In discussing Clifton Truman Daniel’s mission of reconciliation to Japan  as well as his own work, Jeff Goldfarb posits an etiquette of reconciliation. Such an etiquette prioritizes finding common ground on which to build a future peace as opposed to focusing on points of contention. It does this, in part, through empathetically appreciating the perspectives of others, including the ways in which others remember the past. This reminded me of Masahiro Sasaki. He is a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima and the older brother of Sadako Sasaki, famous as a symbol of innocent victims of the atomic bomb, commemorated in the children’s book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Masahiro was the host of Clifton Truman Daniel in Japan last year.

After a talk about Sadako and her atomic bomb induced leukemia suffering at the Central Library in Vienna in 2004, a boy asked Masahiro Sasaki “which country dropped the bomb?” He answered, “It has been more than 50 years since the atomic bomb was dropped, God has healed our soul not by focusing on who dropped it, or who suffered from it, but by giving us a long period of time…so I have forgotten the country that dropped the bomb.”

Asked later about this answer, Masahiro explained that if you speak about who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, then Americans ask “who started the war?” which leads toward confrontation as opposed to finding common ground and reconciliation.

As a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and having lost his sister from leukemia caused by the bomb, Masahiro certainly has not forgotten the past and has reason to remember it with vigor and with anger. As Jeff writes, Americans have reason to counter such anger with their own memories of the bomb, its purpose, and its effects. But Masahiro prioritizes reconciliation and averting war in the future, which he believes calls for avoiding confrontation over the past and instead coming up with a new discourse that helps create a better future. He of course knows who dropped the bomb, but he publicly turns away from his own knowledge.

Masahiro’s enactment of this etiquette of reconciliation challenges Santayana’s famous quip, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” by asserting that arguments over memories of the past can lead to violence, rhetorical and physical. Even when they do not lead to violence, such arguments over the past can still block reconciliation and feed hostility. Perhaps an etiquette of reconciliation suggests that there are appropriate ways to remember the past (in less confrontational ways, in agreeing to disagree over the past and prioritizing common interests), or that there is even, as Irwin-Zarecka argues, virtue in forgetting. There may be times to remember forcefully and times to let the past be the past. Letting the past pass may open room for a different future, leading to new ways to live together.

Clifton Truman Daniel’s “A Mission of Reconciliation,” describes his recent trip to Japan, honoring the victims of the atomic bomb, ordered by his grandfather. On the first day of Daniel’s trip, Nana Yamada, the Nagasaki correspondent of Japan’s largest television network, asked Daniel whether he came to Japan to apologize.

He didn’t.

“Out of respect for the survivors and their countrymen, I would not defend the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but neither could I apologize for my grandfather or my country. After all, I have shaken the hands of dozens of WWII veterans who tell me they probably wouldn’t have survived the invasion of the Japanese main islands.”

For the remainder of his visit and in his report, Daniel worked to explain and enact this complicated stance, which I appreciate. It hit close to home. As I read his account, I thought of my father.

While Daniel’s grandfather, President Harry Truman, momentously decided to drop the bomb, my dad, Ben Goldfarb, was one of the thousands of GIs who, therefore, were not part of the invasion. For my father, this was after serving in the South Pacific for four years as a conscript (who went in as a private and out as a corporal or private, I can’t remember; he told me about repeated promotions, followed by demotions connected to fighting with an anti-Semitic officer in his unit).

My father and I generally agreed on politics, though he was probably more of a leftist. He didn’t vote for Daniel’s grandfather, but for Henry Wallace. Yet, he strongly supported President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs, not only because it saved him, but also because, he convinced himself following the commonsense of his times, the bombs in the long run saved more lives than they destroyed. I didn’t and don’t agree, but it was one of the very few issues that he really didn’t want to debate, our typical mode of communication once I was an adult. And as Daniel didn’t want to either defend or apologize for his grandfather, I didn’t want to argue about this with my father, and never did after one discussion.

I think that Daniel’s public position and my private one implicitly reveal an etiquette of reconciliation. We both recognize that others see differently than we do: I, across a generational divide, he, across a national one. We respect the other’s positions, even if we can’t change ours. We choose to remember together some things, remember others differently. We make room for discussion about some issues, seeking common ground, respecting loss and sacrifice, as we avoid issues on which there cannot be agreement. In terms of my recent research interest, we recognize the social condition, and we attempt to work with it, rather than against it. We recognize that ways of life and identities surround judgments, as the judgments form the life and identity, and that some things are possible, but others aren’t. The combination of respectful competing memories, and convictions beyond change, defines the possibilities and also the impossibilities of reconciliation. This was at issue in Clifton Truman Daniel’s trip and my discussion with my father about the atomic bomb, but it ubiquitously appears.

Will it ever be possible for Palestinians and Israelis to come to a peaceful resolution of their conflicts and to reconcile? Will racism, and tense race relations, ever really come to an end in America? Will Japan’s relations with its neighbors, specifically China, ever be normalized? I think that the optimistic and pessimistic answers to such questions often tell more about the person answering than about the specific conflicts of each case. I also think that those who declare a time frame for an answer, as in: it will take a century to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are widely off the mark. Rather at issue is not time but manner: how the social condition is confronted, how the etiquette of reconciliation is enacted. It may open new possibilities at any time in each of these cases, but requires purposive creative action, carefully combining shared memories and purposive forgetting such as is exhibited in the visit by Daniel and his respectful reception, through the work of his Japanese hosts. Combining memory and forgetting is also important for fathers and sons, and for that matter, grandfathers as well.