Starting from Ground Zero

When a postcard arrived from a friend, I was in my late teens, living in the passive-aggressive air of the bright grey sky in a tiny room in Kobe. The picture on the postcard was seemingly drawn hastily in a graffiti-like style in pale pastel colours. In it, a woman in pyjamas with dark, messy hair is sitting on a single bed, slightly hunched over and covering her mouth with her hands. She appears lost in thought, blankly bemused, as she stares at an open suitcase in front of her, waiting to be filled, with piles of books lying next to it. From her strangely impassive face, I heard an inaudible voice oozing out—“What shall I do?” With the hallucinating whisper stuck in my ear, I saw myself in this picture—a person at a standstill, chocked in a void. I later discovered that it was a self-portrait by the German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, depicting herself just before she fled Nazi-occupied Berlin in 1938.

Images travel beyond the constraints of time and space, arriving to us in an unknown place at an unknown moment. The hunched portrait of Charlotte Salomon arrived to me at a time when I was struggling with what had been oppressing my life. The picture is from Salomon’s autobiographical picture book Life? or Theatre? (1941–1942), a series of paintings created during her time as a refugee in the South of France before her death in Auschwitz. The book, composed of 769 gouache paintings accompanied by corresponding narratives, describes factual scenes from Salomon’s public and private lives as well as her own psychological visions. They deal mainly with the difficulties in family relationships, love affairs, and the position of female German Jews in the immediate aftermath of the rise of the National Socialists to power. Salomon’s struggle against depression and the prevalence of suicidal tendencies in her family is most evident, and a sense of distress and anger rings out from the series. Her crude, hasty expressionist style and fragmented pictorial composition suggest an impending emergency, as if she had to make an urgent statement in the face of the injustice of her precarious life. Behind that impassive face on the postcard silently screaming out to my ears, “What shall I do?” was her confrontation with harmful, damaged realities beyond her control, compelling her to escape from the toxic ground zero.

Twenty-something years ago, I also fled from a literal Ground Zero, perhaps one of the most symbolic places on Earth, bearing witness to the catastrophic violence of humankind. I grew up in Hiroshima as an outsider resident, not as a descendant of a victim, immersed in the guilt of absorbing the pain of others. In this city, I came to be saturated with grotesque stories and testimonies narrated by A-bomb survivors and with apocalyptic images of the aftermath archived in film footage and photos. Throughout my youth, horrified by this unearthly inferno landscape and at the same time darkly illuminated, I became haunted by the malice of the world and started to see violence everywhere. Sometimes, I question the validity of the “peace education” I went through in my school days in Hiroshima. Devouring those dark spectacles can be too aggressive; its influence on a youthful mind could go easily wrong beyond its “peaceful” intention. I still don’t know if the apocalyptic imagination I cultivated back then has helped me to think positively about this world—empathy could go in the wrong direction too. Every 8:15 a.m. on the 6^th of August, every time I walk down the street in Hiroshima, I still can’t stop seeing the landscape of living hell full of bodies hideously burned wandering around looking for water, piles of rotten corpses on the street giving off a nasty smell, the vivid orange colour of intestines pecked by crows, floating corpses crowding the Enkō-gawa river, swollen like balloons. My imagination is unstoppable in devouring a vision that human history witnessed for the first time—the immediate, collective death of tens of thousands of people who had the misfortune of being around the Ground Zero. 

At some point, the somber sentiment that I cultivated for 6 August started to materialise in the form of a dark sense of humour. After I relocated to London in my late twenties, I started an A-bomb memorial party at home as 6 August approached, as if to perform a pious witness to the pain of survivors to the western people. This gradually turned into something darker that I called a “violence party.” The particularity of the moral commemoration of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atrocity retreated, and the ubiquitousness of violence of this world came to the front, where the comfort of the dichotomic division between oppressor and oppressed, between victim and witness, can’t hold any longer. I once disguised myself as a Miss Atomic Bomb with a mushroom-cloud-shaped crown on my head, as a tribute to the Miss Atomic pageants that were held in the 1950s United States. Another time, I became the Necessary Evil, a B-29 camera plane flying with the Enola Gay from Hiroshima Mission planes. The dark sense of humour serves as a point of contact between raging disgust and its sublimation. Subversion becomes a methodology. I had been too exposed to the generational trauma of this Ground Zero, becoming immersed in the pain of others that I would never be able to experience firsthand. In the moral struggle in the face of something inexplicable and unrepresentable that I would never claim authorship of, my prayer became perverted, confronting the fate of spectacle. 

My confusion and its hedonistic turn led to a perverted desire for the violence party as I finished the intellectual marathon of writing a PhD thesis on the representation of violence (including the image of that hunched Charlotte Salomon in the postcard). At one of the violence parties, I threw my bloody thesis into the fire and stared at it as it burned to ashes, feeling a mixture of self-pitiful regret, guilty pleasure, and fearful liberation. I had been too immersed in redemptive endeavour to recognise the pain of others as my own, which then became the source of my novel oppression. 

Years later, after I had burned my thesis and the storm of the pandemic had started to recede, on a rainy day in June, I visited the Mitaki Temple in the north of Hiroshima City, where the remains of unidentified victims of the Atomic Bomb are buried. I then discovered that in a corner of the vast temple grounds, there is a small pagoda, installed in 1973, which enshrines the remains of Auschwitz victims sent from Poland. Looking at the inscription on the pagoda, suddenly it all made sense to me—why I had come all the way from there to here, and what drove me so compellingly to write a hundred thousand words on violence: “We should ponder over ourselves of the avarice, rage and stupidity that are deeply infiltrated in the hearts of each and all, and cultivate the integrity that humans share.” I realised that I had always been driven by the unknown forces of the collective generational witness to humanity’s atrocities, operating beyond my agency. At that moment, my dark desire to be devoured by the unreachable pain of others was sublimated into the collective suffering—that which inspires humanity’s endeavor to resist and survive its own violence. In the cathartic pleasure of this self-induced revelation, I breathed the air of Mt. Mitaki, green and translucent, washed by the sudden heavy rain that had poured over Hiroshima on that day.