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No More Hiroshimas
By Mike Murase
This is reprinted from East Wind Magazine ( Fall/Winter 1982 edition) with the permission of the author
For me, the issue of nuclear disarmament hits close to home in many ways. I was born 90 miles east of Hiroshima and grew up in post-war Japan where I often heard talk about the suffering caused by the atomic bomb. Just before I came to America, I visited Hiroshima for the first time. Although I was only eight or nine years old, the scenes of the hollowedout atomic dome and the numerous statues and monuments throughout the city made a lasting impression on me.
After coming to this country with my family, I grew up in a section of Los Angeles which was mainly Black and Asian. All through school, our steady diet of U.S. history included George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and westward expansion. Very little was discussed about the history, experiences and contributions of Third World people in America. In our study of World War II, we were taught that America was fighting for democracy, but there was hardly a sentence about what happened in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and no mention was made of America's concentration camps.
In the late1960's, when I was going to college, the Viet Nam War was going on, and the country was engulfed in a tidal wave of struggles: the Black liberation and Third World people's movements; the student movement and ethnic studies struggles; and the anti-war movement.
When I got involved, at first, I was simply -and in retrospect, naively -just "for peace." I hoped for a world in which conflict could be resolved through peaceful means... without killing, without war. But, by going to "teach-ins," listening to speakers at raillies and demonstrations, and by reading, I learned that the Viet Nam War was not just a matter of two armies engaged in "conflict." The source of the war was the U.S. who was waging a war of aggression, an imperialist war, to maintain control of one of the richest areas in the world. Tin, tungsten, rubber and other raw materials in Southeast Asia, as well as its key strategic location, was what the war was all about. Because the war was an Asian war, thousands of progressive and revolutionary-minded Asian youth became a part of the anti-war movement. We saw how racism towards Asians was used as an excuse for the mass killings of Asian people. When we marched in demonstrations, we chanted at the top of our voices, "No More Hiroshima! No More Viet Nam!"
