
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, June 29, 1995                   TAG: 9506290074
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: TOKYO                                  LENGTH: Medium

JAPANESE: U.S TRYING TO LEGITIMIZE A-BOMB

Japanese reporters flocked to the opening of the Smithsonian Institution's Enola Gay exhibit in Washington this week and then dashed back to their word processors to file scathing stories depicting the United States as a place where the atomic bomb is such a ``holy relic'' that no politician dares mention the death and destruction it carries.

The brief but damning reports in national newspapers and on some television news shows Wednesday night generally agreed that the United States is ``trying to legitimize the atomic bomb'' with a museum exhibit that downplays the suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and emphasizes the role the nuclear weapon played in forcing Japan's World War II surrender 50 years ago this summer. At least 100,000 people were killed when the United States dropped atomic bombs on those two cities in August 1945.

``The Enola Gay is presented here not as a warning against the great horror of nuclear war,'' declared TV Asahi correspondent Hideaki Saito, ``but as a national hero that brought World War II to an end.''

The Japanese government had a bitter struggle of its own this spring over this country's aggression during the war. But that experience - which ended with a statement of ``deep remorse'' that barely passed one house of the parliament - has been forgotten now as a scornful Tokyo watches the American debate over the Enola Gay and the scaled-back museum exhibit that came out of it.

There remains considerable debate in Japan about the country's responsibility for starting the war in the Pacific, but there is almost no dispute about the atomic bombs used at the war's end. Just about everyone agrees, as Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama put it this year, that the nuclear weapon was ``an atrocity.''

Accordingly, the Japanese watched with horrified fascination last winter as the Smithsonian's plans for an exhibit focusing on the bomb's destructive power and its aftermath were cut back under pressure from veterans' groups.

Yoichi Funabashi, the influential Washington correspondent of the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun, declared last week that the resulting exhibit demonstrates that the atomic bomb is viewed in the United States as a ``holy relic,'' something politicians dare not criticize.

``This is an exhibit without any record of the damage the bomb caused,'' Funabashi wrote. ``Two aspects of the bomb that cannot be ignored - the birth of the atomic age and the idea of `never again' - have been yanked out completely.''

by CNB