The Second World War is ending instead with a bang.

週末に読んだ本The Long Shadow – the Great War and the twentieth centuryで知ったのですが、雑誌Lifeは1945年8月20日号でWar's Ending: Atomic Bomb and Soviet Entry Bring Jap Surrender Offerという特集を組んでいました。広島や長崎への原爆についても写真付きで紹介して、核爆弾の仕組みやマンハッタン計画を早速紹介していました。

Editorialのページでは原子爆弾で戦争が終わったことをT.S. EliotのThe Hollow Menの有名な一節をもじってThe Second World War, which had been tapering off to a whimper, is ending instead with a bang.と書いています。この詩は前のブログでも紹介させてもらいました。

THE ATOMIC AGE - THAT FLASH SHOWED WHERE MAN'S REAL PROBLEMS ARE: NOT UNDER THE BED BUT IH THE CELLAR

The Second World War, which had been tapering off to a whimper, is ending instead with a bang. That bang - the atomic bomb - caught the Allied world at the edge of a haunted doze. Still fighting, we had paused to sniff a dream, a dream of the return to "normal" life.“



エリオットの詩の方は以下のように終わりますので、ちょうど反対にしたんですね。

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
（これが世界の終わり方
盛大な音はなく、泣き声とともに）

すでにこの社説で原子爆弾を使用していいものか倫理的問いかけも行っていました。

The thing for us to fear today is not the atom but the nature of man, lest he lose either his conscience or his humility before the inherent mystery of things. Atomic science certifies this mystery. Its own laws condemn us to ultimate ignorance.; but also to the eternal freedom of choice inherent in an indeterminate universe. No limits are set to our Promethean ingenuity, provided W3 remember that we are not Jove. We are not ants either; we can abolish warfare, and mitigate man's inhumanity to man. But all this will take some doing. And we are in a strange new land.

38Dページでは日本の天皇制について説明しています。

The Japanese emperor is Japan.
But he has been used by the men who really run Japan

The Emperor of Japan is neither a man nor a ruler. Nor is he simply a god living in Tokyo. He is a spiritual institution in which center the energy, the loyalty and even the morality of the Japanese ; he is the divine source of temporal power and the fountain of honors; for the Japanese he is the reason for existing and also the reason for dying. The Japanese people are expected to serve him and to "set his mind at rest." He is the physical incarnation of the state. He is Japan.

As such, his utility value is high, and he has been much used by the groups that really run the country. When big business wanted to discomfit military opposition to a disarmament treaty, they used the Emperor's signature. When big business wanted to discomfit military opposition to a disarmament treaty, they used the Emperor's signature. When the military wanted to join the Rome-Berlin Axis, they used his signature. His name withdrew Japan from the League of Nations, declared war on the U.S., endorsed the maneuvers and political changes of power politicians and justified state control of Japan's whole social fabric. For the name of the Emperor has as much weight in Japan as the unanimous will of the people would have in America.

この雑誌Lifeを読んでいるとたばこやお酒、自動車、冷蔵庫などの広告がたくさん掲載されていることがわかります。竹槍で本土決戦だと言っている国との国力の差を嫌でも実感させられます。。。