THE FATAL IMPLICATIONS OF A TAMPERED MEMORY:

The popular remembrance of the United States’ use of nuclear weapons against Japan at the conclusion of World War II represents that even the most basic factors of uniformity in recollection are clearly absent. The discrepancies that are easily identified on the global scale, as well as within domestic Japan, are rather representative of a remembrance that has been significantly influenced by exterior and hostile motives. Tampered memories generated by the American occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952—have had a damaging impact on the global recollection of the atomic bombings of Japan’s mainland cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This essay will argue that these interdictions are ultimately complicit in humanity’s continued incapacity to achieve a comprehensive appreciation for nuclear weaponry. The implications of this have only further served to accelerate a global desire built upon nuclear capability—while simultaneously repressing the historical reality of its exclusive victims.

The United States’ seven-year occupation of mainland Japan coincided with the onset of the Cold War, creating an atmosphere of censorship in Japan. This atmosphere was so intense that dissemination of any and all information regarding nuclear bombs or their effects was immediately suppressed. Suffering as a community was not authorized. With hindsight as an advantage, it should be stated that this specific interdiction was misguided, counterproductive, and certainly disdainful to the need to preserve the authentic memory of those impacted. The Hibakusha1 remains the sole victims of nuclear destruction, yet there is a possibility we are all victims of ignorance initiated by the suppression of their memory of August 6th and 9th, 1945.

There have been prior attempts by historians to reconstruct the kaleidoscope of responses beyond the “overwhelming sense of horror and shock experienced” by survivors of the atomic bombs, yet only a small number of them engage with implications that stem from the suppression of their memory.2

Very few events in modern history have attracted as much attention or provoked as much dispute as the American use of nuclear weaponry at the conclusion of World War II. It is a highly controversial subject matter graphically exemplified by the incineration of two essentially civilian-dominated,target cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki stimulate a readied resistance in the would-be researcher.3 It does so mostly because of its inseparable correlation with massive death and mutilation but also in part because it explains the general reluctance of those engaged in human sciences to “risk professional confrontation with great historical events which do not lend themselves to established approaches or categories.”4 In any case, these inutile controversies are significantly harmful to the ability of understanding Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a position of memory on all sides of the conflict.

American historian John Dower, and American psychiatrist, Robert Lifton have dedicated their academic lives to understanding the Japanese memory and perception of the atomic bombs. Dower’s work acknowledges that even contemporary historians were forced to adhere to a biased public record, seeing as before censorship was enacted by the victorious occupying American forces in September of 1945, an array of varied and provocative reactions in domestic Japan were stifled by their own imperial government.5 Lifton supplements this work as he has spent over a decade in the stricken localities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki post-bombings, where he “felt a survivor-like responsibility to make known in [his] country” what he has found there.6

Robert Lifton is a Lecturer of Psychiatry at Harvard University and a current psychiatrist specializing in the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence. His Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima supplies a comprehensive examination of the interplay between the individual psychology of the survivor and its consequences on historical change, or rather the “psychohistorical process.”7 During his time in Japan,starting in 1958 and covering a total period of over a decade,Lifton interviewed a wide variety of Japanese national youth. These were mostly undergraduate students in Kyoto, approximately two-hundred miles East of Hiroshima. He describes that a “great majority had either no memory of the war at all or only the most meager recollections of it”, what was painfully apparent when he explored with them their sense of themselves and their world “was an enormous significance for them, however indirectly expressed, of the fact that Japan alone had been exposed to the bombs.”8 He charts these opposite tendencies as part of a general struggle to manage an unmastered past with a threatening future, eventually concluding that nuclear weapons have left a potent imprint upon the Japanese that continues to be historically and psychologically transmitted—yet too commonly unacknowledged.

John Dower, Ford International Professor of History, Emeritus, at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is “probably the best-known historian of Japan” in the United States.9 His 1999 book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and continues to stand “as the most comprehensive treatment in English of the American-dominated Occupation of Japan.”10 Striving to depict the ‘Japanese experience’ in his works, Dower “challenges the American-centered” illustrations that represent the United States “as the bearer of democracy to a ‘feudal, childlike people’ (‘a boy of twelve’ was how Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur once described the Japanese).”11 He has written “marvelous and provocative” pieces that have inspired many historians to “better understand one of the pivotal events” in the twentieth century. He details his stories in a fashion that is easily understood by the general public and was instrumental in building conclusions in this paper that center on the damaging effects on memory consistent with the American occupation.

Both Dower and Lifton represent two important points in reference to Japanese memory of the atomic bombings. The American occupation and administration of mainland Japan have influenced a historiography of skepticism when examining genuine responses to the bombs previous to 1952. The task and purpose behind its interdictions will be described in a later section. However, it is plausible that the lack of American transparency surrounding the all-encompassing effects of their nuclear attack is directly related to the continued Japanese struggle of managing unmastered pasts—or tampered memories.

The suppression of all discussion springing from the only population in the historical record to be engaged with a nuclear weapon endured for nearly seven years. It was not until February of 1952—six and a half years after being incinerated and irradiated— that Japan’s academic associations were finally authorized to engage “freely, openly, and independently” in bomb-related investigations with the public.12 This general disregard for the victims and their absorption of events can be seen as a contribution to the difficult process of determining their collective memory. Effectively placing a delay on their memorial process has likely produced an infinite amount of historical inconsistencies, as well as a general unwillingness to remember something so unnaturally abysmal.

This essay will take the ideas of those like Lifton and Dower a step further, attempting to bridge the gaps between the obscured United States’ occupation of Japan, its irreparable influence on the global memory of the 1945 atomic bombings, and what implications this has in a modern world built on a platform of nuclear deterrence.

On the 6th of August 1945, on a clear Monday morning in South Japan, at exactly 08:15, Colonel Paul Tibbets of the United States Army Air Forces, captain of the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, coordinated with his bombardier to release the aircraft payload over the designated target. Little Boy, a highly-enriched uranium composite bomb, dropped clear of its restraining hook and began to plummet toward the city of Hiroshima from an altitude of 31,060 feet.13 The first use of nuclear weaponry in the history of global armed conflict had commenced at a point of no return. After falling six miles in approximately forty-three seconds, Little Boy’s nuclear fission reaction was successfully executed at an altitude of 1968 feet, directly above a surgical clinic one hundred and sixty meters away from the original designated zero-point. The peak of a Monday morning rush hour in Hiroshima resulted in nothing short of a hellish catastrophe. In the matter of a fractional second, an explosion equal to 15 kt., or 15,000 tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT), instantly vaporized around 65,000 Japanese citizens and a heavy majority of Hiroshima’s infrastructure—with 62,000 out of 90,000 of its buildings being rendered inutile, as well as a complete elimination of all utilities and public transportation.14 Just over seventy-two hours would pass before U.S. President Harry S. Truman authorized a second nuclear bomb, Fat Man, to be detonated over the city of Nagasaki on August 9 at 11:06 a.m., instantly killing an additional 35,000 to 40,000 Japanese civilian and military personnel. These are the official U.S. government after-action values; it will discuss later why they must be revised.

The Allied war against Japan concluded on 15 August 1945, with Emperor Hirohito acknowledging that Truman and the United States were capable and more than determined to utilize however many more A-bombs it took to destroy Japan’s willingness to continue hostilities. In his careful, self-serving address to his nation, upon the accepted terms outlined in the Potsdam Declaration, Hirohito emphasized that “the enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs to kill and maim extremely large numbers of the innocent… the heavy casualties are beyond measure; if the war were to be continued it would lead not only to the downfall of our nation but also to the destruction of all human-civilization.”15 Japan’s capitulation—at least in this official imperial rendering—thus became an overarching act that saved humanity from possible mass extinction.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s after-action report (AAR) tallied the cumulative deaths at 70,000 to 80,000 in Hiroshima and 30,000 to 40,000 in Nagasaki.16 A shocking aspect of the AAR’s cumulative casualty total of the atomic bombs is that while they were estimates at the time— they are undeniably conservative in nature and, most appallingly, fail to take into account any “bomb-related deaths subsequent to June 1946.”17 Perhaps for understandable yet unacceptable political reasons, neither the United States nor Japanese governments revised the original casualty assessments after this date or even called for acknowledgment of the rising number of Hibakusha bomb-related deaths.

I have found when having discussions with fellow students and friends that the American occupation of Japan at the conclusion of World War II is not particularly considered common historical knowledge. Most had either not known that the U.S. occupied Japan in the first place or were unaware of its length or influential extent.

The American occupation of Japan officially began on 28 August 1945, when one-hundred fifty U.S. military personnel were flown into Atsugi within the Kanagawa Prefecture. The USS Missouri closely followed with approximately four-hundred (400) accompanying vessels, swiftly landing the 4th Marine Regiment on the Southern coast of Kanagawa.18 At the same time, the United States Army’s 11th Airborne Division was airlifted from Okinawa to the Atsugi Airdrome, only approximately thirty (30) miles away from the Tokyo Metropolis. By the end of 1945, almost 500,000 American troops and personnel were stationed throughout Japan, supplemented by an additional 40,000 troops from the British Commonwealth.19 The United States’ complete occupation and administration of Japan would endure for nearly seven years, concluding on 28 April 1952 with the drafting of the Treaty of San Francisco.

While this essay looks to highlight the occupation exclusively from an angle of memory, it should be noted that its scope and size were exceedingly broad. The initial phase heavily focused on crippling Japan’s defense capability, undertaking large reforms in Japanese militarized society to ensure they would never again create a threat to global peace.20 Additional sweeping reforms targeted all major sectors of Japanese society, economy, and government, effectively rendering them an experimental puppet state of the U.S. Some contemporary historians such as Theodore Cohen and Herbert Passin noted the correlation between the swaths of these reforms and similarities to The American New Deal programs of the 1930s, with large alterations aimed at land distribution, labor, education, administration, enfranchisement, economy, and any other facet that did not conform to Western standards under prior imperial rule.21 This paper will explore and define the more damaging aspects of the U.S.’s occupation of Japan, specifically their domestic suppression of all discussion and information stemming from Japanese populations in the immediate years following their nuclear victimization.

The origin of ‘tampered memories’ began with the obscure characteristics of the American occupation. BLACKLIST operations were a set of directives spearheaded by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), American General Douglas MacArthur. His operations “aimed to suppress the militaristic nationalism” of post-war Japanese society.22 While this was a large array of orders and granted parameters that actually succeeded in what they were attempting to accomplish, some directives were not so delineated in their approach and what it might insinuate for the larger proportion of Hibakusha. In the Reports of General MacArthur, prepared by his general staff in Washington and enforced from the Dai-Ichi Seimei building in Tokyo, on page 11 under the subsection “Initial Objectives of Occupation,” there are two directives that set themselves apart from the greater majority. Directive (F), which details the authorization of means necessary in the “securing and safeguarding of intelligence information of value to the United States and Allied Nations,” and Directive (G), which authorized the “suppression of activities of individuals and organizations inimical to the operations of the Occupation forces.”23

Under these guidelines, the United States had effectively laid the foundation required to legally implement a top-down, systematic, and militarized objective to literally blacklist and suppress any unwanted information that might be damaging to America or its occupational status. Through the following actions taken by U.S. officials in domestic Japan, it is apparent that any and all matters concerning the atomic bomb or its effects were absolutely principal in the development of these directives.

John Dower states in his Diplomatic History piece, “The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory,” that Japan filled two globally-unique positions after the first use of nuclear weapons on humans. One is that it was “only the Japanese that had actually experienced nuclear destruction. And in the years following, only they were not allowed to publicly engage the nature and meaning of this new world.”24 The thorough grasp of administration within Japan and its public afforded the U.S. unconditional and militarized freedom to suppress the dissemination of all intelligence of the A-bomb forcefully. This censorship directly reflects the general U.S. policy of secrecy relating to nuclear matters but also begins to shed light on ulterior motivations beyond just deterring public unrest, which has to be the “most elastic and all-encompassing rationale of censors everywhere.”25 One aspect of this ordeal that has struck my curiosity is that popular rhetoric of nuclear capability in this age was spoken of in terms of bravado, inspiration, and human achievement. They yearned, and maybe more significantly, boasted about their possession of acquiring the science and technology capable of creating a weapon of such fatal parameters. However, once given the global platform to put on display the awesomeness of their manifestations, there was a pathetic attempt at forced seclusion.

Official United States reports on the two annihilated civilian targets tended to falsely emphasize physical damage and minimize the reality of human loss and suffering. Early journalistic accounts that pertained to the consequences of radiation sickness and the potentially harmful long-term effects were repudiated and repressed by occupation authorities.26 Japanese footage of the event was confiscated. Global media outlets were stripped of local credentials. Accounts of fatalities were disastrously conservative.27 Above all, the horrendous image and experience of being a nuclear bomb casualty were hastily suppressed from worldview.

Among the first Americans to enter the localities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the attacks were scientists from the Manhattan Project, the group credited with developing the infamous nuclear weapon. They arrived on August 30, 1945, and their objective was to “assess every aspect of the attacks, with an eye both to understand what had happened, to measure any lingering radioactivity, and also to learn what could be generalized as the effects of atomic bombs for use” in future testing or engagements.28 However, their main goal was primarily to come back to the United States with a comprehensive estimation of total casualties. Colonel Stafford Warren, the Chief Medical Officer of the Manhattan Project and a “pioneer in nuclear medicine,” led this detail.29 He delivered the group’s findings before the U.S. congress in February of 1946, where he proclaimed that he was “embarrassed by the fact that even though [he] led a medical party which was supposed to get figures on the mortality, and so on, that [they] could not come back with any definitive figures that [he] would be able to say were more than a guess.”30 He continues on to say that “the only fact” they could acquire during months of study was that “at Nagasaki they had recorded the burning and cremation of 40,000 bodies”— and it was his belief “that there must have been 20,000 or 30,000 more in the ruins, buried or consumed by the fire.”31 Furthermore, he stressed that the “data in Hiroshima was likewise inadequate” and saw no way of putting a “precise figure on the mortality or how a precise figure can ever be put on the total casualties” from the nuclear attack.32

While the number of total fatalities has been cited and revised many times since, the comments given by the Chief Medical Officer of the group that had actually created the A-bomb, much less a ‘nuclear medicine pioneer’— are exceedingly fascinating. In some facet, they represent that although these men were competent enough to create a device capable of producing such a calamity, it seems that even they were unaware of its potential lethality or were unwilling to be transparent about its impact on a genuine human population. Additionally, it displays that they were completely unprepared and unequipped to conduct an accurate battle-damage assessment (BDA) without resorting to unprofessional, personal, ‘beliefs.’ Chief Medical Officer Warren would cushion some of these shocking statements by blaming the Japanese for maintaining an imprecise census of their cities before the bombs were dropped.33 His personal ‘beliefs’ on the number of Japanese killed in the affected localities would conveniently match the numbers given by the United Strategic Bombing Survey, thus in some way representing the official United States’ values detailed in their formal after-action report (AAR).

Thanks to these obscure characteristics of the American occupation, authentic or accurate estimates of A-bomb fatalities continue to be perpetually difficult to acquire. The figures mentioned earlier from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey are almost disrespectfully conservative, seeing as they did not even concern themselves with conducting their research past June of 1946, where, conveniently for them, an equal or even greater number of victims of radiation sickness and other countless atomic-induced mutated diseases would succumb to their wounds. Modern evaluations of immediate and long-term deaths caused by the A-bomb “may be as high as triple the familiar estimates—in the neighborhood, that is, of three-hundred thousand (300,000) or more individuals.”34

U.S. inclinations to prohibit open reporting from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made apparent in a famed situation involving Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. The Australian managed to infiltrate occupied Hiroshima in early September of 1945 and was successful in his objective of “dispatching a graphic description of victims of an ‘atomic plague’ to the London Daily Express.”35 This was done in Morse code and stood as the first Western account of the fatal effects of radiation on humans. Titled “Atomic Plague: A Warning to The World,” it began as such:

In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured by the cataclysm – from an unknown something which I can only describe as atomic plague. Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.36

Mr. Burchett’s warning to the world did not go unnoticed by the Americans, who immediately mounted a strong offense against the Australian and his story. They hastily tracked him down, stripped him of his press accreditation, accused him of being a Japanese propagandist, confiscated his camera, and ordered him to leave the country of Japan effective immediately.37 His camera was returned to him absent of all the exposures he had taken while in-country, which were also confiscated and sent to Washington D.C., where they would be classified as ‘secret’ before being released in 1968, twenty-three years later.

Dower mentions an additional comparable account by an American journalist in Nagasaki whose work also never cleared the desk of General Douglas MacArthur’s press headquarters in occupied Japan. Additionally, a thirty-man Japanese photography crew had eleven thousand feet of raw film taken in the stricken localities between August and December of 1945. It was confiscated by occupation forces in February of the following year and was not returned to them until two decades later, in 1966, with unknown degrees of alteration.38

President Truman’s creation of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) at the end of 1946 would present additional problems for the perception of America’s occupation of Japan. The commission was created exclusively for the purpose of analyzing and documenting the long-term biological effects of the A-bomb; not in any facet did it seek to extend its services beyond that, however. That is to say, no effort as far as medical treatment or patient care was given to the residents of the affected localities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, really culminating in the ABCC’s tendency to be seen by the Japanese as simply treating the Hibakusha population as experimental subjects or guinea pigs, now for a second time.39 Whether these judgments are fair or not, it represents yet another example of America’s effort to understand the unforeseen consequences of their nuclear attack further while simultaneously neglecting political responsibility or moral management of those consequences. Maybe even more shocking is the fact that the Japanese government itself did not produce any sort of large-scale assistance or relief programs until after the end of the U.S. occupation in 1952, leaving room to discuss what further potential restraints the occupation may have had on the Japanese capacity to help its own people.40

In the specific cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the agony was compounded not just 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.”41 Dower explains at the local level that, the U.S. occupation was inhumane. The public grievance was strictly unauthorized. Public-written correspondence referring to the A-bomb or its fatal characteristics was restricted; impacted residents were vehemently denied the opportunity to seek professional counsel or support in their afflictions. The gross aspects of this early history of neglect have served to make the positive identification “of victims and precise quantification of the effects of the bombs” exponentially more difficult than what might otherwise have been the case.42 Under these conditions, evidence that reflected the true severity of becoming a nuclear casualty was not embodied in a pictorial or video medium; rather, Japanese drawings and paintings are the closest representations we have of the authentic response from the only populations actually to have been victimized by nuclear weaponry.

An examination of the artwork produced by survivors of the A-bomb captures the most realistic emotional and physical responses to the effects of nuclear weapons on humans. Particularly, the objective in showcasing these drawings and paintings is the brutal yet undeniably necessary process of capturing, promoting, and acknowledging the exclusive form of memory and commemoration that existed for humans amidst the seven-year occupation of Japan. John Hersey, who actually introduced atomic-bomb survivors to the United States populace with his 1946 celebrated essay Hiroshima, put his finger on the difference between the these visuals and the more familiar photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; “The pictures by hibakusha,” he observed, “are more moving than any book of photographs of the horror could be, because what is registered is what has been burned into the minds of the survivors.”43 The images are intimate and offer more precise comprehension of the impact nuclear weaponry on humans, as well as on our social and environmental support systems.

Residents of afflicted localities who were exposed to flash burns from the nuclear explosion became known as the “procession of ghosts.” In order to prevent the dripping flesh from their hands on their body—liquified from the shielding of their eyes during the intense light produced by the atomic blast—survivors would slowly stumble with palms down in front of them so as to ease the pain.44 Onagi Akira, who was fifteen years old at the time of the explosion, produced watercolor drawings of what he saw in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. One image depicts a man, skin peeling from his hands, frantically searching for his child. Neither the man nor his child survived. Of the hundreds of drawings and pictures created by survivors, this is one of the most searing. Yamashita Masato, who was twenty years old in 1945, depicted the charred corpse of a young child, arms extended towards the heavens, 600 meters from the hypocenter. This striking picture, “by the virtue of its singular grotesqueness,” was drawn on August 9, 1945, just three days after the artist had witnessed the impact of the atomic weapon on Hiroshima.45

In a drawing entitled, “A woman driven by unbearable thirst tried to catch the black raindrops in her mouth” Takakura Akiko, who was nineteen years old in August 1945, illustrated the dire thirst experienced by many of the victims. Another piece by Ikegawa Haruo, twenty years old, composed a picture depicting people walking in a line with hands extended, crying for water. The parching thirst experienced by many accounts for the most often heard last words spoken by victims, mizu kudasai, “water, please.”46 Similarly, Kihara Toshiko, who was seventeen in August 1945, depicted a line of people crossing a streetcar bridge 1,680 meters from the hypocenter. The text linked to the image describes “red, blue, green, and purple corpses swollen three or four times” floating under the bridge.⁴⁷ So many people had thrown themselves into the seven great rivers of Hiroshima that each and every one had effectively been clogged with the bodies of nuclear casualties. If they had not succumbed to the injuries of nuclear warfare, they would have drowned and died in these rivers.48 The black rain depicted in the image done by Takakura Akiko is representative of the nuclear and radiological effects the weapon had on atmospheric pressures. The ABCC—conveniently—found no lethal or harmful connection between “black rain'' and the radioactive fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.49 One also might ask where those processions in this last image are going. Here, “the enormity of the disaster became compounded, for there was in fact almost nowhere to go. Most hospitals and clinics had been entirely or at least partially destroyed. Most doctors and nurses had been killed or gravely injured.”50

Lastly, fifteen year old Takumei Kazumi painted an image where “a dead young Caucasian man is shown tied to a toppled telephone pole near Hiroshima's shattered” Genbaku Dome.51 Illustrating a scene encountered on August 7, “this cryptically annotated picture obviously represents one of the little-known Hiroshima stories: that there were perhaps two dozen or so American prisoners in the city when the bomb was dropped, most of whom survived the bomb but were hauled out and murdered by enraged Japanese.”52

From the standpoint of memory, these visuals produced by the Hibakusha are priceless. In their grotesque nature, they represent to the fullest extent what was actually experienced by those who were there on the day of the attacks. They themselves stood as the only acceptable source of documenting evidence for survivors to attach their memories to. It must always remember that any authentic pictorial or video evidence was strictly censored by the occupying American forces, who were the only ones allowed to distribute real-world photography and almost always between a contract between a photographer and the U.S. military.

Their creations are wholly requisite in gaining the closest version to a comprehensive appreciation of nuclear warfare that exists in the historical record. As Robert Lifton has argued throughout his works, the psychological occurrences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have an “important bearing upon all of human experience,” and the link between them and ourselves is not simply metaphorical but has “specific psychological components which can be explored in relationship to the general psychology of the survivor.”53 In simpler terms, as humans connected to this event, we owe it to ourselves—and arguably more important to the survivors—to capture, acknowledge, and promote these images wherever possible in order to maintain the survival of the only untampered memories that we have of those faithful days in August of 1945.

In this complicated milieu, produced by the United States’ attack on Japan and subsequent occupation, “where time was so peculiarly warped, the Japanese as a whole did not begin to really visualize the human consequences of the bombs” until approximately four to seven years after the annihilation of their nation’s cities.54 Not only is this a disservice to the survivors and the preservation of their memory, but it is a gross mischief to the global community in general. The United States effectively delayed the right of a natural process of memory to all afflicted Japanese people, creating countless rifts and inconsistencies among their collective memory of the event, many of which are still identifiable today. In addition, there is a possibility that a general difficulty of formulation in identity for post-war hibakusha was produced by the use of nuclear weapons, followed by a phase of governmental neglect.55 If the only population victim to these weapons has had their processes of memory denied, I assert we would be foolish to think our own general collective memory of the event to be any different today.

Robert Lifton was essential to understanding the broken aspects of the hibakusha’s post-war formulation of identity. During his time in Hiroshima, he devoted six months to a systematic study of atomic bomb survivors, mainly conducted in individual interviews, two hours in length, and between two different sample populations. One consisted “of thirty-three [survivors] chosen at random from the lists kept at the Hiroshima University Research Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Biology,” and the second consisted of “forty-two survivors especially selected because of their general articulateness and particular prominence in atomic bomb problems.”56 His findings are both fascinating and depressing, where in summary, he expresses that almost all survivors consisted of a strong and unusual degree of inarticulateness (not in the intellectual spectrum, but the general incapacity or unwillingness) in conveying their experiences of the attack which was “likely to be associated with a particularly significant residual anxiety.”57 Answers consisting of “I don’t know at all” or “I don’t know what to say” were common to the questions concerning their experience.58 One woman who lost her son in the attacks was asked how she would perceive the use of an additional bomb being used on a human population, “probably speaking for both herself and her husband in uttering a final statement of despair,” she said:

If it [a nuclear war] should ever happen again… I would die at once—at that very moment. This is all that a person like me can feel. Being already an old woman, if it should be used again, whatever may happen, I would rather die.59

What Lifton had thought she meant here was not only that at her age, “she lacked the strength to deal with future holocausts,” but the psychic blows absorbed from the combination “of her son’s death, and the atomic bomb experience” possibly including the aspects of utter governmental neglect and subsequent personal isolation, “had so shattered her life space that only a part of her—and that tenuously—had remained alive.”60 Determining causation is an inherently difficult task. However, between the extraordinary circumstances of being victimized by a nuclear weapon, immediately followed by American-militarized pressures specifically crafted to deny that adequate process of grieving, most likely has induced an inconceivable amount of hesitancy to discuss—or even remember—an aspect of their lives so unnaturally abysmal. The implications of this have had severely damaging effects on the preservation of memory stemming from the only population on the globe to be affected by a nuclear bomb.

The suppression of all discussion and information pertaining to the effects of the bombs have implications that go far beyond those that just impact the Japanese. Unfortunately, the global community as a whole is the victim of negligence sparked by the interdictions engaged by the United States in its decision to employ not one but two nuclear weapons for the first time in history. Aspects of the event, such as the authentic lethality of a relatively low-yield nuclear weapon, were barred from worldview. The effects of radiation on humans were blacklisted. Pictorial and video evidence—even those that exist today—are forever subject to the reality that they were handpicked and authorized for their release by the same entity responsible for the nuclear event itself. In all, the result of these opaque obstacles has proven complicit in humanity’s continued incapacity to achieve a comprehensive appreciation for genuine nuclear warfare.

The lack of transparency surrounding the U.S.’s actions after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki contrasts ironically with the contemporary rhetoric of a nation’s aptitude to achieve the technology capable of fielding a weapon of such fatal parameters. Interestingly enough, the bravado and capacity for human achievement are very solemnly correlated with the realistic horrors experienced by the only people in the world to have actually become victims of these ‘advancements.’

The United States, rather than acknowledging the authentic consequences of their nuclear impositions and instead taking responsibility for the physical well-being of the people of a nation that they had forcefully occupied, chose seclusion and neglect. By shielding the world from the genuine consequences of nuclear warfare, not only have we failed to grasp a comprehensive appreciation for fission-type weapons, but sadly, there is more than enough historical evidence to prove that in this process, the U.S. took the sole population victim to nuclear weaponry and undeniably revoked their right to the natural procedures of memory and grief.

The United States is also complicit in engineering a global platform of nuclear defense systems, all while simultaneously suppressing the horrific effects of the first atomic bombs used on a human population. This is grossly exemplified by the global, rigorous, and decades-long testing of nuclear weapons directly after 1945, which consisted of weapons with yields that would make Little Boy and Fat Man look childishly insignificant in comparison.

The United States’ opportunity to amend these grave mistakes has long passed. Whether seen as acceptable or not, today we live in a global atmosphere capable of exterminating itself in a fraction of a second, with the saddest part being that those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not even considered in its obscure development.

Japanese term: generally designating individuals affected by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
John W. Dower, “The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory,” Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (1995): 27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7709.1995.tb00658.x.
Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, (New York, NY: Random House, 1967) 3.
Ibid, 3.
Dower, “The Bombed,” 276.
Lifton, Death in Life, Preface.
Ibid, 4.
Ibid.
Sheldon Garon, Review of Occupied Japan: Embracing Defeat or Surviving the Americans?, by John W. Dower, Diplomatic History 25, no. 2 (2001), 341. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24913764.
Ibid.
Ibid, 342.
Dower, “The Bombed,” 283.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombing Timeline.” Atomic Heritage Foundation, Nuclear Museum, April 26, 2016, https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-bombing-timeline.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombing Timeline.”
Dower, “The Bombed,” 282.
The United States Strategic Bombing Surveys: European War, Pacific War, (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1987), 107.
Dower, “The Bombed,” 282.
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, “ALLIED FORCES LAND IN JAPAN”, (1945). Internet Archive, 1970. https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.39078.
Eiji, Takemae, Inside GHQ the Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy, trans. Robert Ricketts, and Sebastian Swann, (New York, NY: Continuum, 2002), 94.
Nick Kapur, Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 8.
Theodore Cohen and Herbert Passin, Remaking Japan: The American Occupation as New Deal, (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1987).
Douglas MacArthur and Harold K. Johnson. Reports of General MacArthur. The Occupation: Military Phase. Vol. I Supplement, (Washington D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1966) 1.
MacArthur and Johnson, Reports, 11.
Dower, “The Bombed,” 275.
Ibid.
Ibid, 281
Ibid.
Alex Wellerstein, “Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 4, 2020. https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/.
Wellerstein, “Counting the Dead."
Ibid.
The Special Committee on Atomic Energy, Atomic Energy: Hearings before the Special Committee on Atomic Energy United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress, First Session Pursuant to S. Res. 179, (Washington D. C.: United States Government Printing, 1945), 509.
Ibid.
Ibid, 510.
Dower, “The Bombed,” 282.
Ibid, 282.
George Burchett, Nick Shimmin, and John Pilger, Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Amy Goodman, and David Goodman, The Exception to the Rulers Exposing America's War Profiteers, the Media That Love Them and the Crackdown on Our Rights, (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 2004).
Dower, “The Bombed,” 282.
Frank W. Putnam, “The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Retrospect,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95, no. 10 (1998): 5426–31. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.95.10.5426.
Dower, “The Bombed,” 283.
Ibid, 283.
Ibid.
John Dower, Ground Zero 1945: Pictures by Atomic Bomb Survivors, International Center of Photography (2011).
Dower, “The Bombed,” 288.
Dower, Ground Zero 1945, 11.
Dower, “The Bombed,” 288.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Dower, Ground Zero 1945, 14.
Ibid., 15.
Ibid.
Lifton, Death in Life, 479.
Dower, “The Bombed,” 284.
Lifton, Death in Life, 367-396.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 368.
Ibid.
Ibid., 389.
Ibid.