Article: Atomic Bomb Victims Stand Alone

In this opinions piece on the New York Times written by Norihiro Kato, a Japanese literary critic and a professor emeritus of Waseda University, Kato discusses and voices his opinion on the Japanese and international community’s neglecting attitude towards those who had survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. This opinion is the prevailing knowledge claim: the international community’s actions regarding its exception to the use of nuclear weapon are essentially neglecting the victims of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Kato starts with the introduction of the lack of morality in times of war, then claims that the Hiroshima atomic bombs were different than the other catastrophic tragedies that has happened in history. Throughout the article, the professor illustrates how certain actions can be interpreted as neglect and disacknowledgement. In other words, the knowledge claim that Professor Kato makes in this piece is clear and resonates throughout the whole article.

Unlike other knowledge claims that I have “unpacked” and “evaluated” from previous assignments in TOK, the process of evaluation of the claim was different. As mentioned previously, Kato begins with his article mentioning how in times of war, the world is devoid of morality. Kato writes, “Everyday morality falls mute before the horrors of war,” but the extreme generalization and overly inclusive words such as “everyday” seemed to conclusive and harsh as a reader, which inevitably had me doubt more the claims Kato were to make throughout. By the end of the third paragraph, I had lost my credibility to the claims he had made. Without substantial evidence that support his claim, Kato simply claims in the beginning that he “feels” that the atomic bombings in Japan are different than the “Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, the bombing of Dresden or the Holocaust.” He states that the “international community has reached a consensus regarding all those other horrors.” Reading this sentence in the beginning and revisiting the sentence again has shed light on me different possible interpretations. In the beginning, Kato’s previous, evidence-lacking claims had me feel as if he was generalizing too much and downplaying the other “horrors” that had occurred. However, I hadn’t at that moment realized that despite the broadness of the claim, it could very well be justified through empirical studies and analysis. The context with which I had regarded Kato’s claims had blinded me in some ways the from accepting the credibility and validity of the claim. While there was some lack of evidence that did steer me towards the initial direction of thought, there was an identity factor of the writer, ascertained from the first three paragraph, that can seriously affect the justification of claims. His evidence for this claim is dispersed throughout the later half portion of the article, pointing out to the fact that the use of nuclear weapon is not prohibited, that powerful members of the UN Security Council have nuclear weapons themselves and the delayed action from Barack Obama, especially after he had stated his stance against atomic. All these evidence do work to persuade the readers to consider his point. His claim gains more credibility as he acknowledges some of the reason why the UNSC members choose to hold on to their weapons as a means of balancing out power.

In the fourth paragraph, Kato writes that “there is no shared public consensus that..the indiscriminate killing of civilians is wrong” and immediately following that writes that the “international community has not prohibited the use of nuclear weapons.” While the writer may have a point in his claim, the way he structured his sentence seems to imply as if non-prohibition of nuclear weapons means neglect and indifference of the international community to the victims of Japan. He does not consider the political, external pressures and simply the global context of the current situation. He shuts off other perspectives of how the loss of lives were death, accusing others of indifference.

Despite the scattered, relevant evidence for his claim and Kato’s other errors in the presentation of his ideas, the evidence and most importantly the acknowledgment of reasons for the acquisition of nuclear weapons of powerful states really bolstered Kato’s claim. However, for his claim to be justified even further, more specific examples that explicitly show the ignorance of the world, if any, to the pains that the victims are going through today. Also, as this was a translated article, the translating process between different languages may have reduced the force of his language, which Kato may have achieved in Japanese but may not have necessarily done so in English.

Word Count: 760