Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (22 page)

At the same time, the trauma of nuclear devastation and unconditional surrender also reinforced an abiding sense of Japan's peculiar vulnerability and victimization. As the bombs came to symbolize the tragic absurdity of war, the recent war itself became perceived as fundamentally a
Japanese
tragedy. Hiroshima and Nagasaki became icons of Japanese suffering—perverse national treasures, of a sort, capable of fixating Japanese memory of the war on what had happened to Japan and simultaneously blotting out recollection of the Japanese victimization of others. Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is, easily became a way of forgetting Nanking, Bataan, the Burma-Siam railway, Manila, and the countless Japanese atrocities these and other place names signified to non-Japanese.

“Victim consciousness” (
higaisha ishiki
) is a popular euphemism in postwar and contemporary Japan, and the bombs occupy a central place in this consciousness. From this perspective, it can be observed that nuclear victimization spawned new forms of nationalism in postwar Japan—a neo-nationalism that coexists in complex ways with antimilitarism and even the “one-country pacifism” long espoused by many individuals and groups associated with the political left.

Such considerations leave out the fate of the nuclear victims themselves; and, in fact, most Americans and Japanese at the time were
happy to ignore these victims. Official U.S. reports about the two stricken cities tended to emphasize physical damage and minimize human loss and suffering. Prescient early journalistic accounts about the horrible consequences of radiation sickness were repudiated or repressed by occupation authorities. Japanese film footage was confiscated. Accounts of fatalities were conservative.

The U.S. policy of prohibiting open reporting from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made clear at an early date, in a celebrated incident involving the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. Burchett made his way to Hiroshima early in September and succeeded in dispatching a graphic description of victims of an “atomic plague” to the London
Daily Express
. This was the first Western account of the fatal effects of radiation, and occupation officials immediately mounted an attack on what Burchett had reported. He was temporarily stripped of his press accreditation, and his camera, containing film with yet undeveloped Hiroshima exposures, mysteriously “disappeared.” A comparable early account by an American journalist in Nagasaki never cleared General Douglas MacArthur's press headquarters, and reports to the outside world thereafter were carefully controlled through complacent, officially approved mouthpieces such as William Laurence, the science editor of the
New York Times
.
¹⁴
Some eleven thousand feet of movie film shot in the two cities between August and December by a thirty-man Japanese camera crew was confiscated by U.S. authorities in February 1946 and not returned to Japan until two decades later, in 1966.
¹⁵

Accurate estimates of atomic-bomb fatalities also have been difficult to come by over the years. In June 1946, the prestigious U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey placed the number of deaths at approximately seventy to eighty thousand individuals in Hiroshima and thirty-five to forty thousand in Nagasaki. An honest estimate at the time, these figures have been perpetuated in most subsequent commentary about the bombs, although they are conservative in themselves and obviously fail to take into account bomb-related deaths subsequent to mid-1946. For the usual political reasons,
after 1946 neither the U.S. nor Japanese governments chose to revise the initial estimates or call attention to the ongoing toll of
hibakusha
deaths. It now appears that the total of immediate and longer-term deaths caused by the bombing of the two cities is well over 200,000—probably around 140,000 in Hiroshima and 75,000 in Nagasaki—with the great majority of these deaths occurring during or shortly after the bombings. Some estimates are considerably higher.
^16
*

Disregard for the victims extended beyond sanitized reporting, suppressed film footage of the human aftermath, and disregard of the real death toll. Unsurprisingly, the United States extended no aid to survivors of the atomic bombs. Among other considerations, to do so could have been construed as acknowledging that use of the bombs had been improper. Aid to victims also might have opened the door to claims for compensation or special treatment by victims of conventional U.S. incendiary bombing. The well-known Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) established by the U.S. government in Japan at the beginning of 1947 was set up exclusively to collect scientific data on the long-term biological effects of the bombs. Whether fairly or not, to many Japanese the ABCC thereby earned the onus of simply treating the
hibakusha
residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as experimental subjects or guinea pigs a second time.
¹⁷

More surprisingly, perhaps, the Japanese government only began extending special assistance to the bomb victims after the occupation ended in 1952. In the aftermath of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, local treatment was largely dependent
on local resources—and this from municipalities that had come close to annihilation. One of the several legacies of this callous early history of neglect has been to make identification of victims and precise quantification of the effects of the bombs even more problematic than might otherwise have been the case.
¹⁸

In the localities themselves, suffering was compounded not merely by the unprecedented nature of the catastrophe, as well as by the absence of large-scale governmental assistance, but also by the fact that public struggle with this traumatic experience was
not permitted
. It is at the local level that U.S. censorship was most inhumane. With but rare exceptions, survivors of the bombs could not grieve publicly, could not share their experiences through the written word, could not be offered public counsel and support. Psychological traumas we now associate with the bomb experience—psychic numbing and the guilt of survivors, for example, along with simply coping with massive bereavement and mutilation and grotesque protracted death—could not be addressed in open media forums. Nor could Japanese medical researchers working with survivors publish their findings so that other doctors and scientists might make use of them in treating the
hibakusha
. U.S. occupation authorities began easing restrictions on the publication of personal accounts by survivors only after more than three years had passed since the bombings. And it was not until February 1952—two months before the occupation ended, and six and one-half years after the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed and irradiated—that Japanese academic associations were able to engage freely, openly, and independently in investigating atomic-bomb injuries.
¹⁹

American isolation of the
hibakusha
was compounded by ostracism within Japanese society itself, for the bomb, of course, stigmatized its victims. Some were disfigured. Some were consigned to slow death. Some, in utero on those fateful midsummer days, were mentally retarded. Many could not cope well with the so-called real world to which most other Japanese (including survivors of combat as well as conventional incendiary bombing) returned after the war. And all initially were presumed to carry the curse of the bombs in
their blood.
Hibakusha
were not welcome compatriots in the new Japan. Psychologically if not physically, they were deformed reminders of a miserable past. Given the unknown generic consequences of irradiation, they were shunned as marriage prospects. The great majority of Japanese, overwhelmed by their own struggles for daily survival, were happy to put them out of mind. So was the Japanese government, which did not even establish its own research council to conduct surveys of bomb survivors until November 1953.
²⁰

In this milieu, where time was so peculiarly warped, the Japanese as a whole did not begin to really
visualize
the human consequences of the bombs in concrete, vivid ways until three or four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed. The first graphic depictions of victims seen in occupied Japan were not photographs but drawings and paintings by the wife-and-husband artists Maruki Toshi and Maruki Iri, who had rushed to Hiroshima, where they had relatives, as soon as news of the bomb arrived. The Marukis published a booklet of black-and-white Hiroshima drawings in 1950 under the title
Pika-don
(“Flash-bang,” a euphemism peculiar to the blinding flash and ensuing blast of the atomic bombs). In 1950 and 1951, they were permitted to exhibit five large murals of
hibakusha
entitled “Ghosts,” “Fire,” “Water,” “Rainbow,” and “Boys and Girls.” This was the beginning, as it turned out, of a lifelong series of collaborative paintings addressing the human dimensions of World War II in Asia.
²¹

As the Marukis later recalled, they began attempting to paint Hiroshima in 1948 not merely because they remained haunted by what they had witnessed but also because they believed that if they did not put brush to paper there might never be a visual eyewitness record of these events for Japanese to see. Actual photographs of the effects of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not published nationwide until after the occupation ended in the spring of 1952—and in theory never should have been available from Japanese sources to publish at all, since occupation policy forbade even possessing such negatives or prints.

In the print media, the easing of censorship in late 1948 finally
paved the way for publication of reminiscences, poems, essays, and fictional re-creations by
hibakusha
. A minor publishing boom developed in this area, led by a remarkable outpouring of writings by Nagai Takashi, a widowed young father dying of radiation sickness in Nagasaki. Nagai, ironically enough, had been a medical researcher specializing in radiology and was a devout Catholic. His wife had been killed outright in the Nagasaki blast. He lived in a tiny hut in the ruins of Nagasaki with his young son and daughter—reflecting on the meaning of his city's fate, writing furiously before death caught him (which it did on April 30, 1951, killing him with heart failure caused by leukemia). Nagai was extraordinarily charismatic in his prolonged death agony and captured popular imagination to a degree unsurpassed by any other Japanese writer about the bombs until the mid-1960s, when the distinguished elderly novelist Ibuse Masuji, a native son of Hiroshima prefecture, published
Kuroi Ame
(Black Rain).

Nagai's interpretation of the nuclear holocaust was apocalyptically Christian. The bombs were part of God's providence, a divine act of suffering and death out of which world redemption would arise. And in his view, it was not mere happenstance that the second and last nuclear weapon fell on Nagasaki, a city with a long Christian tradition—exploded, indeed, above the great cathedral at Urakami. “Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim,” Nagai wrote in a typically passionate passage, “the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole-burnt offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all the nations during World War II?”

There is no evidence that the Japanese who flocked to buy Nagai's writings, or wrote him in great numbers, or made pilgrimages to his bedside, were fundamentally moved by his Christianity. More obviously, they were moved by his courage, his struggle to make sense of his fate, and the pathos of the two youngsters he soon would leave orphaned. And regardless of what one made of messianic Christian theology, Nagai's sermon that Japan had been divinely chosen to endure unique and world-redemptive suffering clearly struck a resonant chord in the Japanese psyche. Even
Emperor Hirohito, who had been formally recostumed as “the symbol of the State and the unity of the people” under the new constitution, undertook a pilgrimage to Nagai's bedside in 1949.
²²

In his own telling, Nagai conceived the idea for his most famous book,
Nagasaki no Kane
(The Bells of Nagasaki), on Christmas eve of 1945 and completed the manuscript around August 9, 1946—the first anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb that had killed his beloved wife, also a Christian, and scores of medical coworkers. The book was not approved for publication until the beginning of 1949, however, and its handling as that time captured the lingering nervousness of U.S. occupation authorities on these matters. Between the same covers, the publisher was required to pair Nagai's abstract and emotional reflections with an extended graphic account of Japanese atrocities in the Philippines. This coupling was extremely ironic, for it unwittingly subverted the official U.S. position that use of the bombs had been necessary and just. Japanese readers, that is, could just as easily see the juxtaposition of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs and the rape of Manila as suggesting an equivalence between American and Japanese atrocities. Despite this crude and revealing intervention, in any case,
Nagasaki no Kane
not only became a best-seller but also soon was turned into a popular movie with an equally well-known theme song.
²³

Nagai's breakthrough essentially opened the door to the publication of books, articles, poems, and personal recollections by
hibakusha
beginning in 1949.
²⁴
By the time the occupation ended, a distinctive genre of atomic-bomb literature had begun to impress itself on popular consciousness—often, as in Nagai's case, associated with a vivid sense of martyrdom. In 1951, two years after completing “Summer Flowers,” one of the classic firsthand accounts about Hiroshima, Hara Tamiki committed suicide by lying down on a railway crossing near his Tokyo home. T
ō
ge Sankichi, by far the most esteemed poet of the atomic-bomb experience, wrote most of his verses in an extraordinary burst of creativity while hospitalized in 1951 for a chronic bronchial condition
complicated by exposure to radiation in Hiroshima. T
ō
ge died on the operating table in March 1953, with friends from the Japan Communist Party clustered nearby while a compatriot read the “Prelude” of his
Genbaku Shish
Å«
(Poems of the Atomic Bomb). Later engraved on a memorial in the peace park in Hiroshima, “Prelude” became the single best-known Japanese cry of protest against the bombs: