Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [151]
‘In retrospect, I realize that internment helped people to discover unknown sides to themselves. They conserved their emotions, and kept a careful inventory of hopes and feelings.’
Some historians claim that the war was virtually over, and that the Japanese leaders, seeing their wasted cities and the total collapse of the country’s infrastructure, would have surrendered without the atom-bomb attacks. But this ignores one all-important factor – the Japanese soldier. Countless times he had shown that as long as he had a rifle or a grenade he would fight to the end. The only infrastructure the Japanese infantryman needed was his own courage, and there is no reason to believe that he would have fought less tenaciously for his homeland than for a coral atoll thousands of miles away.
The claims that Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute an American war crime have had an unfortunate effect on the Japanese, confirming their belief that they were the victims of the war rather than the aggressors. As a nation the Japanese have never faced up to the atrocities they committed, and are unlikely to do so as long as we bend our heads in shame before the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The argument that atomic weapons, by virtue of the genetic damage they cause to the future generations, belong to a special category of evil, seems to me to be equally misguided. The genetic consequences of a rifle bullet through the heart are even more catastrophic, for the victim’s genes go nowhere except the grave and his descendants are not even born.
In 1992, nearly fifty years after entering Lunghua camp, I returned for the first time. To my surprise, everything was as I remembered it, though the barrack huts had gone, and the former camp was now a Chinese high school. The children were on holiday, and I was able to visit my old room. Standing between the bunks, I knew that this was where I had been happiest and most at home, despite being a prisoner living under the threat of an early death.
But to survive war, especially as a civilian, one needs to accept the rules it imposes and even, as I did, learn to welcome it.
This article first appeared in the Sunday Times in 1995.
Read on
Have You Read?
Other titles by J.G. Ballard
The Kindness of Women
This second autobiographical work from Ballard continues where Empire of the Sun left off. Tracing Jim’s life as he moves from Shanghai to England, and from adolescence to middle age, it is an unsparingly honest account of suburban bliss, domestic tragedy and sexual experimentation.
The Drowned World
In Ballard’s first full novel, inspired in part by his memories of Shanghai, London is a city inundated by a primeval swamp.
The Drought
Water. Man’s most precious commodity is a luxury of the past in this compelling early novel from Ballard. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on Dr Charles Ransom and the remaining inhabitants of Mount Royal, civilization begins to crack…
Collected Short Stories
Ballard’s very first stories, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’, were published in Science Fantasy and New Worlds back in 1956. This volume offers an unparalleled chance to explore his complete shorter oeuvre and marvel at both his development as a writer and his mastery of the form.
Crash
Ballard’s controversial cult novel, subsequently made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg, was originally published in 1973 but it has lost none of its potency. Vaughan, a TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the highways, craves the ultimate erotic atrocity: a union of blood, semen and engine fluid