "It had worked as designed, but it had done what war does, it destroys people."
Obviously, we had scientists who understood, in theory, the power of the bomb. We had conducted the tests in New Mexico. Given this, they must have been able to conceive the suffering it would cause when used on a civilian-populated area. Could those in leadership conceive it? If they conceived the full power and range of suffering it would cause, how could they justify doing it?
When asked in an interview with the Huffington Post about the relevance of his film to today's society, Okasaki responded:
"We used some propaganda films and in one the former ambassador to Japan is describing the Japanese people. All you have to do is exchange the word Japanese with Arab and it's the same description, the same excuse for going to war: It's a 2,000-year-old culture and religion and the people don't care about life on earth because they'll be rewarded in heaven. Of course it's also a description of Christianity. How you make it okay to kill people is you make them really foreign and abstract. And I think that the film has a disturbing relevance now and the possibility of nuclear weapons is closer to home now. I think there's a really strong curiosity today because we're living in a world where people are aware of how dangerous this is. I'm startled that people have been so interested in the film. I expected more denial, more avoidance. It's really gratifying to see how much interest there is in the story."
When watching the film, it's very clear that the propaganda draws a clear delineation between "us" and "them." The message is clearly, "They're not like us, they don't think like us, they don't live like us." They are portrayed as a mindless horde who will stop at nothing to destroy everything America holds dear. But when you hear the survivors speak, they talk about suffering through the war. They talk about wanting it to end. They talk about family. Most of all, they talk about what they and their families were doing on that fateful day - playing with toy boats, hanging out the laundry, reading the paper, getting ready for school. Whatever the Japanese government and military was doing, their accounts show that they were not all that different.
When you make someone "different", or "foreign and abstract," you then lessen your empathy toward them. If they are "not like us," then they don't "feel the same as us." It's harder to inflict pain, especially catastrophic pain, on someone with whom you can identify. Would Truman and his advisors have chosen to do this if they could identify more with the people on the ground? If he could more easily liken a child like Sakue Shimohira to an American child? Would it have still felt justifiable?
In school, we were taught that the bombing was necessary to end the war. This has been debated now for more than 60 years. It may or may not be true - I'm no military strategist. Viscerally, at an emotional level, I find I cannot reconcile myself to the idea that this suffering is justifiable for anyone. These were children getting ready for school, not soldiers planning their next attack. Their parents were civilians, hanging out the laundry, getting ready for work, reading the paper.
Wars create atrocities on all sides - but couldn't there have been a better way?
