Eighty-one years ago, Nagasaki was erased in a blinding flash, with 74,000 victims incinerated by a weapon that should have been the last. Three days earlier, Hiroshima had suffered the same fate.
During those three days, Japanese militarists kept insisting that people sacrifice themselves for the "glorious Empire of Japan". The destruction of Nagasaki finally shattered that dangerous faith and forced Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers six days later.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made it clear at the Hiroshima memorial ceremony on Thursday and again at the Nagasaki memorial ceremony on Sunday that the country's neo-militarists have learned nothing from the horrors of the bombings. At Nagasaki's Peace Park, the city's mayor, Shiro Suzuki, called nuclear weapons an "absolute evil". Yet, standing just a few feet away, Takaichi offered only deliberate ambiguity over whether her government will abide by the Three Non-Nuclear Principles.
Japan already operates under the protection of the United States' nuclear umbrella. To invoke a purported "external threat" as a rationale for acquiring an independent nuclear deterrent is hardly the "realistic and pragmatic approach" Takaichi describes — rather, it lays bare the unmistakable ambitions of the country's neo-militarist faction.
Takaichi will not say she intends to revise the principles, but neither will she promise to preserve them. She speaks only of current policy, deliberately leaving the future open to interpretation. This is the slow-motion dismantling of a commitment that has defined postwar Japan.
The hypocrisy is staggering. Here is a prime minister attending the memorials for victims of nuclear hellfire, surrounded by aging hibakusha, victims of atomic destruction — whose average age is over 86 — yet she will not reaffirm the principles these survivors have defended for decades. When the hibakusha protest her stance on "nuclear sharing" with the US, and when a record 128 local assemblies urge her government to uphold the three principles, her response is little more than a verbal shrug. No wonder Moscow called Japan's nuclear memorial act hypocritical — Takaichi equivocates on the non-nuclear principles while refusing to even ask why the bombs fell on Japan.
The "realism" that Takaichi invokes is increasingly aligned with the right-wing's neo-militarist ambitions. For Japan's remilitarization, "reality" means expanding military capabilities and deepening reliance on the alliance with the US. "Pragmatism" means leveraging Washington's desire for a more heavily armed Japan and stronger Asia-Pacific ally to create political space for nuclear ambiguity. Should we call this the Atomic Stockholm Syndrome?
Japan, the only country ever atom-bombed, now flirts with nuclear weapons under "extended deterrence". The US umbrella is a crutch, and Takaichi wants Japan to lean on it rather than lean on peace. Tokyo refuses to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, calling it "ineffective" to address its "security concerns".
Japan is in the unique position to be the moral voice for the abolition of nuclear weapons; but obligation requires clarity of conviction.
Takaichi has offered nothing but ambiguity. She does not need to formally rewrite the three principles. They can be diluted through reinterpretation, administrative decisions and incremental policy changes. If Washington looks the other way because it wants a more militarized Japan as part of its regional strategy, alliance politics could easily overwhelm international objections. What is at stake, therefore, is more than Japan's military posture. It is Japan's historical identity and regional stability.
Eighty-one years after Fat Man fell on Nagasaki, Takaichi stood in Peace Park and blurred the edges of a promise generations of Japanese have held sacred. The city's mayor was right: Nuclear deterrence does not eliminate the risk of catastrophe; it institutionalizes it.
The Takaichi government is intent on "honoring" the dead by placing their descendants under the shadow of the same weapons that destroyed them. When the last hibakusha is gone, what will remain of their plea? A prime minister who could not bring herself to unequivocally declare: "I promise to uphold the Three Non-Nuclear Principles". That is not realism. It is a betrayal of history.