COLUMN ONE : Hiroshima Longs for Life Beyond the Bomb : This modern metropolis wants to be more than a symbol of horrendous tragedy. But like the rest of Japan, the city struggles with its responsibilities for peace and a still-bitter war.

HIROSHIMA, Japan — Were it not for her mother, who patiently plucked the maggots from her rotting flesh, who massaged her horribly scarred skin and whose unwavering devotion gave her reason to live, Michiko Yamaoka says she would surely have killed herself.

But Yamaoka underwent 37 operations, learned a sewing trade--and survived to describe the day the sky turned black with nuclear rain when the world’s first atomic bomb exploded over her hometown of Hiroshima.

Like the city’s 98,000 other atomic bomb survivors, Yamaoka, 65, overcame grotesque burns that permanently disfigured her and an insidious radiation disease that destroyed her blood cells and caused her to vomit, become weak and lose her hair. For five decades, she faced down fears of irreparable genetic damage and silently endured being spurned for marriage and jobs.

Despite her trials, she is beyond recriminations toward the American bomber crew that dropped the nuclear weapon on a clear summer day and changed her life--and the world--forever.

“I was healed by my mother’s love,” said Yamaoka, who as a junior-high student was buried under a brick wall by the blast. “I tell Americans: We have to go beyond questions of who won and lost the war. We have to talk about peace by holding hands together so we won’t have another nuclear war.”

Fifty years after the atomic attack, Hiroshima has moved beyond dark and pitiful images of tragedy, of ghostly survivors in blackened rags and red, swollen faces numbly shuffling amid the incinerated ruins of a city nearly wiped off the map.

The bomb exploded at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945, releasing a blast that buried people under glass and debris, heat that scorched everything within a three-mile radius and massive radiation. Although casualty estimates vary, the city says 140,000 people had died by December, 1945.

Like Yamaoka’s own triumphant comeback, this city on the western edge of central Japan has been reborn. Hiroshima is now an attractive metropolis of 1.1 million people, with wide, tree-lined streets, an eloquent peace museum and the most prominent reminder of nuclear devastation: the burned-out hulk of a domed public hall.

“Until now, Hiroshima has been a symbol of tragedy, but we have a vision to become a city that gives others hope and courage to live,” said Mayor Takashi Hiraoka. “The most wonderful thing is that we’ve overcome hatred and sadness, pain and trouble, to give testament to the human ideal of peace.”

Hiroshima’s new slogan, unveiled in November, is: “A City in Praise of Human Beings.”

Memories Fading

Like the debate over the bomb itself, however, managing the memories of war and establishing ideals of peace have been delicate, complex tasks. Memories are fading as survivors, whose average age is 68, die; many younger residents are tired of dwelling on the bomb as the premier symbol of their city. The peace movement has been hopelessly split along ideological lines between Communists and Socialists, alienating most of the public.

Despite its anti-war image, Hiroshima has retained its conservative character as a former military town and heavy industrial base. It consistently votes for the conservative Liberal Democratic Party, whose recent opposition blocked Hiroshima prefecture from passing a war-apology resolution. The issue of whether Japan would squarely face its war aggression has also sparked controversy in the Parliament and throughout Asia.

And a peace declaration that the city passed last August only briefly mentions that Japan should “never forget” its war in Asia, while Nagasaki--which suffered a nuclear attack three days later--has passed a resolution calling for the consideration of compensation to Japan’s Asian war victims.

Hiroshima is less generous to the offspring of its atomic-bomb survivors than are more liberal areas of Japan, said activist Mamoru Nishimoto. Neither the city nor the prefecture extends medical benefits to survivors’ children, known as Nisei, as do the cities of Tokyo, Kanagawa, Yokohama and Tsushima, the latter in Aichi prefecture. Hiroshima officials say providing such benefits is the responsibility of the national government, which offers Nisei subsidized checkups but not medical care.

Perhaps most striking, broad lessons about the war seem curiously uneven in Hiroshima classrooms. Despite the city’s desire to serve as a center for international peace education, it appears to do little better than the rest of Japan in offering a balanced view of the war.

As part of the region’s peace education, the bombing is drilled into the heads of every schoolchild through graphic movies, books, testimonials and museum visits. Students are recalled from summer vacation every Aug. 6 for silent prayer and memorial ceremonies.

But ask students why the bomb was dropped or why Japan entered the war, and the most common response is a blank stare.

“We learned that bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that many people died,” said Yuki Hamaoka, 18, a high school senior. “There was a strong perspective that the Japanese were victims.”

“We only learned that we were done in, we were done in--but we were never told the cause,” said advertising-firm employee Ritsuko Hosobe, 25, as she munched on a seafood-and-noodle pancake known as okonomiyaki --Hiroshima’s other famous symbol.

Icons of Suffering

Indeed, one of Hiroshima’s most lasting legacies is the deep sense of victimization that many Japanese seem to feel about the war.

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki became icons of Japanese suffering--perverse national treasures, of a sort, capable of fixating the Japanese memory of the war on what happened to Japan and simultaneously blotting out recollection of the Japanese victimization of others,” wrote John W. Dower, a noted Japan scholar and war historian, in a recent essay. “Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is, easily became a way of forgetting Nanjing, Bataan, the Burma-Siam railway, Manila and the countless Japanese atrocities these and other place names signified to non-Japanese.”

That sense of victimization, however, has not led to a deep sense of anti-Americanism here. Although Dower wrote of early rage after the bombing--some American prisoners of war were beaten to death, and an American soldier of Japanese descent, stationed in Japan, committed suicide when his Hiroshima relatives rejected him as an “American murderer”--the anger quickly faded.

Shuichi Kato, a social critic and hematologist who landed in Hiroshima one month after the bombing to investigate medical conditions, explained the seeming contradiction:

“Most people had only a fuzzy idea that Americans dropped the bomb. Rather, it was as if there were a crack in the heavens on a summer day, a supernatural miracle occurred and suddenly Hiroshima disappeared.

“No one thought about who did it or why. The bomb was outside human understanding, outside human history, outside even morals.”

The incomprehensible devastation led to Hiroshima’s other major impact in Japan: an abhorrence of nuclear weapons so deep that Kato likened it to the Buddhist concept of higan --a feeling reflecting one’s ultimate and deepest desire which, like original sin, can never be denied by appeal or argument.

In addition, the bomb fueled the national promotion of science and technology, as Japanese leaders realized the enormous gap symbolized by America’s nuclear weapon and their own public exhortations to fight to the death with bamboo spears, Dower wrote.

Japan’s nuclear allergy and promotion of science remain strong. But the one-sided memory is beginning to change--albeit slowly--as more people realize that a nation that fails to face its own acts of war cannot credibly promote ideals of peace.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum last year added a wing that for the first time mentions Japan’s forced conscription of Chinese and Korean laborers. In a display on Japan’s war with China, the fall of the Chinese city of Nanjing in 1937 was previously portrayed as an event that inspired the Japanese in their “holy crusade” on behalf of their divine emperor. Now, however, the museum has added an explanation that Imperial army troops massacred as many as 300,000 Chinese.

Newly revised textbooks offer more instruction on Japan’s aggressive acts against Korea and China, and a few more teachers are offering a broader view of Japan’s war history.

Etsuko Nakatani, the daughter of atomic bomb survivors, teaches her elementary school students about the invasion of China, the attack on Pearl Harbor and Korea’s resistance to Japan’s colonial rule.

And where schools still fail, others appear to be filling in. Outside a video game arcade on a languid summer night, Hitomi Nakamukai, 17, said she heard about Pearl Harbor not at school but from her grandfather. Her friend, Keiko Ueno, heard about Korean demands for war compensation not from teachers but from her mother.

But as activists struggle to balance views of Hiroshima’s place in history, they are threatened by a decline of interest in the entire topic.

New Identity Needed

The opinion was unanimous among a group of men from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, drinking beer after a company soccer game on a recent night: It’s time to move beyond the A-bomb and replace pitiful images of weak victims with a new identity of innovative industry or farsighted social policies.

“Everywhere I go in the world, people say, ‘Oh, you were bombed by America,’ ” said Keiji Tagawa, 26, a plant supervisor. “It makes us famous, but it’s a negative image.”

“It puts us in a weak position,” chimed in his friend, Mitsutaka Murakami, 46, an electric maintenance worker.

Kikumi Nakano, 47, a Mitsubishi aviation engineer, said the city’s focus on peace activities, such as international conferences, has absorbed public funds that could be used for more mundane but important services, such as better roads. He and others also say city officials should spend more time focusing on how to convert its heavy industrial base, represented by Mitsubishi, Japan Steel and Mazda Motor Co., into more high-tech and lucrative light industries.

“Most of us living in Hiroshima now have no relation to the bomb, but our existence is denied,” Nakano said.

Over at Peace Park, the broad plaza that houses the museum, an eternal flame and other monuments, Kazunari Sasaki, 32, laughs when asked whether he and his friends or family talk about the bombing. “Never,” he says.

Although his mother was a survivor, Sasaki says he doesn’t remember what she said about it and is unable to pass on her memories to his 1-year-old son, Katsumi. Such trends worry officials here over how to protect and preserve what is, indisputably, still the city’s greatest legacy. Today, less than 10% of Hiroshima’s residents are bomb survivors. Officials have begun to videotape oral histories--the peace museum has so far collected 50--but they are no replacement for the survivors themselves.

At one recent gathering, several high school students listen in tears as a survivor quietly describes the devastation and her own torment and guilt as she peeled off the fingers of an anguished victim grasping for help; as she survived when most of her friends died; and as her mother made a deathbed apology for thinking of herself before her daughter.

Yet opportunities to hear such direct testimony are rapidly decreasing.

“If [the number of] people who are ignorant about the war increases,” said Hachiro Togimoto, 84, who was a police officer at the time of the attack, “we might end up with the opinion that even Japan can have a nuclear bomb.”

The number of irradiated buildings that serve as reminders of the nuclear attack has shrunk to 30; two more firms recently announced they plan to renovate their properties. The city can do little about it, since most buildings are privately owned and buying them would cost more than $100 million, said the museum’s Harada.

The peace movement, initially split over whether to condone nuclear testing by the former Soviet Union, has drawn participation from only 20% of Hiroshima residents, said Minoru Omuta, chairman of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation. Unless local citizens take over from political ideologues and bureaucrats, he said, the movement will fade into irrelevance.

Since survivors won passage of a law last year giving them financial aid for funeral expenses and other items, Omuta said, activists should take up the cause of Koreans, Chinese and other foreigners caught in the blast, more directly discuss nuclear issues with Americans and, most important, improve Hiroshima’s peace education.

Many here agree.

“Atomic bomb. Hiroshima. Peace. These key words are input into the majority of people, but what have we really learned from them?” asked Shigeto Yamawaki, chairman of Hiroshima University’s psychiatry and neuroscience department.

He said the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, under which Japan is protected by the United States, made people take the precious gift of peace for granted and deprived them of the chance to grapple with its true meaning and value. And the nation’s external peace is belied by a rapid decline in people’s peace of mind, he said, as accelerated lifestyles in this economic superpower lead to growing depression, anxiety and alienation.

As Japan turns inward, seeking more inner peace amid its external stability and material wealth, Hiraoka, the mayor, says Hiroshima is ideally suited to lead the transition.

“From now on, we’ll enter an era where we pursue quality of life and enrichment of mind--and Hiroshima citizens are qualified to take leadership as a symbol of those who have survived the nuclear age,” Hiraoka said.

Miyoko Matsubara, a schoolgirl at the time, was disfigured by thick scars and, seven years ago, lost a breast to cancer. She never married, and was never able to pursue her dream career in banking. She was shunned by strangers who thought her scars would contaminate them with radiation.

But, inspired by an American friend at her Christian church, she diligently studied English so she could share her story with Americans; it has become her mission.

“Back then, I was always crying in my heart,” Matsubara said. “But now I believe if I tell my story I can contribute to world peace.

She smiled. “I am so happy.”

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.