Dorothy Tibbs-Dawson

Daisy Tibbs-Dawson has been thinking a lot recently about a chapter of her rich life that she, a famous Seattle peace activist, and the citizens of Hiroshima wrote 63 years ago. A 25-year-old volunteer on a 1949 project to help rebuild housing in the atomic-bombed city, Tibbs-Dawson recalls hard work in primitive conditions where people were friendly to her and other Americans, even treating them as kind of celebrities.

This Friday, a number of Seattle-area residents are returning to Hiroshima to celebrate the opening of commemorative museum connected with the project. “I just wish I could go,” said Tibbs-Dawson, now in her late 80s.

A former executive in Seattle Public Schools’ Head Start program and a longtime leader in Presbyterian church affairs in the Northwest, Tibbs-Dawson, 88, is staying at home because of health issues that would make travel risky. Though she’s traveled widely since, she has never returned to Hiroshima. “It would be such a difference,” she says of the city, now a prosperous metropolitan area of more than 1 million people.

Officials in Hiroshima are set to open a museum in early November commemorating the reconstruction efforts of Seattle community members in the wake of the city’s atomic bombing.

The city will open Schmoe House on Nov. 1 to commemorate the work of foreign nationals in helping Hiroshima residents recover. The new museum, which will be affiliated with the famed Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, will be housed in one of the last remaining Hiroshima houses built by the Seattle-led volunteer group.

Schmoe House will be named after longtime peace activist and Quaker Floyd Schmoe of Seattle, who was 105 when he died in 2005. Schmoe first traveled to Hiroshima in 1949 to build houses for bombing survivors as part of a four-person delegation that included the now-deceased Rev. Emery Andrews, a longtime pastor of Seattle’s Japanese Baptist Church, and Tibbs-Dawson, who still lives in Seattle. The fourth delegation member, Ruth Jenkins, may live in California, according to information recently received by Yosh Nakagawa, a longtime leader in the Japanese Baptist Church as well as in sports and business.

Nakagawa and Andrews’ son, Pastor Brooks Andrews, (who is the interim senior minister at the church on Broadway just south of Seattle University) are traveling to Hiroshima for the opening of Schmoe House. Nakagawa said several members of Schmoe’s family and a number of Japanese Americans are also expected to attend the opening.

Between 1949 and 1953, groups working with Schmoe built 21 houses in Hiroshima. Houses were also built in Nagasaki, the other city that suffered a nuclear attack. Brooks Andrews said his father returned to Japan in 1951 or 1952 to help with the Nagasaki effort.

In a book published later, Schmoe wryly referred to himself and Emery Andrews as “definitely of the ‘parent generation’ ” to other volunteers on the project, mostly in their 20s. He also noted that Andrews was “known to most of the Nisei [second-generation Japanese Americans] in the Northwest simply as Andy. He probably married more Nisei couples than any other man in the United States.” According to Nakagawa, Schmoe and Andrews became friends during World War II, when both were supporting Japanese Americans, who had been interned in camps in gross violation of various guarantees in the U.S. Constitution.

At the start of the work, it seems that Hiroshima residents were somewhat amazed by the help. “Dad said people were very curious as to why this group would build houses, since they were former enemies,” Andrews recalled. “They couldn’t understand this. But for Dad and Floyd Schmoe, it was a gesture of peace.”

While the group was crossing the Pacific to express solidarity with the victims of the bombing, the composition of the four-person delegation was also breaking barriers at home. Tibbs-Dawson was a young African American — with a position teaching in a junior college — when Schmoe persuaded her to go. This at a time when segregation was still a social norm in most of European American-dominated society at home.

In an interview at her home near the Madrona business district, Tibbs-Dawson recalled the intense attention the group received on a trans-Pacific ship trip that began in San Francisco and included a stop in Hawaii. On the boat the group traveled in third class, but was greeted in Honolulu by reporters, photographers and a welcoming committee that draped leis around their necks. “The first-class people couldn’t believe it when we got all this attention in Hawaii,” she laughed.

Schmoe became a mentor to Tibbs-Dawson while she was still a student at the University of Washington (one of fewer than 70 African Americans in the school) and worked on weekend projects he organized to fix up the houses of Japanese-Americans returning from the wartime internment camps. She grew up in Alabama and her parents died while she was still a girl, but her passion for education attracted the attention of missionary school principal, J.T. Wright, and his wife. When the Wrights moved to Seattle for a job, they interested her in coming to the UW. Tibbs-Dawson enrolled without trouble, but quickly found racial prejudice in classrooms and the community.

She encountered culture shock moving to Seattle, but became good friends with both white and Asian Americans, including lifelong friend and famed educator Aki Kurose (“We raised our kids together.”). If they all wanted to go to a restaurant, the group would have to wait until they arrived to see if she would be accepted. The trip to Japan brought its own shocks, including the poverty in Hiroshima. “It was a shock when you got there,” she said. “You see all the devastation.” Tibbs-Dawson remembers seeing “people who were, you know, nothing but skin and bones.”

The group worked for several months building houses, tramping in mud and using very basic construction techniques. Many young Japanese volunteers from Tokyo and Hiroshima joined in. While in Hiroshima, the volunteers lived at a church headed by a Methodist minister, the Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, one of the six main characters in author John Hersey’s classic account of the bombing, Hiroshima.

If there was still anger toward Americans, it wasn’t directed toward Tibbs-Dawson and the rest of the group. She recalled her amazement at the upbeat attitudes she observed at a ceremony marking the fourth anniversary of the Aug. 6, 1945 bombing (Schmoe was taken aback). People realized, Tibbs-Dawson explained, that it was not ordinary civilians like the group from the United States who had ordered the bombing. Plus, she said, “We were supportive and all of us had volunteered.”

As on the trip over, the group attacted considerable attention wherever it went in Japan. Jenkins, known as “Pinkie,” was tall and red-haired, making her perhaps as much an object of a curiosity as Tibbs-Dawson to the Japanese. But Tibbs-Dawson enjoyed the people and the country, and she would often take on the role of speaking in Japanese to a crowd. Even now, she still easily tosses off some Japanese phrases.

Schmoe himself actually objected to what quickly became the practice in Hiroshima of referring to the houses built by volunteers from the city, abroad, and Tokyo as Schmoe Houses. In Japan Journey, a small book published in 1950, Schmoe noted that in an invitation sent to 100 people — including members of the press — the mayor of Hiroshima, Shinzo Hamai, called two completed houses “Minamachi Schmoe Houses,” referring to a neighborhood where the houses were. Schmoe felt that the designation was “not fair” to other Americans involved in making the houses possible. (There’s a signed copy of the book at the University Friends Meeting center, where Schmoe was an active member.)

While there may have been initial surprise in Hiroshima at the foreign interest, there has been enduring interest in the work of the Americans. Schmoe became legendary in Hiroshima, and Seattle’s Peace Park, near the University Bridge, was built in part with funds he received from a peace prize from there. In 1970, Andrews was recognized with an extremely prestigious award from the Emperor of Japan. Tibbs-Dawson recalled Andrews as upbeat. “He would keep us going,” she said.

As he prepared for the trip, Brooks Andrews, now 74, said he never expected to travel to Japan. He said he probably still doesn’t fully comprehend “the esteem that Hiroshima holds for the houses and the building projects.”

But 63 years after his father’s first trip, he is about to have a chance to experience how strongly the memory is held. In recent weeks, Hiroshima’s daily newspaper has published at least two articles (English versions here and here) on the upcoming dedication.

Tibbs-Dawson remains grateful for the experience of seeing Japan and said she always kept her devotion to peace. People have learned enough, she said, to have avoided using nuclear weapons again. “But we are still at war again,” she said. “I just keep wondering why. It seems like we will always be at war with somebody somewhere. And you just keep wondering, when will it ever stop? Or when will we ever be able to live with one another and accept one another?”

Copyright 2012/Joe Copeland

This story is also being published on Crosscut News.

Schmoe was there with other volunteers for a project called Houses for Hiroshima, which helped meet one of the greatest continuing needs four years after the United States dropped the first atomic bomb.

The annual ceremonies today are solemn, moving and meaningful. I found a description of the fourth-anniversary memorial in a small book Schmoe wrote, Japan Journey, after the first of his housing-assistance trips. There’s a signed copy of the book, published in 1950 by Silver Quoin Press, in the library of the University Friends Meeting, where Schmoe was an active Quaker.

In the book, he recounts briefly attending the ceremony, which occurred shortly after he and other Seattle volunteers arrived. He wrote, “Hiroshima’s public observance of the fourth anniversary of the atom bomb, August 6, 1949, left me feeling pretty low. … I was not prepared for fireworks and confetti.”

While he may have been understandably jarred, there is probably a straightforward explanation in the context of the times: Hiroshima was still trying hard to revive itself and rebuild. An upbeat approach to at least part of the the ceremony, rather than the religious tone that Schmoe suggested he would have expected, probably made sense to organizers. City officials  were trying hard to overcome the continuing misery of the immediate postwar era in Japan, especially the atomic-bombed cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The exhibition facility, commemorating help from various foreign nationals, will be called Schmoe House.

In Leaving My Beloved Children, Nagai recounts the loss of students and teachers from two middle schools, popularly known as “Junshin” and “Josei,” in the heavily Catholic Urakami district. “Both were run by the convent, and their principals and teachers were almost all nuns,” he writes. “The students of Junshin had been mobilised to work in a factory, and they perished one by one, singing hymns as they succumbed to the flames and turned into ash. This was just like in ancient days, when undefiled lambs used to be burned as a sacrifice on altars to please God. Ah! The huge sacrificial fire that was lit on the last day of World War II on the holy ground of Urakami in Nagasaki!”

He has a similar depiction of the deaths of 27 nuns from Josei school “called to heaven.” Referring to the immediate aftermath of the Aug. 9, 1945 bombing, he writes, “That night I had sent my assistant, Mr. Osasa, to take care of some patients, and he reported that he could hear, off and on, some Latin hymns being sung in unison in the middle of the night at a point on the bank of the river about two hundred yards east of the school. The next morning, the nuns were found dead en masse. Was it they who had been singing the hymns the night before? Or was it a group of angels who been sent down to carry their souls to heaven who were singing? I could not help thinking this way because the faces of the nuns in death all looked so pure and peaceful.”

Most survivors and witnesses to the horrific scenes of suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would find these accounts jarringly idealized if not insensitive. It all stands in stark contrast to the graphic descriptions routinely heard from many survivors, who are honest about their own horror decades later. Yet Nagai himself was a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing and, until 1951, of the leukemia that he attributed to his own medical and research work with radiation. It is surely fair to question his optimism about nuclear science, especially in light of Japan’s post-Fukushima problems with radiation, or fault him for playing into the hands of those who wanted to silence criticism of nuclear weapons. Nagai also writes, however, from a realm of personal conscience and belief that has to be respected.:“That same day, I became an emaciated, weak old man with no worldly possessions, and had to stand in the ruins of our house with my two children. But, strangely enough, I had no doubt that this, too, was somehow a manifestation of God’s providential love.”

Nagai goes on to say that he became able to experience true happiness. And, looking ahead to what was then the inevitable end of his fight with leukemia, he turns more realistic about the actual process of dying, perhaps implicitly acknowledging the pain of Nagasaki’s bombing victims in their deaths, while emphasizing his faith, and perhaps theirs. “The death that will soon visit me, too, must be a gift to me from God, in God’s endless love,” he writes. “Therefore, I am prepared gladly to accept the spiritual agony and bodily pain that must precede death as things necessary for the manifestation of God’s glory.”

Earlier stories: Lessons from Takashi Nagai, an early leader of survivors

Takashi Nagai, 2: criticisms

As Miyamoto explained in the article published in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Nagai was a popular figure in the city. And, at a November 23, 1945, funeral Mass, he said that the Nagasaki victims of the U.S. atomic bombing there were “sacrificial lambs” to God. And, quoting a biography by Fr. Paul Glynn, Miyamoto notes that Nagai went on to say, “Let us be thankful that Nagasaki was chosen for the whole-burnt sacrifice.”

It’s easy to suppose that this kind of sentiment fit rather well with the U.S. Occupation’s desire to avoid any questioning of the bombing or focus on the suffering of those who were caught in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eventually, as Miyamoto demonstrates, this led to sharp critiques from Japanese Catholics, including from another physician, Tatsuichiro Akizuki, who became active in the peace movement there. (Akizuki traveled to this country in his anti-nuclear activities, leading to a visit with Dr. Craig Leman in Corvallis, Ore., that Leman warmly remembered in a 2009 interview with me.)

Miyamoto writes that a former mayor of Nagasaki, Hitoshi Motoshima, took a different tack, placing Nagai’s views in the context of their fellow Catholics’ long history of suffering and government discrimination, even after outright persecution ended. And Motoshima, who would be injured in 1990 by a right-wing assassin for his criticism of Emperor Hirohito, pointed out that Nagai recognized the injustice of Japan’s World War II aggression.

The main criticisms of Nagai tended to be threefold, according to Miyamoto. His idea of sacrifice tended to divert criticism from Japan’s World War II government’s failure to accept defeat before the bombings. Nagasaki Catholics tended toward “tolerating the atomic bombings as God’s will.” And by accepting the benefits of peaceful nuclear power, his “conveniently fit” with official U.S. policy. Of course, it’s not necessarily surprising that Nagai, as a scientist and physician who had worked hard to provide patients with radiation treatments under difficult wartime conditions, would hold hope for good to come out of nuclear knowledge.

An earlier article on Nagai is here.

Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral (Joe Copeland)

More than six decades after his death, Dr. Takashi Nagai remains relevant to how we look at the pursuit of peace today.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Nagai became one of the most famous survivors of the atomic bombing in Nagasaki. He lived a little less than six years after the bombing but managed to write about a dozen books that reflected powerful religious faith, broad compassion for all victims of war and deep humanity.

Most or all of his works have been translated into English although it appears on Amazon that there is only very limited availability in the United States. A 1989 biography, A Song for Nagasaki, by Fr. Paul Glynn, remains readily available from Ignatius Press, including in electronic versions.

In Japan three ago, I picked up a copy to Nagai’s Leaving My Beloved Children Behind, published in 2008 English by St. Pauls Publications with what seems to be a very readable translation by the late Professor Maurice Makoto Tatsuoka and Tsuneyoshi Takai. (An earlier version, under the title Leaving These Children Behind, a good but very direct translation of the Japanese title Kono ko o nokoshite, この子オ残して, lists as $532.77 as a used paperback on Amazon.)

Nagai was deeply Christian, an adult convert to Catholicism in a country that was, at the time, deeply suspicious of any Western religious influences. His writings, including his best known book internationally, The Bells of Nagasaki, are very spiritual.

Reading the opening sections of Leaving My Beloved Children Behind, I’m struck by the power of Nagai’s thinking about the world around him, his ability as a physician to explain the science of radiation, his sense of humor about himself, and his loving concern for his two children as his death approached. Before World War II had ended, Nagai learned that he was suffering from leukemia, which he attributed to his work as a radiologist.

His wife, Midori, died instantly at the family’s home in a predominantly Catholic area near the city’s Urakami Cathedral in the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Takashi Nagai. Nagai, according to a Wikipedia account that seems to be based largely on Glynn’s biography, felt early in the conflict with the United States that Nagasaki could be destroyed. After learning of the bombing of Hiroshima, they took their two children to stay outside of the city and returned home. Dr. Nagai continued working hard treating the ill and injured after the bombing, but in September he was found to be seriously ill, the Wikipedia entry notes. By July 1946, he was confined to bed, spending most of his remaining time in a small hut at his home in Urakami, which is now the site of a powerful little museum that my wife and I visited in 2009. She remembers us as being the only non-Japanese there at the time.

Nagai’s writings were widely acclaimed in the years before his May 1, 1951 death. After Pope John Paul II’s visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1981, it was clear that there was a gulf between Nagai’s early view of the bombing’s victims as, in essence, victims whose lives had been sacrificed for the peace that God wished and John Paul’s powerful speech in Hiroshima that began, “War is the work of man.” Visiting Nagasaki for the first time in 1986, I was struck by how freeing one of the very active Catholic hibakusha, the late Tsuyo Kataoka, found it to know that the pope regarded the bombings as a horrible act of men, not something willed by God on sacrificial victims.

There are two readily available accounts of some of the differing religious interpretations. There is a pdf version of a Japanese Journal of Religious Studies paper from DePaul University. And there’s an early 1980s article from Fr. Jack Wintz, a Franciscan priest, on Nagasaki’s Catholics move from passivity to more active efforts on behalf of peace.

Kataoka was a lovely woman, a mix of propriety, directness and energy who reminded me of one of my aunts. Anything that gave her comfort is good by me. And the active pursuit of peace makes perfect sense, morally and politically.

But reading the start of Nagai’s Beloved Children, his writing and thinking will still seem relevant to those who long ago embraced a determined the quest for world peace — something that the prolific nature of his writings while sick would seem to suggest he also was engaged in. Two British-based filmmakers certainly think it’s relevant.

Ian and Dominic Higgins have started production of a movie based on Nagai’s life, All That Remains. Their production blog is here and their Facebook page is here. There is a lot of emphasis on his Christian faith but, from what I have seen so far, there is also a strong focus on the search for peace.

(Note: There’s also an excellent reflection on Nagai posted just Sept. 26 on the web site of a Catholic peace group, Pax Christi USA, by Scott White, a member of the group’s national council. His article is about the threat of a U.S.-led war against Iran. He quotes Nagai as writing: “Men and women of the world, never again plan war! With this atomic bomb, war can only mean suicide for the human race. From this atomic waste the people of Nagasaki confront the world and cry out: No more war! Let us follow the commandment of love and work together.”)

More on Nagai is here.

After all, as Martin J. Sherwin argued in his classic work, “Hiroshima: A World Destroyed,” the second bombing had been allowed to proceed on a timetable set by military operations officers rather than one carefully controlled by the nation’s top officials. For such a revolutionary weapon as the atomic bomb, that seems a rather surprising delegation of authority, even for President Harry Truman who came into office praised by a home state newspaper as someone who would bring greater consultation to decision making than practiced by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After the Aug. 6 bombing of Hiroshima, Truman spoke of the need for Japan to accept unconditional surrender, the longstanding U.S. policy, or face “a rain of ruin.” But, as Sherwin notes, Hiroshima and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, which Japan had long feared, had quickly led those in the Japanese government wanting peace to push for surrender. Emperor Hirohito was ready for peace, it was clear. He and likeminded leaders only wanted assurance that the emperor system would be allowed to remain, in some form.

Sherwin wrote: “By August 9, the decision to sue for surrender had become inevitable, though the tragedy’s Japanese protagonists needed time to recite their lines. If Washington had maintained closer control of the atomic bomb raids, the annihilation of Nagasaki could have been avoided. But as it happened the initiative had been left with the bomber command on the island of Tinian.” That’s a clear judgment, in a classic work, that the bombing of Nagasaki, with its perhaps 70,000 deaths then and in the following year or so, created horrible suffering while having no effect on the end of the war.

But the historical record of the final days of the war has continued to be examined and debated. And there are cases made for believing that the ensuing developments were, in fact, dramatic and the final course of action could be seen as considerably in doubt almost until Hirohito broadcast his famous surrender announcement on Aug. 15.

On the morning of Aug. 9, Tokyo knew that the Soviet Union had launched war against it. Around 10 a.m., according to “Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb” by Andrew J. Rotter, Emperor Hirohito had signaled to those around him that he wanted to surrender, accepting allied terms. A meeting of the prime minister and the top officers, the Supreme Council, got under way at 10:30 a.m., according to Herbert P. Bix in his outstanding biography, “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan.” (Bix, however, suggests that the foreign minister still had to persuade Hirohito that the allied surrender terms would allow him to stay before the crucial decision early on Aug. 10 to announce Japan’s readiness to accept defeat as long as the emperor and emperor system was to be maintained.)

In any case, the cabinet officers were already meeting when at 11:02 a.m. on Aug. 9, a U.S. bomber crew, struggling with cloudy weather to find Nagasaki, released the second bomb over a residential neighborhood. Sherwin wrote that, since the two bombings happened so close to one another, it’s impossible to know for sure whether Nagasaki made any significant difference in the decision to seek peace. “Yet,” he added, “the argument that the second bombing gave the Emperor the opportunity to convince the military that Allied surrender terms had to be accepted is not convincing. Nothing could be further from the truth. The surrender movement began soon after the fall of Saipan in September 1944 and on June 22, 1945, the day Okinawa was wrenched from Japanese control, the Emperor began his first cautious step toward undermining those committed to continuing the useless struggle.” At an imperial conference, he spoke of the need for alternatives to fighting to the end.

Yet, just because the emperor wanted to end the war and was, by the time the Nagasaki bombing took place making his wish known, it doesn’t necessarily follow that surrender would necessarily have occurred. Indeed, after the emperor got the decision made to press for peace on Aug. 10, the next several days saw further debate over an ambiguous U.S. response to Japan’s demand to preserve the emperor and an abortive military coup.

Rotter concluded there’s no definitive proof to show whether the two bombings influenced the emperor to finally become serious about ending the war. Rotter wrote, “It may be nothing more than a historian’s common sense to suppose that the infliction of death on many thousands – no one yet knew even roughly how many – by a mere two bombs was, along with Soviet intervention, decisive in ending the war.”

But let’s go back to Sherwin He noted that, early on Aug. 10, it still took the emperor’s intervention to break a division with the government’s Supreme Council on whether to surrender on terms the Allies might accept. He then wrote, “That unconditional surrender remained an obstacle to peace in the wake of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Soviet declaration of war – until the government of the United States offered the necessary (albeit veiled) assurance that neither the Emperor nor the throne would be destroyed – suggests the possibility, which even (U.S. Secretary of War Henry) Stimson later recognized, that neither bomb may have been necessary, and certainly that the second one was not.” Finally, after Japan’s initial statement, the secretary of state sent a note that at least allowed those in Japan who wanted to surrender to believe that the emperor would be maintained.

While I think you could debate whether we can judge the effects, if any, of the horror in Nagasaki on the peace process, Sherwin correctly raised a much larger point about the U.S. policy on unconditional surrender. It was, for various reasons, something that the government never modified before launching either attack.

The reasons, as Sherwin made clear, had nothing to do with malevolence and virtually everything to do with the pressures on U.S. policymakers; their political sense of what was domestically possible; the age and energy levels of some key leaders, including Stimson and President Roosevelt while he still lived; and President Truman’s inexperience when he took office after Roosevelt’s death. All of that led to what ought to be considered, I believe, a tragic lack of creativity in U.S. diplomacy (and probably among its allies) in the weeks and months leading up to the bombings.

As Bix and others have shown, Hirohito and most of his government displayed the same tendency and attitudes that ranged from the fanatical, in the case of the military, to the completely unrealistic. How they might have reacted to an earlier modification in the policy of unconditional surrender is a fair subject for debate. But the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so awful that a more robust U.S. diplomatic effort would have certainly been worth trying.

The memorial cenotaph and Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima

Here’s an article I wrote for YES! Magazine (reprinted with permission):

In recognition of progress toward creating a safer world, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists turned back its famed Doomsday Clock by one minute. The clock now is set at 6 minutes to midnight.

In 1951, when the U.S. conducted this atomic test at the Nevada Test Site, the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had recently begun and the Doomsday Clock was set at three minutes to midnight.

That’s still dangerously close to midnight, the group’s longstanding image for the end of civilization—either through nuclear war or, more recently, a climate catastrophe so great as to put large populations at risk. The scientists say the new time reflects the continued urgency of the threats as well as signs that the world may be reaching a turning point in its efforts to come together to solve them.

The group’s leadership pointed to cooperation by major powers on nuclear arms reduction as well as international pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions. “These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization—the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change,” the board of the Bulletin said.

The Bulletin’s modest move seemed appropriate to nuclear expert and disarmament advocate Peter Kuznick, an associate professor at American University and director of the university’s Nuclear Studies Institute. Kuznick saw the decision as similar to Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, which “was more a sign of optimism and potential” than of concrete progress.

In their statement, the scientists also framed the change as representing an “opportunity” for progress, calling for “citizens everywhere to raise their voices and compel public action for a safer world now and for future generations.”

The group also called on world leaders to take action, noting that “a key to the new era of cooperation is a change in the U.S. government’s orientation toward international affairs brought about in part by the election of Obama.”

Kuznick agreed that Obama has made significant steps, including his speech in Prague envisioning an end to nuclear weapons, cooperation with Russia on continuing to reduce nuclear arms, and active leadership on nuclear non-proliferation discussions. But, pointing to the recent support of former Republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz for abolishing nuclear weapons, Kuznick called Obama’s Prague speech “positive but not exactly revolutionary.”

He also pointed out that not all of Obama’s actions have been positive—for example, discussions of maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons until everyone else has abolished their stockpiles, or the continued high state of alert for nuclear weapons. Similarly, the Bulletin’s announcement listed a host of steps necessary to keep progress moving, including actions by the U.S. and other major powers to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons, to complete arms reduction talks, and to maintain tighter controls on their nuclear weapons.

Lawrence Krauss, co-chair of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors and a professor at Arizona State University, noted that many people wrongly believe the United States has pledged not to make first use of nuclear weapons. Moreover, neither the U.S. nor the eight other nuclear powers have ever ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, a member of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, said part of the credit for the one minute gain (the smallest in the clock’s history) goes to citizens of countries around the world who reject nuclear weapons.

For citizens and activists, making use of the positive potential the Bulletin sees will mean talking, writing, learning about nuclear issues, and marching, said Kuznick. To turn potential into progress, “We have to use everything.”

Joe Copeland wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Joe is an associate editor for the Seattle-based Crosscut.com. Last summer, he was a visiting researcher at Hiroshima Peace Institute on a Fulbright grant.

Or, in this case, “We think we can.”

On New Years Day, the Hiroshima Peace Media Center published an English-language report that the president of Japanese Olympic Committee had let the mayors know that the national group wouldn’t even accept a joint bid. That’s because the bureaucratic, image-conscious international Olympics movement has a rule that, at least as it is being interpreted, restricts bids to a single city. And, it is said, there’s simply no time to change the rule in time for bidding on the games.

The story, which was based on a newspaper article in the media center’s parent Chugoku Shimbun, certainly sounded like the cities’ effort had hit a dead end. Today, however, I found a report in USA Today that Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and Tomihisa Taue want to continue their uphill effort. They are expected to meet this week with Chiharu Igaya, a longtime International Olympic Committee leader and a 1956 silver medalist in Alpine skiing, to seek his support.

As someone who has Winter Games experience, Igaya has undoubtedly noticed that the one-city rule seems to have some flexibility. Just to the north of Seattle, where I’m writing this, Vancouver, British Columbia, is about to host the Winter Olympic Games with many events a two-hour drive away in Whistler, if the roads aren’t too icy. But Nagasaki and Hiroshima? That’s apparently different. Admittedly, they are about three and a half hours or so apart by express train. But their common history certainly unites them in a way that is unique.

Hiroshima’s Mayor Akiba said it is possible his city could serve as host of the games but with some of the events held in Nagasaki. Taue has been quoted as saying that Nagasaki is too small to host the games on its own.

As challenging as the Olympics are for any city to organize, there would surely be some additional complications for the two cities, but also some additional resources in finances, organizational support and volunteer efforts. And they would have the power of the idea that, by 2020, the world should be celebrating the abolition of nuclear weapons or at least marking progress in non-proliferation and disarmament.

A couple of times this week, as I went back through notes from my research in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it struck me how much energy people would have to put into organizing for the Olympics. Shinji Noma, who spearheads Hiroshima’s small Amnesty International chapter, talked about the difficulty of getting people to involve themselves in the group.

During another interview, Abbey Pratt-Harrington, a student from Willmington College in Ohio who was doing a research project about 20th century peace activist Barbara Reynold’s life, mentioned how international visitors to the World Friendship Center, a bed-and-breakfast Reynolds established, particularly enjoy going to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park when volunteer interpreter Akiko Awa conducts tours. I had happened to be impressed with Awa’s energy, directness and passion for the city’s history when I spoke to a group of interpreters. But, going over the notes, it struck me again that there are not huge numbers of people available to take on extra efforts as volunteers.

Hiroshima is, after all, a city of a little over 1.1 million people; Nagasaki has about 450,000 residents. Even together, the population is a far cry from such potential rivals as New Delhi and Istanbul. But Budapest, another possible 2020 candidate, has only about 1.7 million people.

Whatever the challenges, Hiroshima and Nagasaki still are interested in pursuing the bid and putting on the games. They think they can, which seems good enough for now.

Joe Copeland, associate editor for Crosscut.com, was a visiting researcher at Hiroshima City University’s Hiroshima Peace Institute in 2009 as a Fulbright Scholar.

Copyright 2010, Joe Copeland

In an interview with Japan’s NHK public broadcasting network in advance of a trip to the Asian country this week, Obama said, “The memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are etched in the minds of the world and I would be honored to have the opportunity to visit those cities at some point during my presidency.” After Tuesday’s broadcast, the mayors of the two atomic-bombed cities quickly welcomed the statement as a very positive sign.

In the United States, Associated Press reported the statement in terms of the possible political controversy at home. Some conservatives would try to make the president look like he was apologizing for the atomic bombings at the end of World War II and attempt to dismiss his pursuit of a nuclear weapons-free world as naïve.

Although an apology would be justified (as with so many actions on all sides of the war), it’s not going to happen when some 60 percent of Americans – especially those who are white and older – believe the bombings were justified. But thinking that something may have been justified in the context of the world’s worst war hardly eliminates the element of human sympathy most Americans can feel and their rational concern about nuclear dangers.

In any visit, Obama’s points would be to promote nuclear weapons nonproliferation, to mourn the tragic toll of hundreds of thousands of victims and to express the world’s hope that the August 1945 bombings remain the only atomic attacks. Across the political spectrum, most Americans would be in accord with the president. Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former secretaries of state in Republican administrations, are active in promoting the complete abolition of nuclear weapons as a matter of national security.

Obama made no promises. But his interview will raise hopes even higher in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where people young and old had launched petitions asking the president to visit. As leaders of the international Mayors for Peace (Seattle’s outgoing leader, Greg Nickels, is a member), Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and Nagasaki’s Tomihisa Taue have directed a great deal of attention to making progress on nuclear abolition when the United Nations holds a major review of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty next May. As Obama tries to contain and reduce nuclear dangers, a visit to Hiroshima or Nagasaki would be a powerful symbolic card to play.

Joe Copeland, a former Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial writer, was a visiting researcher at Hiroshima City University’s Hiroshima Peace Institute earlier this year as a Fulbright Scholar. Note: This item is cross-posted at former P-I foreign editor Larry Johnson’s new blog, Looking for Trouble.