ATOMIC SILENCE Contrasting Narratives Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

Izadora Ení Zubek
ATOMIC SILENCE
Contrasting Narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
DISSERTAÇÃO DE MESTRADO
Thesis presented to the Programa de Pós-Graduação
em Relações Internacionais of the Instituto de Relações
Internacionais, PUC-Rio as partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Mestre em Relações
Internacionais.
Advisor: Prof. Monica Herz
Rio de Janeiro
August 2016

Izadora Ení Zubek
ATOMIC SILENCE
Contrasting Narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Thesis presented to the Programa de Pós-Graduação
em Relações Internacionais of the Instituto de Relações
Internacionais, PUC-Rio as partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Mestre em Relações
Internacionais.
Prof. Monica Herz
Advisor and President
Instituto de Relações Internacionais, PUC-Rio
Prof. Marta Regina Fernández Y Garcia Moreno
Instituto de Relações Internacionais, PUC-Rio
Prof. Rosana Kohl Bines
Departamento de Letras, PUC-Rio
Prof. Pinar Bilgin
Bilkent University
Prof. Monica Herz
Coordinator of the Centro de Ciências Sociais, PUC-Rio
Rio de Janeiro, August 10th
, 2016.

All rights reserved.
Izadora Ení Zubek
The author was educated in the Classes Préparatoires
aux Grandes Écoles (CPGE) at Lycée Fénelon in Paris,
France, from 2008 to 2010. The CPGE is a
multidisciplinary undergraduate program focused on
the humanities. She graduated in Political and Social
Sciences from Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas in
2012.
Bibliographic data
Zubek, Izadora Ení
Atomic Silence: Contrasting Narratives of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki / Izadora Ení Zubek; advisor: Monica
Herz. – 2016.
172 f. : il. color. ; 30 cm
Dissertação (mestrado) – Pontifícia Universidade
Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Instituto de Relações
Internacionais, 2016.
Inclui bibliografia
1. Relações Internacionais – Teses. 2. Armas
Nucleares. 3. Sobreviventes. 4. Narrativas. 5.
Literatura. 6. Virada Estética. I. Herz, Monica. II.
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
Instituto de Relações Internacionais. III. Título.
CDD: 327

To Kensuke Ueki, Keiko Ogura,
Kazuhiko Futagawa and Takeshi Inokuchi.

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Professor Monica Herz, my advisor and the first reader of this
work, for her guidance, her insightful remarks, and her empathic reactions.
I was fortunate to have conducted research in Hiroshima and attended the 70th
anniversary of the atomic bombing. I am grateful to Soazig Lemoine, Ambassador
Nobuyasu Abe, and Professor Kazumi Mizumoto for their precious help.
I am deeply indebted to Professor Kensuke Ueki, Ms. Keiko Ogura, Mr. Kazuhiko
Futagawa and Mr. Takeshi Inokuchi, the hibakusha I had the honor to meet.
Hearing their stories in person profoundly affected my work. I will never forget
these encounters that have encouraged me to keep researching and writing on
nuclear atrocities. For that reason, I dedicate this dissertation to them.
Various professors and friends provided critical comments on earlier versions of
this work. Thanks are owned to: Michael J. Shapiro, Matt Davies, Roberto Yamato,
Jimmy Casas Klausen, Rosana Kohl Bines, Paulo Esteves and Victor Coutinho
Lage. I would also like to thank Professor Paula Sandrin for giving me the chance
to share this research with her students.
I am thankful to all the faculty members and staff of IRI for these two wonderful
years of learning. I am appreciative of my friends and colleagues for creating a
fruitful environment for research.
I am very grateful to Professor Marta Fernández, Professor Rosana Kohl Bines and
Professor Pinar Bilgin for being part of the dissertation committee.
My research has been aided by financial support from PUC-Rio and FAPERJ, I
wish to express my gratitude to both institutions.
Finally, I am indebted to my loving family who made me value peace more than
anything else. Special thanks to my grandfather Ricardo, my father Georges, my
stepfather Armand, my brother Bruno, my fiancé Guilherme, and my mother
Guendalina, whose generous vision of the world always inspired me.

Abstract
Zubek, Izadora Ení; Herz, Monica (Advisor). Atomic Silence: Contrasting
Narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rio de Janeiro, 2016. 172p.
Master’s Dissertation - Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Pontifícia
Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
Inspired by the “aesthetic turn” in International Relations (IR), the present
dissertation focuses on atomic bomb literature, a genre in Japanese literature that
portrays the nuclear attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the viewpoint of
survivors, of hibakusha. The study contrasts stories and poetic depictions, conveyed
by literature, with dominant narratives and representations of the events,
championed by sovereign authorities. Its aim is to call attention to the fissures
between literary accounts and hegemonic discourses, disrupting the latter. The
dissertation argues that the contrast between narratives accentuates divergences,
exposes inconsistencies, undermines self-evident concepts, and fragments taken-
for-granted “truths.” By bringing out differences, this contrast creates a vivid,
kaleidoscopic memory of the atomic bombings. Moreover, the study advances that
literary texts enable us to grasp aesthetic, cultural, and emotional facets of nuclear
weapons that have been often neglected in IR scholarship. The dissertation
investigates how atomic bomb literature destabilizes the sovereign frontiers that
limit our modern political imagination. By delineating alternative narratives of war
and nuclear atrocities, literature challenges the “atomic silence”, the silence of
death and destruction imposed by the bomb, and sparks critical thinking about
world politics and security.
Keywords
Nuclear Weapons; Survivors; Narratives; Literature; Aesthetic Turn.

Resumo
Zubek, Izadora Ení; Herz, Monica. Silêncio Atômico: Contrastando
Narrativas de Hiroshima e Nagasaki, Rio de Janeiro, 2016. 172p.
Dissertação de Mestrado - Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Pontifícia
Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.
Inspirada pela “virada estética” nas Relações Internacionais (RI), a presente
dissertação foca na literatura da bomba atômica, um gênero da literatura japonesa
que retrata os ataques nucleares de Hiroshima e Nagasaki a partir do ponto de vista
dos sobreviventes, os hibakusha. O estudo contrasta histórias e imagens poéticas,
veiculadas pela literatura, com narrativas e representações dominantes dos eventos,
promovidas por autoridades soberanas. O objetivo do trabalho é chamar atenção
para as fissuras entre relatos literários e discursos hegemônicos. A dissertação
argumenta que o contraste entre narrativas acentua divergências, expõe
inconsistências, corrói conceitos auto-evidentes e fragmenta “verdades” tidas como
absolutas. Ao evidenciar as diferenças, esse contraste cria uma memória viva e
caleidoscópica dos bombardeios atômicos. Além disso, a dissertação defende que
os textos literários nos permitem vislumbrar dimensões estéticas, culturais e
emocionais das armas nucleares que são geralmente negligenciadas pela disciplina
de RI. O trabalho investiga como a literatura da bomba atômica desestabiliza as
fronteiras soberanas que limitam nossa imaginação política moderna. Delineando
formas alternativas de narrar a guerra e as atrocidades nucleares, a literatura desafia
o “silêncio atômico”, o silêncio de morte e destruição imposto pela bomba, e
estimula o pensamento crítico sobre política mundial e segurança.
Palavras-chave
Armas Nucleares; Sobreviventes; Narrativas; Literatura; Virada Estética.

Contents
1 Introduction 11
2 Authors, Authorities and Narrative Interferences 27
2.1 Disrupting the Victor’s History 29
2.2 Disturbing National Memory 41
2.3 Dislocating Peace Memorials 54
3 Reading Between the Lines: Literature and Ambiguity 72
3.1 Between Private and Public 77
3.2 Between War and Peace 85
3.3 Between Past, Present and Future 92
3.4 Between Self and Other 100
4 The Pen and the Bomb: The Powers of Literature
in the Atomic Aftermath 108
4.1 Witnesses of Atrocity: Reclaiming Voices 117
4.2 Guardians of the Dead: Haunting Words 128
4.3 Sentinels of Memory: Transforming Silences 138
5 Conclusion 149
6 References 158
6.1 Bibliography 158
6.2 Filmography 171

List of Figures
Figure 1. Mushroom Cloud Over Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. 30
Figure 2. Miss Atomic Bomb by Don English, 1957. 32
Figure 3. Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico
by Georgia O’Keefe, 1930. 40
Figure 4. Souvenirs from Hiroshima, 2015. 61
Figure 5. Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall
Before the Bombing. 63
Figure 6. Genbaku Dome on August 6, 2015. 63
Figure 7. Hiroshima Castle, 2015. 64
Figure 8. Memorial Cenotaph on August 6, 2015. 70
Figure 9. Aerial View of Hiroshima Before and After
the Atomic Bombing, 1945. 110
Figure 10. “Hiroshima’s children patiently wait their turn
for a complete and detailed physical examination
in ABCC's temporary laboratory clinic.” 112
Figure 11. Human Shadow, Hiroshima, November 20, 1945. 113
Figure 12. Wooden Sandal. 132
Figure 13. Pocket Watch. 132
Figure 14. Tricycle and Metal Helmet. 133
Figure 15. Photograph of Kimiko and her School Badge. 133
Figure 16. Convergence by Jackson Pollock, 1952. 149
Figure 17. Monument to Sankichi Tōge. 157

What is this age to be called now?
An age when all is only black?
One word,
one dream,
one poem that is utterly gone.
In my heart I feel like a soldier of silence.
All you who speak so much,
you call the illusions of this city “peace”?
All that I believe in
are the words within silence,
words full of danger.
Yutaka Akiya

1
Introduction
Why did this happen? Everything seemed senseless. I kept thinking to myself that I must
continue writing. There was no justice, no humanity, no anything in what happened.
Everyone died. The more research I did, the more terrible it became. It was too terrible.
Masuji Ibuse
Acoustic metaphors pervade political imagination. Having a “voice” is a
requisite for political subjectivity. The freedom of “speech” - of expressing
thoughts and feelings by articulate sounds1
- is a fundamental right and the
bedrock of democracy. A participatory citizen is willing to “speak out” and to take
part in the public debate. Being able to “speak for” a group is the basis of
representation and authority. A leader who seeks to appeal to the concerns of the
people allege to “hear” them. If your claims are “heard” in the public sphere, it
means that you are recognized as a “viable actor” (Butler, 2004, p. xvii). In
contrast, if you are “silenced”, you are relegated to the margins of the political
community. Jacques Rancière (2011, Thesis 8) observes that if there is someone
you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not listening to
what they say, by ignoring the sounds coming out of their mouths. In this context,
he criticizes the social order for “dooming the majority of speaking beings to the
night of silence” (Rancière, 1999, p. 22).
Numerous metaphors are inherited from the political thought of Aristotle.
In the Book I of Politics, the philosopher argues that the gift of speech is the
distinctive attribute of human beings and the evidence of their political nature. He
stresses that animals can only emit noises: their voices are merely signifiers of
what is pleasant or painful. On the other hand, men master speech and thus can
1
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, edited by Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson
(2008, p. 1386), defines “speech” as “the expression of or the ability to express thoughts and
feelings by articulate sounds.”

12
formulate what is just or unjust, good or evil. Language is conceived as a tool that
enables the exchange of values and ideas, the discussion about the “good life” of
the community. Thanks to speech, subjects can connect with each other and
construct a common public space. In this view, communication holds citizens
together, fosters unity, and makes politics possible. Therefore, silence, as the
antithesis of speech, would correspond to a defeat of politics.
Drawing on the Aristotelian tradition, Hannah Arendt resorts to the
metaphor of silence. She associates silence with violence:
Where violence rules absolutely, as for instance in the concentration camps of
totalitarian regimes; not only the laws - les lois se taisent, as the French
Revolution phrased it - but everything and everybody must fall silent. It is
because of this silence that violence is a marginal phenomenon in the political
realm; for man, to the extent that he is a political being, is endowed with the
power of speech. (Arendt, 1990, p. 18-19)
For Arendt, absolute violence prohibits speech, obliterates freedom, and hence
negates politics. Brutality undermines the political realm. The violence-ridden
community becomes polarized into perpetrators and victims: the former do not
need to persuade the latter, they can make a point by unilaterally inflicting pain
and destruction. Indeed, “violence itself is incapable of speech” (Arendt, 1990, p.
19) and unable to inspire genuine adhesion. Violence can only tyrannize subjects
by breaking their will, by turning them into the shadow of what they were. In this
sense, Michel Foucault (2001, p. 340) distinguishes violence from power,
underlining the differences between the two kinds of relationship:
A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it
breaks, it destroys, or it closes off all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be
passivity, and if it comes up against any resistance it has no other option but to
try to break it down. A power relationship, on the other hand, can only be
articulated on the basis of two elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a
power relationship: that “the other” (the one over whom power is exercised) is
recognized and maintained to the very end as a subject who acts; and that, faced
with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and
possible inventions may open up.
A relationship of violence imposes total silence: it closes off all possibilities, it
denies any right of response, it muzzles any murmur of dissent. Its opposite pole
is mute passivity. In opposition, a power relationship, no matter how oppressive,

13
recognizes that “the other” has a voice, that he or she is a subject who can retort,
react, resist. In a relationship of power, the political sphere remains open to a
whole range of alternatives. In a relationship of violence, politics is not an option.
In Greek antiquity, the international realm was marked by the absence of
politics. Outside the walls of the polis, the city-state, diplomacy2
might exist but
politics, in the Greek sense of the term, did not (Arendt, 1990, p. 12). As the
Athenians explained to the Melians, in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian
War (1959, p. 159), “the powerful exact what they can, while the weak yield what
they must.” There was no semblance of justice outside the political community.
Inside the polis, citizens3
were equal before the law. Outside the polis, however,
the strong and the weak were ranked in an order sustained by force. The
disparities between peoples were a matter of life and death, for violence
predominated, for the weak had to capitulate or perish.
Eventually, after a long and contingent historical process that will not be
recounted here, the modern state reified the dichotomy between inside and
outside. According to R. B. J. Walker (1992, p. 174), the principle of state
sovereignty consolidated the frontier “between inside and outside, between self
and other, identity and difference, community and anarchy that is constitutive of
our modern understanding of political space.” Within borders, political life
flourishes and speech resonates. Outside borders, conflict, violence and rivalry
prevail. Inside is safe, subjects share a haven where they can talk about universal
ideals, whereas outside is vulnerable to the “violent play of particularities”
(Walker, 1992, p. 177). In the international arena, political speech is muffled by a
cacophony of irreconcilable beliefs and interests. At best, dissonances between
states can be tempered by diplomatic relations.4
At worse, war is declared.
In martial times, the frontier is inflamed: cartographic lines are turned into
bloody trenches; the Other becomes the enemy and the target; identity is hoisted
like a fighting banner and difference is ruthlessly attacked. The death of nationals
becomes sacred and the butchery of foreigners is glorified (Kahn, 2009). Lands
2
See F. E. Adcock’s “The Development of Ancient Greek Diplomacy” (1948).
3
The definition of citizenship was nonetheless very restricted, not applying to women and slaves.
4
Walker (1992, p. 160) notices that international relations and world politics are often mistakenly
treated as synonyms because the foundation of modern politics has been forgotten: “the
established principles of modern politics are founded on the assumption that a world politics is
impossible by definition.” In this sense, international relations are “mere relations” that are
disjoined from political life (Walker, 1992, p. 177).

14
and cities are immolated at the altar of the sovereign. Bodies are degraded and
reduced to “nothing but a field for the display of one’s own sovereign power”
(Kahn, 2009, p. 164). All means are used to suppress the enemy’s clamor, to
impede the Other’s speech. Words are shattered by ever-changing weapons.
Consequently, silence, a deep and sorrowful silence, rules over the wastelands of
war.
In this perspective, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
reached the pinnacle of civilian slaughter, executed in the name of the sovereign.
At 8:15 on August 6, 1945, a new weapon – the atomic bomb - was dropped by
the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. At 11:02 on August 9, 1945,
a second nuclear weapon was used against Nagasaki. In a flash, the two cities
were annihilated. Thousands of lives were lost. The violence unleashed on the
citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so absolute, so extraordinary and
unprecedented, that it left the world speechless. In September 1945, Wilfred
Burchett was one of the first foreign correspondents to report on the nuclear
aftermath. He wrote that, after four years of war, he had seen the most terrible and
frightening desolation: “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”
(Burchett, 2007, p. 2).
The atomic blast reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to rubble. The heat of
the explosion carbonized countless bodies and made them unrecognizable.
Anonymous corpses filled the ruins. Faceless figures floated on the Ōta River.5
Scorched shapes laid on the Urakami Valley.6
The wounded – their clothes in
rags, their burnt skin hanging off in tatters, their flesh covered in blood – begged
for water. Most of them died within a few days. Near the hypocenter, people
vanished without vestiges of who they were, not even ashes. Only scarce shadows
remained, permanently etched into stone. The cities were conquered by a “deathly
silence” (Lifton, 1967, p. 25), both literal and metaphorical. Everything was
ravaged, blackened, and silent. Everybody was either dead or dying. According to
Kenzaburō Ōe (1996, p. 176), the silence that followed the nuclear atrocities “was
5
The Ōta is the main river that flows through Hiroshima. Many atomic bomb victims jumped into
the river to escape the firestorms or to ease their burns, others were pushed into the water by the
pressure of crowds at the river banks; a great number drowned (Lifton, 1967, p. 25).
6
The Urakami Valley is the site of Nagasaki’s ground zero.

15
a cruel and complete silence, worse that any other, like a moan that cannot be
voiced.”
Moreover, many so-called survivors did not survive at all. After the
bombings, they fell ill, poisoned by radiation, and succumbed in the ensuing days,
years, or even decades. Unborn children were also doomed: the radiation received
in utero imperiled their future. Before birth, they were already victims of the
atomic bomb. The spectacular violence of the nuclear detonation was
accompanied by the quiet violence of the “atomic plague,”7
by radiation-induced
diseases that continued to kill and torture after the end of the war. The suffering of
survivors was obscured by the celebration of technological and military triumph.
The human impact of the bomb was consistently rendered invisible. After 1945,
and especially during the Cold War, the size and yield of nuclear arsenals grew
exponentially. Great powers learned to “stop worrying and love the bomb,” they
learned to disregard the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons to
increase their lethal stockpiles.
Meanwhile, hibakusha8
- atomic bomb survivors - were silenced. On
September 19, 1945, the General Headquarters of the Allied Occupation issued a
Press Code restricting reference to A-bomb matters in speech, reporting and
publication (Swain, 1996, p. 190). In postwar Japan, the atomic bombings became
a taboo topic censored by U.S. authorities. Censorship was oppressive and cruel,
since it alienated already traumatized survivors: John W. Dower (1999, p. 414)
notes that they “found it exceedingly difficult to reach out to one another for
comfort, or to tell others what nuclear war meant at the human level.” Hibakusha
were forbidden from sharing their stories, from connecting with others - their
voices could not be heard in public. They had to privately, and silently, endure the
atomic ordeal.
7
Burchett (2007, p. 2-3) described the “atomic plague” in the wake of the bombing: “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. […] I found people who, when
the bomb fell, suffered absolutely no injuries, but now are dying from the uncanny after-effects.
For no apparent reason their health began to fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish
spots appeared on their bodies. And the bleeding began from the ears, nose and mouth. At first the
doctors told me they thought these were the symptoms of general debility. They gave their patients
Vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting away from the hole
caused by the injection of the needle. And in every case the victim died.”
8
In Japanese, hibakusha means “a person who suffered the explosion” and designates survivors of
either of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Soanes; Stevenson, 2008, p. 670). The
term will be used throughout this dissertation.

16
The occupation of Japan ended in 1952, but silence lingered. Although
references to the atomic bombings were not censored anymore, survivors were
marginalized. They were discriminated in terms of employment and marriage due
to the after-effects of radiation. Takeshi Ishida (1989, p. 153) indicates that
“compassion” for hibakusha has only increased comparatively recently in Japan.
As a result, even though survivors could talk about their experiences, few people
were willing to listen to them. This situation gradually changed when nuclear
weapons began to be considered as a national threat. In 1954, the Japanese fishing
boat “Lucky Dragon n°5” was showered with radioactive fallout from a hydrogen
bomb test, famous under its code name “Castle Bravo,” at Bikini Atoll in the
Marshall Islands. One of the crewmen died of radiation sickness soon after the
ship returned to its home port. The case was broadly publicized in Japan and lead
to the organization of the first World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen
Bombs (Swain, 1996, p. 185; p. 188). In fact, the repercussions of nuclear
explosions in the Pacific sparked new interest on the dangers of fallout and hence
raised awareness on the plight of hibakusha.
In this context, some survivors chose to testify against nuclear weapons,
joining peace movements, others remained silent (Ōe, 1996). Either way it was
acutely painful to articulate - and to politicize - such a gruesome episode of their
lives. Lisa Yoneyama (1999) remarks that it would be hard to overstate the
difficulty that many survivors have in talking about their experiences. She
specifies that “no more than a small scattering of the over 370,000 survivors who
witnessed the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear atrocities have openly voiced their
survival memories” (Yoneyama, 1999, p. 89). As years passed by, more and more
hibakusha have decided to tell their stories. Elderly survivors are concerned with
future generations that are prone to forget, and consequently to downplay, the
horror of nuclear war. This sentiment was expressed by several hibakusha that I
met in Hiroshima during the 70th
anniversary of the atomic bombing. In particular,
Professor Kensuke Ueki explained how his fellow survivors are sometimes
exasperated because they feel obliged to talk about deeply traumatizing
experiences, which they would have preferred to silence. They feel obliged for, if
they did not speak, their experiences would die with them, people would forget
about the extreme cruelty of nuclear weapons and thus be inclined to use them
again.

17
Still, the voices of survivors are fading away. Today, atomic bomb
survivors are on average eighty years old. In 2005, they were 240 000. In March
2015, they shrank to 183 519 (Pons, 2015). In the next years, the living memory
of the atomic bombings, embodied by hibakusha, will disappear. The witnesses of
the first and only nuclear attacks in history will, inescapably, fall silent. The
atomic silence, the silence of death and violence imposed by the bomb, will have
won. The present dissertation confronts this silence by turning to literature.
Literature is a very peculiar kind of “mute speech” (Rancière, 2011) that blurs the
frontier between speech and silence, revealing zones of indistinctness and
ambiguity. In The Family Idiot, a book on the novelist Gustave Flaubert, Jean-
Paul Sartre (1987, p. 284) maintains that:
Reduced to silence, the great voice still speaks internally, and the mute words it
engenders somehow find a way of becoming externalized in the words silently
traced by a hand.
Writing is a silent exercise, yet it also breaks the silence by putting into words
what was “reduced to silence,” by expressing what was lived in silence. The lost
“great voice” cannot be fully recovered, but it can be transformed into something
else, into a work of literature, into a text that can transcend the boundaries of time
and space. The lost voice can reappear in printed form, resonating in other times
and, if translated, in other places.
Besides, Adrienne Rich (2001, p. 150) illuminates the link between poetry
and silence:
The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and
worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus
unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes its way
— certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered
and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice any art at its
deeper levels. The impulse to create begins — often terribly and fearfully — in a
tunnel of silence.
Rich argues that the matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of language, but
also of silence; not only of “what is there,” but also what is absent, disappeared,
unspoken. In addition, she alludes to the political dimension of silence, for these
“invisible holes in reality” chiefly concern marginalized and disempowered
subjects, subjects who are unaccounted for. Rich’s reflection on poetry echoes

18
Rancière’s view on politics. For the philosopher, politics “exists wherever the
count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of
those who have no part” (Rancière, 1999, p. 123). By crossing the “tunnel of
silence,” poetry enacts a political intervention, it manifests the part of those who
have no part, it conjures up the voice of the voiceless. Similarly, Albert Camus
(1957), while expounding on the writer’s role in his speech at the Nobel Banquet,
evokes silence in relation to literature:
By definition [the writer] cannot put himself today in the service of those who
make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be
alone and deprived of his art. Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions of
men will free him from his isolation, even and particularly if he falls into step
with them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at
the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least
whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that
silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art.
Camus mentions the political and ethical responsibilities of the writer. For him, an
author cannot side with the powerful, with those who “make history,” he must be
at the service of those who suffer it. The writer’s duty is to listen to the silence of
untold stories, like the one of an unknown prisoner, abandoned at the other end of
the world. He must be attentive to the pain of others, to injustices perpetrated far
away, to the plurality of fates intertwined in the grand narrative of history. The
writer must not forget “that silence” and must prevent his readers from forgetting
it too. Literature is hence a means to remember the silence, it is a channel to
transmit it by making it “resound.” Silence provides, then, the impetus for both
artistic creation and political commitment.
In this perspective, the present dissertation will focus on atomic bomb
literature, a genre9
in Japanese literature that explores the silences of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki; portrays the atomic bombings and their aftermath; adopts the
perspectives of hibakusha and embraces their narratives of the events (Treat,
1995; Mostow, 2003; Miller, 2009; Thornber, 2010; Tan, 2014). The genre is
composed of diverse literary forms, such as, among others, memoirs, novels,
9
The term “genre” is widely used by English-speaking scholars to designate the set of literary
texts that deal with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This dissertation chose to follow these scholars and
use the term without entering into the literary debates on what constitutes a genre because its scope
is not literary criticism per se. Rather, this study is a piece of IR scholarship that approaches
literature as a fecund source of narratives, which destabilize dominant discourses on world politics
and security.

19
poems, short stories, and essays. They all address, in one way or another, the
legacies of the atomic bomb. They all remember the silence of flattened cities, the
silence of nameless dead, the silence of ostracized survivors, the silence of
unredeemable violence, death, illness, and grief.
The genre also includes a vast array of writers, from acclaimed
professional authors, like the Nobel laureate Kenzaburō Ōe, to children that
recorded, with poignant candor, their sentiments about the nuclear attacks. In
general, atomic bomb literature is characterized by its testimonial quality because
most atomic bomb writers are themselves hibakusha who witnessed the events
and drew on their personal experiences of survival. There are, however, some
notable exceptions such as, for instance, Ōe, author of Hiroshima Notes, a
collection of essays, and Masuji Ibuse, author of the classic novel Black Rain.
Although Ōe and Ibuse are not survivors, they relied to a great extent on first-
hand sources like eyewitnesses’ testimonies, diaries, and interviews. They
endeavored to document the stories of hibakusha and based their writing on
thorough research. Despite being written by non-hibakusha, their works also
display a tangible testimonial dimension.
Furthermore, in a comprehensive study on the genre, John Whittier Treat
(1995, p. 21) emphasizes that atomic bomb literature is “singularly paradoxical.”
He observes that works of atomic bomb literature have been censored, and have
also been awarded Japan’s greatest literary prizes; they have been shunned and
admired, hidden and exalted. Treat indicates that contradictions are constitutive of
atomic bomb literature. He suggests that it could not be otherwise, since the use of
nuclear weapons in the pursuit of peace was the original contradiction, which
gave rise to the genre. He adds that the expression “atomic bomb literature” is
itself an oxymoron, for it combines the destructiveness of the atomic bomb with
the creativity of literature, for it blends the horror of nuclear devastation with the
possibility of artistic beauty.
This dissertation will investigate how atomic bomb literature destabilizes
dominant narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It will contrast stories and poetic
depictions, conveyed by literature, with institutionalized representations of the
nuclear attacks, championed by authorities. It will draw attention to the fissures
between literary accounts, told from the standpoint of hibakusha, and official
discourses, forged to justify atrocities in the name of national security. The

20
research argues that the contrast between narratives accentuates divergences,
exposes inconsistencies, undermines self-evident concepts, and fragments taken-
for-granted “truths.” In this sense, contrast gives us a sharper picture of the atomic
bombings. By bringing out differences, contrast creates a vivid, kaleidoscopic
memory of the events. The creation of such memory is crucial to struggle against
“nuclear amnesia”, i.e. the alarming tendency to forget about the devastating
effects and continuous existence of nuclear weapons (Lifton, 2001; Mendelsohn,
2006).
Moreover, the encounter between narratives, between art and power(s),
contributes to a more critical, and subversive, study of International Relations
(IR). According to Hedley Bull (1966, p. 68), “in the conversation about the
Powers there is a convention of silence about the place of their human subjects,
any interruption of which is a kind of subversion.” The dissertation intends to
interrupt this convention of silence and invite to the conversation subjects that are
often excluded from it. It will attempt to put center stage subjects that are often
banished to the “margins, silences and bottom rungs” (Enloe, 1996) of IR. The
focus on narratives is a way of achieving this objective. Indeed, Carolina Moulin
(2016, p. 142) remarks that:
As such, one of the critical potentials of taking narrative as a central concept in
international relations analysis resides precisely in the opening up to the
multiplicity of unauthorised narrators and voices – collective, singular,
fragmented and unsigned – that continue to creep in the cracks of the interstate
relations.
This dissertation will take narrative as a central concept to its analyses and,
therefore, it hopes to contribute to the opening up of multiple voices that emerge
from the gaps of the international system. For instance, this study will examine
many literary works that were written by hibakusha women. Voices of women are
rather “unwelcome”, to say the least, in the masculine domain of international
affairs. Women are traditionally confined to the private sphere, and thus
segregated from the centers of power where rational men take all the important
decisions. In spite of some high-profile exceptions, women remain
underrepresented on the global stage. In this context, hibakusha women are
doubly marginalized, for their gender and for being atomic bomb survivors.
Consequently, the voices of Kyōko Hayashi, Yōko Ōta, and Sadako Kurihara, just

21
to name a few, rise from profound “cracks” in interstate relations to tell us what
atomic bombs do to human subjects, to tell us what nuclear war means at the
individual level.
The present dissertation values these voices, for it considers that they offer
singular and compelling ways of narrating the atomic story. For too long, this
story was exclusively told “in terms of calculation and prudence” (Oppenheimer
quoted in Burke, 2007, p. 188). For too long, nuclear strategists, defense
intellectuals and security scholars have talked about nuclear weapons as though
they were playing “some abstract game of chess” (Thurlow, Helfand, 2016).
Indeed, game theory analysis, notably undertaken by Thomas C. Schelling (1960;
1966), and mathematical models were widely employed for rationalizing the
prospects of nuclear war. Scholars attempted to turn conflict and the possibility of
human annihilation into a form of “hard science.” As nuclear weapons were not
used since Nagasaki, these scholars “could reasonably claim to have as much
experience as the military in the field of nuclear warfare” (McKay, 2014). Their
scientism and abstract strategies were preeminent during the Cold War.
Accordingly, ethical concerns were put aside. Herman Kahn (2007, p. 41),
a leading nuclear strategist who inspired Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove,
admits that he tended to “ignore, or at least underemphasize, what many people
might consider the most important result of war – the overall suffering induced by
ten thousand years of postwar environment.” Raymond Aron (1976, p. 174)
observes that the reason of nuclear strategists is in essence immoral because it
thinks conditionally about an abominable act, namely the extermination of
millions of human beings. Similarly, Robert Jervis (1989, p. 114) underlines that
“the basic facts of the nuclear age may be irreconcilable with our moral
impulses.” In other words, moral silence, practiced by governments and security
scholars, allows the nuclear age. Silence, the refusal to talk about the nefarious
consequences of nuclear weapons, is instrumental for nuclear military policy.
After the Cold War, scholars continued to think about nuclear weapons in
strategic terms. Kenneth Waltz (with Sagan, 1995), for example, advocates for the
spread of nuclear weapons by contending that they make states feel “secure” and
thus promote the stability of the international system. He views the system from
above: he abstracts his macro analyses of world politics from their human context.
Waltz’s rationale can be questioned in light of the narratives of hibakusha. Atomic

22
bomb writers tell the story of nuclear warfare in terms of loss, sadness and anger,
contrasting with the unemotional tone of nuclear experts. They render the
concrete, harrowing details of the lived experience of the atomic bombings. They
describe how nuclear weapons have destroyed their homes, their families, and
their bodies, obliterating any possible sense of security. They denounce the
intolerable costs of a nuclear-armed world and, therefore, reveal the blind spots of
most strategic discourses. In fact, Waltz’s heedless way of defending nuclear
weapons seems more problematic, not to say callous, when we see the
international system from below, when we have in mind the ghosts of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
The humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons has been recently discussed
by scholars who take into account the suffering of human subjects in the
formulation of security discourses (Granoff, 2011; Borrie, Caughley, 2013;
Bernard, 2015; Hayashi, 2015; Minor, 2015; Ritchie, 2015). These authors intend
to “reshape the conversation” on nuclear weapons by calling attention to their
inhumane consequences and (il)legal aspects (Bolton, Minor, 2016). They draw
on the 1996 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICC) which
declares that the threat or use of nuclear weapons “would generally be contrary to
the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the
principles and rules of humanitarian law.” According to Monica Herz (2013, p.
40), the ICC’s opinion establishes that humanitarian principles should apply to the
analysis of the legality of the use of nuclear weapons, and that they should be
considered in any debate on nuclear weapons. The ICC contributed to the
recognition of the (un)ethical dimension of nuclear warfare. Reports on the
humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons often mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki
as “case studies” (Tomonaga, 2013). The experiences of atomic bomb victims are
regarded as evidence of the unacceptable suffering caused by nuclear weapons.
The present dissertation does not dwell on humanitarian law per se but, as it
focuses on the pain of hibakusha, it has a clear affinity with the humanitarian
approach.
This study is based on works of literature, and is hence part of the
“aesthetic turn” in International Relations. A number of scholars have drawn on
aesthetic sources to rethink world politics and to open new post-positivist avenues
of research (Bleiker, 2001, 2009; Enloe, 1996; Shapiro, 2013, 2015; Zehfuss,

23
2015; and others). They have adopted postmodern perspectives and engaged with
art to challenge the common sense of the discipline, to invent heterodox ways of
doing – and undoing – IR. Roland Bleiker (2009, p. 38) indicates that
engagements with literature are among the most extensive contributions to the
aesthetic turn in international political theory. He points that several authors have
sought to address political dilemmas by approaching them through fiction and by
theorizing the significance of narrative in our understanding of the political. This
dissertation aspires to follow in their footsteps by proving that literature offers
innovative insights into nuclear issues. The work advances that literary texts
enable us to grasp aesthetic, cultural, and emotional facets of the atomic bombings
that have been often neglected in IR scholarship. This study can also be associated
with the “emotional turn” in the discipline, since “literature is a production of
affects” (Casarino, 2002, p. 75). Lately, extensive researches on emotions and
affects have been conducted in IR. Beyond rationalism, scholars have sought to
explore the role of emotional states on world politics (Crawford, 2000; Fattah,
Fierke, 2009; Hutchinson, Bleiker, 2014). In particular, authors have focused on
trauma and memory in contexts of violence (Edkins, 2003; Hutchinson, 2010;
Resende, 2010; Budryte, Resende, 2013). The present dissertation can be seen as
part of this movement.
Furthermore, Bleiker (2009, p. 66) highlights that art can become
politically relevant in the field of security:
Although presented as a pragmatic response to external threats, security is just as
much about defining the values and boundaries of political communities, about
separating a safe inside from a threatening outside. It is about sustaining national
identity and legitimising the use of violence for political purposes. In short,
security is about the political imaginary as much as it is about facing threats. And
it is in this realm that art can become politically relevant: it can contribute to
discussions about the nature of threats and their impact on political communities,
about the memory of trauma and its shaping of future policies, about the
fundamental definition of security and the ensuing relationship between inside
and outside. Doing so entails expanding the definition and task of security
beyond an assessment of threats and the search for an appropriate strategic
response to them.
Sharing Bleiker’s view on aesthetics, the present dissertation will show how
atomic bomb literature destabilizes the sovereign frontiers that constrain our
political imagination, and how it contributes to discussions about the memory of

24
trauma. It will delineate alternative narratives of war and nuclear violence,
attempting to spark critical thinking about security through art.
In order to attain its objectives, the research will use a methodology
inspired by the work of Michael J. Shapiro (2013). His political thought emanates
from the analysis of diverse aesthetic sources, from encounters with various and
contrasting texts:
[…] my analyses proceed by putting together a variety of disparate references
from diverse texts or genres of expression. The overall methodological injunction
behind such a “putting together” is what Rancière refers to as indisciplinary
thought; it is the kind of thought that breaks disciplines in order to deprivilege the
distribution of (disciplinary) territories that control “who is qualified to speak
about what.” (Shapiro, 2013, p. 31)
Shapiro explains that his goal is to displace institutionalized practices of
knowledge with “thinking.” He associates thinking with invention and critical
juxtapositions that disturb hegemonic ways of reproducing and understanding
phenomena. For that reason, he embraces what he calls a “trans-disciplinary
method,” which disrupts academic frontiers to “create the conditions of possibility
for imagining alternative worlds” (Shapiro, 2013, p. xiv). According to Shapiro
(2013, p. 11), a turn to the arts creates these conditions because it “yields a
different kind of political apprehension of security, framing it within a different
political ontology and a different spatial imaginary.” The author enacts
“interferences” between theoretical and artistic texts as a method for summoning
critical thinking about security and politics.
Likewise, this dissertation will alternate the analysis of literary texts with
theoretical argumentation, interweaving the two. It will contrast excerpts from
atomic bomb literature, mostly fiction and poetry, with writings from the social
sciences and the humanities. It will also include references to official statements,
like President Truman’s statement announcing the use of the atomic bomb;
interviews collected by the historian Studs Terkel in “The Good War”(1985); and
allusions to films, photographs and paintings. In addition, the work of the
philosopher Jacques Rancière will be greatly influential throughout the
dissertation.
Although theory plays a major role in this study, literature is its
protagonist: artistic narratives are treated as primary objects of inquiry. The

25
interpretation of literary passages guides the whole research. These passages were
chosen for their critical potentials, their aesthetic qualities, and their availability in
English. Treat (1995, p. 3) notices that atomic bomb literature, as opposed to
“nuclear literature” in general, is a Japanese preserve. In The Columbia
Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, it is specified that “only Japanese
literary history can legitimately speak of a genre of genbaku bungaku (atomic-
bomb literature)” (Mostow, 2003, p. 179). All the literary texts examined in this
dissertation were originally written in Japanese – and, unfortunately, I cannot read
Japanese. I had to rely on translations, sometimes fragments of translations quoted
in other books, by other authors. Many works of the genre were not translated into
English and thus could not be analyzed here. Editorial choices have limited the
scope of my study. In sum, this dissertation is not an exhaustive study of atomic
bomb literature as a literary genre, but rather a political reflection on and with
certain translated works of atomic bomb literature.
Undoubtedly, something will be lost in translation. For instance, the
rhythm in poetry is rarely translatable. Some aspects of the original work will
always be missing in its translated version. However, something will also be
gained: new and unexpected readers. At first, works of atomic bomb literature
were directed toward a Japanese audience (Treat, 1995, p. 3) but, as they are
translated, they transcend the boundaries of a particular linguistic community, and
widen their possible readership. This dissertation, for example, was written at the
other end of the world, in Rio de Janeiro, thousands of kilometers away from
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Translation made it possible: the English language
functioned as a bridge between my mother tongue, Portuguese, and Japanese, the
language spoken by the hibakusha, real or fictional, I had the honor to meet.
Translation is at the heart of this work, and it could not be otherwise, since
international relations are also a matter of translation, of differences and
connections, of frontiers and bridges.
The dissertation is composed of three main sections. After this first
introductory chapter, the second one will deal with authors, authorities and
narrative interferences. The chapter will examine how literary texts interfere with
sovereign memories and official representations of the atomic bombings. It will
investigate how the writings of hibakusha authors disrupt the “victor’s history”

26
glorified by American authorities. Then, the chapter will assess how literature also
disturbs the memorialization of the events in Japan, disputing the myths of the
nation. Lastly, the section will question the representation of the nuclear attacks
through peace memorials and criticize the internationalized narrative of
Hiroshima as a “mecca for world peace.”
The third chapter will demonstrate that atomic bomb literature not only
challenges the content of dominant narratives, but also destabilizes their
“grammar.” Its aim is to “read” the atomic bombings between, and against, the
lines – the sovereign frontiers that limit our modern political imagination. The
chapter will explore the grey areas between concepts by analyzing texts that blur
the distinctions between private and public; war and peace; past, present, and
future; Self and Other.
The fourth chapter will approach stories of resistance. It will confront the
violence of the bomb and the dehumanizing representations of its victims with the
powers of literature. The chapter will show how writers from Hiroshima and
Nagasaki contest their allocated roles as mute victims. It will appreciate how
survivors reclaim their voices and affirm their subjectivities by acting as witnesses
of atrocity. The chapter will also explore how authors protect the dead against
oblivion and defy the sovereign logic designed to make them disappear. Finally,
the section will expatiate on how art can survive mass destruction and how works
of literature create a critical memory of the atomic bombings. The dissertation
will end with a conclusion that summarizes its findings, indicates its limits, and
suggests other horizons of research.

2
Authors, Authorities and Narrative Interferences
Authors and authorities share a common origin: the Latin word auctor,
meaning “creator.” Authors write: they compose texts, books, poems; they create
images, characters, worlds. They tell stories. Authorities rule: they command,
decide, control; they create orders, interests, identities. And they also tell stories.
Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, David Campbell (1996, p. 165)
maintains that the foundation of authority cannot rest on anything but itself, and it
is therefore violence without a ground. This fierce contingency is sublimated by
fiction: authority sow the illusion of a secure ground, the performative act of
foundation is masked as a constative one. The fiction consists in “pretending” to
note the reality, the necessity, the preexistence of something that is being
simultaneously produced. The same act that acknowledges the authority of a
political community is creating this authority. Authority is inscribed in a self-
referential circle.
Consequently, a sovereign state, a polity that claims authority over a
territory and a population, is a construction that has no essential nature, no reason
to be, no destiny to accomplish. Campbell (1996, p. 166) indicates that all states
are devoid of ontological being apart from the many and varied practices that
constitute their reality. One of such practices is telling stories. The production and
transmission of narratives give form to the state. The invention of a common past
unites the nation, forges identity and buttress present authority. In a nutshell, both
writers and states are storytellers, both authors and authorities are creators of
narratives.
Certain narratives of the past are championed by authorities and thus
become “official.” State authorities favor stories that inspire allegiance to the
sovereign, justifying violence committed in his name. Some authors espouse this
same imagination – patriotic writers and poets have been cherished allies of

28
sovereign powers. Conversely, other authors adopt marginal viewpoints that
evade hegemonic discourses and offer alternative ways to make sense of past
events. These authors are the focus of the present chapter. This chapter will
analyze how literary and official narratives of the atomic bombings differ and
sometimes interfere. Narratives interferences - the juxtapositions, intersections
and collisions between stories - will be considered as politically meaningful.
Evoking a sequence in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Pierrot le Fou, Jacques Rancière
(2006, p. 201) remarks that the clash of heterogeneous logics functions as a
“political revealer.” This study argues that the clash of literature and power, of
aesthetic and sovereign logics, of artistic texts and dominant representations
reveal the silences that surround Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By exploring these silences, the chapter intends to destabilize the
“policing” strategies of authorities, and thus value the “political” interventions of
authors. This analysis is based on Rancière’s distinction between the police and
politics. The police is “an order of the visible and the sayable” in which bodies are
assigned places, roles and shares (Rancière, 1999, p. 29). Besides, the police
dictates what can and cannot be seen or heard. It determines that a particular
activity is visible and another is not, that a particular speech is understood as
discourse and another is dismissed as noise - or silence. In opposition, politics
spreads disorder:
Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or
changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen,
and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes
understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise. […] Spectacular or
otherwise, political activity is always a mode of expression that undoes the
perceptible divisions of the police order by implementing a basically
heterogeneous assumption, that of a part of those who have no part, an
assumption that, at the end of the day, itself demonstrates the sheer contingency
of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other speaking being.
(Rancière, 1999, p. 30)
Politics makes audible what was once silenced. It opens space for dissenting
narratives - for voices once muffled, bodies once hidden, and memories once
repressed. This chapter will examine how literary texts challenge policed accounts
of the atomic bombings and hence trigger political questioning.
Firstly, the chapter will investigate how the writings of hibakusha authors
interfere with the “victor’s history,” the narrative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

29
promoted by American authorities. The disruptive aspects of atomic bomb
literature will be highlighted. Secondly, the chapter will assess how literary texts
also disturb the memorialization of the atomic bombings in Japan. This section
focuses on writings that desacralize the sovereign and fragment the Japanese
nation. Thirdly, the representation of the nuclear attacks through peace memorials
will be interrogated. The chapter will underline how the plural experiences of
hibakusha, rendered in literature, dislocate the order of memorials and defy the
consensual image of Hiroshima as “a mecca for world peace.”
2.1 Disrupting the Victor’s History
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Bruce Springsteen
Kyōko Hayashi was fourteen, almost fifteen, on August 9, 1945. She had
just moved with her family to Nagasaki, after spending her childhood in Japanese-
occupied Shanghai, and was working as a mobilized student in the Mitsubishi
Munitions Factory (Treat, 1995; Otake, 2010). She was less than a kilometer and
a half from ground zero when the “world [went] white” (Shamsie, 2009, p. 23).
She barely survived. Although she had no visible injuries, she suffered from
radiation poisoning and was critically ill for several months. She eventually
recovered from the most acute symptoms of radiation sickness but she has never
enjoyed full heath again. In 1962, Hayashi began writing about her experiences as
a hibakusha and became an acclaimed author. Decades later, in 1999, she traveled
to the United States, a country she already knew for having lived there in the
1980s, and visited the Trinity Site.
Located in the Jornada del Muerto desert10
, New Mexico, the Trinity Site
is where the world’s first atomic bomb was tested on July 16, 1945. This first
successful explosion led to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In
10
The desert’s name is fatidic: “Jornada del Muerto” means “Journey of the Dead Man” in
Spanish, a suitable name for a place where the nuclear age – a journey towards man’s destruction –
began.

30
the memoir From Trinity to Trinity, Hayashi narrates11
her journey to the place
where it all started. In that desert, so far away from the Japanese archipelago, the
horror of August 9 became technically possible. The author is disconcerted when
she realizes that this horror – that haunted her whole life – is trivialized in
American representations of the atomic bombings.
While visiting the National Atomic Museum, Hayashi (2010, p. 14)
notices a souvenir store selling “things like T-shirts with prints of mushroom
clouds.” The image of the mushroom cloud is fetishized, reproduced, and
flaunted. The museum visitors who buy these T-shirts are eager to parade the
military power of the United States and therefore are willing to forget that, under
the mushroom clouds, there were thousands of civilians being burned to death.
Indeed, the image of the mushroom cloud is an aerial picture that assumes the
viewpoint of the assailant.
Figure 1. Mushroom Cloud Over Nagasaki, August 9, 1945.
11
In From Trinity to Trinity, the author and the narrator are indiscernible. The two terms will be
used as equivalents in order to clarify the analysis.

31
This famous photograph was taken from a B-29 and it is part of the U.S. National
Archives.12
It shows a dense column of smoke rising over the city of Nagasaki,
moments after the atomic explosion. The picture adopts the privileged perspective
of those who had just dropped the bomb and were flying back to a base in a
Pacific island remote from the nuclear cataclysm.
The photograph of the atomic cloud offers a perfect illustration for the
victor’s history: it conceals and ignores the suffering of the defeated. Michael J.
Shapiro (2015) observes that the mushroom cloud is seen by most as a still picture
radically cut off from event time. According to him, the static image effaces the
process of devastation that occurred on the ground during and after the explosion.
Besides, there are no people in the picture. As a result, the viewer has difficulty in
conceiving the scale of the cloud, i.e. the size of the cloud in relation to a person.
The human dimension of the atomic bombing is nowhere to be seen. The viewer
does not perceive how direly colossal the mushroom cloud might have looked
from the ground. The atomic bomb is abstracted from its massive violence and
gruesome aftermath.
Furthermore, the iconic photograph aestheticizes the nuclear attacks. The
atomic explosion, captured in this picture, creates a majestic cloud that allows
destruction to be “savoured as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (Benjamin,
2008, p. 38). In an U.S. Army training film, compiled in The Atomic Cafe (1982),
an officer declares that “watched from a safe distance, this explosion is one of the
most beautiful sights ever seen by man.” The question of distance is here vital. An
atomic explosion can be admired only at a great distance. If the viewer came too
close, he or she would be affected. If Americans were closer, physically or
emotionally, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they would be affected. Actually, the
distance that separates Americans from the sites of nuclear destruction enables
moral indifference (Bauman, 1998, p. 222) – deafness and blindness to the pain of
others.
Insulated from its human cost, the atomic bomb becomes an attribute of
American hegemony. That is why the mushroom cloud is so avidly reproduced on
T-shirts and the like: it is an insignia of power, pride, and desire. It is the symbol
of a revered super-weapon that makes America great. Sven Lindqvist (2002, 249)
12
“Photograph of the Atomic Cloud Rising Over Nagasaki, Japan”, National Archives Catalog.
Available at: <https://catalog.archives.gov/id/535795> Accessed on 28 Mar. 2016.

32
sarcastically notes that many Americans have seen the mushroom cloud as “a new
version of the Statue of Liberty.” In this perspective, the costume of Miss Atomic
Bomb, the winner of a beauty pageant held in the U.S. during the 1950s, is
emblematic of how fetishized the mushroom cloud can be. Lee A. Merlin,
crowned Miss Atomic Bomb in 1957, wears a cotton mushroom cloud on the
front of her swimsuit - showing her long bare legs, opening her arms, and
lightheartedly laughing. The terror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is drowned out by
erotic frenzy. Miss Atomic Bomb epitomizes how carelessly American narratives
of the atomic bomb have suppressed the memory of its victims.
Figure 2. Miss Atomic Bomb by Don English, 1957.
Near the T-shirts in the souvenir store, there were pins in a basket.
Hayashi (2010, p. 14) finds that “among the pins of American flags and double-
headed eagles, there were pins of Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on
Nagasaki.” The weapon of mass destruction is easily transformed into an object of
mass consumption. Even the author is not immune to the charms of consumerism:
she takes a Fat Man pin, looks at it for a while and wants to buy it as “a
memento.” However, she suddenly acknowledges that “the parent of this pin is
the atomic bomb that attacked Nagasaki” (Hayashi, 2010, p. 14): the two things
are intertwined, the representation of the bomb is inseparable from the bomb
itself. The narrator’s pensive moment is interrupted by a young white man who
tells her that yellow suits her white sweater (Fat Man was yellow). This comment

33
is conveyed without quotation marks and hence intrudes into Hayashi’s interior
monologue. The foreign statement contrasts sharply with what she was previously
thinking. In fact, the salesman’s remark reveals how detached he is from the Fat
Man pin. He does not see it as the replica of a weapon that caused
incommensurable pain, but as an ordinary brooch. He does not give it a second
thought. Neither do most customers: they probably buy the pin because it matches
the clothes they are wearing, regardless of what Fat Man stands for. As Andy
Warhol (1975, p. 229) provocatively puts it: “Buying is much more American
than thinking.”
By not thinking about what the atomic bombs did and meant, American
narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forget about the actual atrocity. The
transformation of the atomic bomb into a merchandise contributes to the
derealization of the event. When Fat Man is turned into a nice tiny pin, the
thousands of lives lost in Nagasaki seem distant and unreal. This derealization is
quite harmful. Judith Butler (2004, p. 148) alerts: “The derealization of loss – the
insensitivity to human suffering and death – becomes the mechanism through
which dehumanization is accomplished.” Therefore, the victims of the atomic
bombings are dehumanized in the “derealizing” images and narratives that shape
U.S. collective memory. The horror of August 6 and 9 is neutralized because the
dead are not mourned, the dead are not recognized as worthy of mourning: they
are discarded as less than human.
Additionally, the dehumanization of atomic bomb victims enables the
maintenance of national honor. If American authorities admitted the full humanity
of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they would have to answer for the
crime they committed. American people would be less proud of their nation’s
victory and less confident about their state’s righteousness. Robert Jay Lifton and
Greg Mitchell (1996) argue that the atomic bombings remain a “raw nerve” in
U.S. collective memory because they are still perceived as a threat to national
self-image. Lifton and Mitchell (1996, p. xi) underline that, for Americans, “it has
never been easy to reconcile the dropping of the bomb with a sense of
[themselves] as a decent people.” The only way to reconcile the nuclear massacres
with national pride is to deny the humanity of the victims.
Moreover, by juxtaposing disparate objects (the pins of American flags,
double-headed eagles, and the Fat Man bomb), Hayashi (2010, p. 14) creates

34
symbolic equivalences that puzzle the reader. The American flags are distinctive
attributes of the American nation-state, whereas double-headed eagles are
emblems of empire. Eiko Otake, the English translator of From Trinity to Trinity,
specifies in a note that the double-headed eagle was used as an imperial symbol in
the Roman Empire, Russia, and Austria. She presumes that Hayashi mistakenly
thought that the United States used the same symbol.
Mistake or not, the intention of the author is less important than the text
itself. The term “author” is used here solely to denote the origin of the writings
analyzed. This origin is both discursive and material. The author is understood as
both a locus of enunciation and a condition of possibility: it is a place, marked by
its singular position, from where a narrative is delivered; it is also a hand, attached
to a singular body, that traces and arranges words. The trajectory of Hayashi as a
hibakusha, the marginality of her standpoint, the set of circumstances in which her
work is inserted, are all relevant to this study. However, her psychological
motives, individual aims, or personal agenda are not. The author has no final
authority over the meaning of her own creation: what the author wanted to say is
eclipsed by what is written and what can be read.
To some extent, this study assumes the critical framework of Roland
Barthes. In the essay “The Death of the Author”, Barthes argues against classic
literary criticism’s emphasis on the intentions and personality of the author in the
interpretation of a text. He suggests instead that a text should be “disentangled”
and not deciphered (Barthes, 2006, p. 44). For him, there is no ultimate
signification, no “secret” in the text, but a tissue of signs, with endless
possibilities, unraveled by the reader. He affirms that the “myth of the Author” – a
godlike figure who instills meaning – must be overthrown. Barthes (2006, p. 45)
concludes that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the
Author.”
In effect, it does not matter if the double-headed eagles were a deliberate
choice of Hayashi or an involuntary mistake, what matters for the reading is their
inscription in the text and the way they interact with other signs in the text. The
presence of imperial tokens between national flags and weapons of mass
destruction generates a correspondence between domination, sovereignty and
violence. The United States follows its dreams of empire through its outstanding
destructive capabilities. The A-Bomb is an instrument of oppression and the

35
cornerstone of an unequal world order. Nina Tannenwald (2007, p. 360) points
out that the non-proliferation regime imposes a hierarchy of collective identities
on states, distinguishing between the “responsible” ones who can possess nuclear
weapons and the irresponsible who must be denied such weapons. These identities
are integrated into a discourse of civilization (“civilized” states can have atomic
bombs, “barbarians” cannot) that echoes imperial mindsets and challenge norms
of sovereign equality. In other words, atomic sovereigns claim to be more
sovereign than others. They have an exclusive force that grants them a superior
authority, and hence jeopardizes the principles of the international system.
Hayashi discovers that this unjust force – praised by President Harry S.
Truman (1945) as “the greatest destructive force in history” – is portrayed as a
national honor. The narrator declares that she had “wholeheartedly believed that
nuclear disarmament represented humanity’s conscience” (Hayashi, 2010, p. 20).
Nevertheless, her encounter with an old man in the National Atomic Museum
“shattered that myth.” The man, probably a veteran of World War II, was
commenting a documentary film about the atomic bombings for an audience of
American museum visitors. He was proud of the “glorious past” that his
generation fought for. He – and most visitors – felt love for their country. They
felt love for the bomb that “ended the war” (Stimson, 1947). They felt love for the
bomb that saved “American lives” because, in a sovereign imagination, “lives”
are only precious when preceded by the adjective “American.” Frank Keegan, a
veteran interviewed by Studs Terkel, describes his enthusiastic reaction, shared by
many others, when he heard about “the huge bomb that decimated Hiroshima”:
We said, Thank God that’s over. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand
Japanese? Too bad. It’s over, that’s what it meant. Nice goin’, Harry [referring to
President Truman]. You did it to ‘em, kid. That’s how guiltless I was. He saved
our lives, he terminated the goddamn thing. (Terkel, 1985, p. 35)
In order to justify his decision, Truman asserted that the atomic bombings
prevented a disastrous invasion of Japan. He claimed that “a quarter of a million13
of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities”
13
Barton J. Bernstein (1999) indicates that the number of casualties invoked by the President was
implausible and unfounded. He argues that Truman’s claim was a myth constructed to justify the
atomic bombings in the postwar period.

36
(quoted in Bernstein, 1999, p. 54). “Humanity” is perceived as a hollow
abstraction, it is the nation and the sacrifices made for the nation that really count.
Kahn (2008, p. 126) explains that the violence of American politics should be
comprehended as a practice of sacrifice for the sake of maintaining the material
reality of the sovereign. The sovereign is a transcendent idea that needs to be
violently performed to exist. As in Bruce Springsteen’s song, American citizens
have “to go and kill the yellow man” (Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese, it does not
matter), or more recently the Middle-Eastern “brown man”, because they were
“born in the U.S.A.”, because the U.S.A. claims their blood and the blood of
others to exist.
After her visit to the National Atomic Museum, Hayashi goes to the
Science Museum in Los Alamos, where the first nuclear weapons were designed
and built. Her tour of American Museums related to the atomic bomb functions as
a metaphorical journey through U.S. collective memory: museums are
institutions, supervised by state authorities, that structure how a nation remembers
its past. Museums select, preserve and propagate narratives to the nation’s present
and future generations. In this case, museums are the gatekeepers of the victor’s
history.14
They celebrate the scientific and military exploits of the United States.
They tell the epic tale of a chosen land and its “heroes” that managed to harness
“the basic power of the universe, the force from which the sun draws its power”
(Truman, 1945) and vanquish the “villains” that savagely attacked Pearl Harbor.
The narrator disrupts this narrative by questioning its distribution of roles:
I had had enough of the atomic bomb and Bockscar.15
Dr. Oppenheimer on the
screen, Dr. Einstein whose mop head was on souvenir wine labels, and soldiers
who were leaving with atomic bombs on board were all heroes. I understand
winners create a proud history. Nevertheless, I found myself examining, arguing
against, and denying these heroes one by one. – The world did not need your
experiment. (Hayashi, 2010, p. 31, emphasis added)
14
When museums fail to fulfill their duties and dare to question the victor’s history, authorities
intervene. In 1995, the National Air and Space Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution,
planned an exhibit commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombings. The Enola
Gay, the airplane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, would be displayed. However, the curator
of the exhibition intended to also include Japanese accounts of the bombings and photographs of
the victims. Veterans’ organizations protested. The Congress stepped in. Thanks to Congressional
lobbying, material testifying to the bombs’ victims was proscribed and Martin O. Harwit, the
museum’s director, was forced to resign (Lindqvist, 2002; Shapiro, 2015).
15
“Bockscar” is the name of the airplane that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

37
Hayashi contests the victor’s history, the “proud history” written by the winners
of war, by denying its heroes. Those who took part in the devastation of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki should not be assigned the role of “heroes.” The
“greatest achievement of organized science in history”, as Truman called the
atomic bomb, is a cruel experiment that the world did not need. Beyond the petty
conflicts between states, with its winners and losers, there is a world, an all-
embracing world, that should not be exposed to such an “experiment.”
The term “experiment” is highly evocative of Nagasaki, Hayashi’s
hometown. Three days after Hiroshima, the second nuclear attack is regarded as a
redundant act within the logic of World War II. According to John Whittier Treat
(1995, p. 302), it represents “the exercise of a technological and scientific
capacity for curiosity’s sake, and the exercise of postwar military capacity for
power’s sake.” American leaders bombed Nagasaki just because they could. They
obliterated another Japanese city because they wanted, and had the opportunity, to
use their new weapon one more time. In the documentary Hiroshima, la Véritable
Histoire (2014), Roy J. Glauber, a Nobel laureate in Physics and a former member
of the Manhattan Project, states that the sole purpose of a second bombing was to
demonstrate to the U.S. military that a weapon made of plutonium could equally
work (Hiroshima’s “Little Boy” was a uranium-based bomb). In other words, the
bombing of Nagasaki was a full-scale nuclear test – an experiment.
Hayashi destabilizes the dominant discourse on the bombings by disputing
the words it employs, words like “heroes.” Her writing interferes with the
sovereign voice that commands and glorifies violence. She dismantles a language
“designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an
appearance of solidity to pure wind” (Orwell, 2004, p. 120). George Orwell
(2004, p. 114) criticizes political speech and writing as “the defense of the
indefensible.” Needless to say, his definition of politics is not the same of
Rancière’s which is used in this study. When Orwell condemns “political
language”, he alludes to the language of politicians, the authorities that support
and profit from the order. He argues that:
Things like the continuance of British rule in Indian, the Russian purges and
deportations, the dropping of the atoms bomb on Japan, can indeed be defended,
but only with arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which
do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language
has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy

38
vagueness. […] Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without
calling up mental images of them. (Orwell, 2004. p. 114-115)
Inversely, literature is all about “calling up mental images.” Hayashi, and other
writers of atomic bomb literature, depict vividly what happened on the ground in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They bring to mind images of desolation that make the
word “victory” sound obscene. Hayashi (2010, p. 50) recalls running “with the
pack of people whose hands, feet, faces no longer looked human.” These people
are portrayed by the poet Sankichi Tōge, a survivor of Hiroshima. His verses
deliver glimpses of the massacre. He describes high school girls burned and
disfigured beyond recognition. The poet imagines what these girls could have
been thinking; he pretends to talk to them. He shows how they are about to die
sordid deaths they cannot understand – sordid deaths that we should not
understand, nor justify. By addressing these girls, Tōge calls to mind grisly,
detailed images of August 6:
You, people
who have lost eyes and can’t shed tears even if you cried,
who have lost lips and can’t utter words, even if you screamed,
whose fingers have their skin peeled off and can’t hold things, even if you
struggled,
you.
You madly move your limbs smeared with blood, greasy sweat, and lymph
fluid,
making your closed eyes gleam white,
your swollen belly barely holding a rubber cord of your underwear,
unable to hide even your secret parts.
You, girls,
Who can believe
you were all lovely high school girls
just a while ago?
[…]
You don’t know
why you had to encounter such tragedy,
why you had ever to run into such tragedy,
You don’t know
for what purpose,
and for what reason
you were made into these strange forms,
far different from human beings.
You are thinking,
you are thinking
of your father, mother, brothers, and sisters who were yours till this morning.
(How could they ever recognize you now?)
You are thinking of the house where you slept, got up, and took breakfast.

39
(In a flash the flowers of the edges were torn apart, and not even ash
remains.)
You are thinking, surely you are thinking,
sandwiched between those in the same plight who become immobile one
after another,
of the days when you were girls,
daughters of human beings.
(Tōge, 2007, p. 16-17)
The poem offers a compelling account of the atrocities committed by the victor,
atrocities that were deliberately “written out of the grand narrative of war”
(Bourke, 2014, p. 491). Consequently, Tōge’s poem undermines the glorification
of war and the “selective history-making” that characterizes official narratives of
past violence (Bourke, 2014, p. 490). Turning young girls into inhuman,
agonizing creatures cannot be frankly considered as an act of “heroism”, an
“achievement” or a “necessary evil.” The victor’s history is hence disrupted. This
disruption has an impact on the present because “empathy with the victor
invariably benefits the rulers” (Benjamin, 1969, p. 256), and thus refusing to
empathize with the victor is a direct challenge to authority today. According to
Walter Benjamin (1969, p. 256), “whoever has emerged victorious participates to
this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those
who are lying prostrate.” Therefore, disrupting the victor’s history is a subversive,
political act with contemporary repercussions.
Furthermore, when Hayashi reproaches the U.S. for conducting an
experiment the world did not need, she clashes with “the police” (in Rancière’s
terms). The narrator appears in a space she was not supposed to be: she often
notices how her presence makes museum visitors uncomfortable. For instance,
during the projection of a documentary film about the atomic bombings, one man
looked uneasily at her, trying to catch her expression. She speaks her indignation,
whereas she was supposed to be silent – to have died on August 9, as many
“enemies” did, or to be erased from American memory, as most survivors are.16
She speaks to her attacker, whereas she was not supposed to be seen or heard, but
killed from a distance. She addresses the U.S. with the possessive pronoun
“your”: “the world does not need your experiment” (Hayashi, 2010, p. 57,
16
The only hibakusha that might be remembered in the United States are the ones presented in
John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946). Many academic works deal with Hersey’s narrative (Luft,
Wheeler, 1948; Sharp, 2000; Shibata, 2012). However, as this study focuses on Japanese authors,
it will not expatiate on the subject.

40
emphasis added). She dares to respond. She dares to confront the state that
experimented a new weapon on her. Lindqvist (2002, 230) indicates that
“domination from the air could only be practiced when the victims were
anonymous, invisible, and speechless.” When the victims speak, the basis for
domination erodes – and a political act occurs.
Although Hayashi confronts the United States’ “experiment” on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she does not demonize “America” as a whole, as a
homogenous entity. On the contrary, she is sensitive to the differences and
internal frontiers that permeate the American nation. She notices, for example,
that all the visitors in the National Atomic Museum, the Science Museum and the
Trinity Site, except for her and her Japanese friend Tsukiko, were white:
All the visitors except for Tsukiko and I were white people, and that might have
made me feel that I was facing others. There were no black or Mexican visitors.
Not only in this museum but also at Los Alamos and at the <Trinity Site>, all the
visitors were white. My visit was short, so I cannot say for sure, but considering
that this place is of fundamental importance for the United States, seeing only
white people felt peculiar to me. (Hayashi, 2010, p. 20)
Hayashi interrogates the absence of Black and Hispanic visitors in the sites of
nuclear memory. In another passage, she recalls the Spanish colonization of the
region. She mentions indigenous stories and alternative memories of the land that
would later become New Mexico (Hayashi, 2010, p. 23). Hayashi (2010, p. 23)
also contemplates natural landscapes that remind her of Georgia O’Keefe’s
paintings – an American artist she admires – and do not correspond to a territorial,
bounded organization of space.
Figure 3. Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico by Georgia O’Keefe, 1930.

41
Ethnic divisions, social inequalities and conflicting pasts breach U.S.
collective memory. Disenfranchised minorities seem to be excluded from the
grand narrative of the atomic superpower and do not take part in “the victor’s
history” the same way ruling classes do. In fact, after World War II, some
Americans, often in the margins of the nation, became themselves victims of their
own state’s nuclear program. Hugh Gusterson (2004, p. 68) observes that, in
addition to studying Japanese bodies affected by the atomic bombs, “American
scientists experimented with radioactive substances on hundreds of Americans –
usually sick, poor, incarcerated, conscripted, or mentally retarded Americans.” He
gives a few examples of the cruelties endured by American bodies:
[…] terminally ill hospital patients were injected with plutonium, uranium, and
other radioactive compounds; mentally retarded children were fed radioactive
breakfast cereal; prisoners’ testicles were irradiated; and American soldiers were
positioned close to atomic explosions at The Nevada Nuclear Test Site, where
they were forced to march into the mushroom clouds to evaluate their physical
and psychological reactions. (Gusterson, 2004, p. 68-69)
Like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these Americans were treated as
guinea pigs in the name of national security. Their dignity was also denied in
order to advance scientific knowledge and prepare for nuclear war. Ultimately, the
U.S. nation is fragmented, unequal, and violently stratified. The nation has its
“others.” The dominant American narratives of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
championed by sovereign authorities, were explored and criticized here. But there
are certainly others.
2.2 Disturbing National Memory
National memory is bordered by strategic forgetting. Indeed, all memories
are shaped by forgetting. As Marc Augé (2004, p. 20) elegantly phrases it,
“memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the
sea.” The act of remembering is surrounded by absence. When one moment is
singled out and emerges in our memory, other countless instants are drowned in
nothingness. Memory is always selective: it rescues some images, sounds,

42
sensations, bringing them to the verge of consciousness, while letting other
images, sounds, sensations drift away. Every individual has experienced the
fluctuations of memory. They often occur as something natural: in our lives, there
are moments that spontaneously mark us, moments that we want to remember or
that we cannot forget. The distinction between memory and oblivion is deeply
personal: it reflects who we are, who we love, what we lived and how we felt.
However, when national memory is at stake, the line between remembering and
forgetting is anything but natural – it is a collective construction, and usually a
disputed frontier.
The content of national memory is contentious because narratives of the
past are crucial for defining and consolidating a nation. In his famous lecture
“What is a Nation?”, Ernest Renan (1882) acknowledges the importance of
forgetting. According to him, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have
many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. In
particular, past atrocities have to be purposefully forgotten in order to ensure
national unity. Renan observes that French citizens, for instance, had to forget
about St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. This violent historical episode
jeopardized the coherence of the French nation and consequently, had to be
dismissed. The nation is underpinned by some convenient silences. Thus national
memory must be extremely selective and insulated from inquiry. Renan remarks
that historical research can be disruptive: investigating the complexity and
violence of the past destabilizes nationhood.
Moreover, the line between remembering and forgetting demarcates the
inclusion or exclusion of certain subjects and events. It delineates who and what
counts for the nation. Who decides which stories are worth telling? If the nation is
coupled with a state, the sovereign does. The sovereign endorses narratives that
reinforce its authority. National memory is therefore an instrument of power. The
sovereign uses and distorts the past to suit its present interests. In postwar Japan,
the sovereign state favored a sanitized narrative of the world conflict and
promoted a strategic appropriation of the atomic bombings. Joanna Bourke (2014,
p. 489-490) specifies that: “in the aftermath of conflict, there is an attempt by
political actors on all sides to shape the story of violence to conform to postwar
needs, desires, and fears.” She adds that national identity and honor depend upon
the recitation of selective histories.

43
In this perspective, Yoshikuni Igarashi (2000) demonstrates that national
identity was a critical issue in postwar Japan. For coping with its devastating
defeat and overcoming its bellicose past, the Japanese nation had to reinvent
itself. Japan was refashioned as a pacifist country endowed with a dynamic
economy. War memories were rearranged in order to conform this new identity.
The role of Japan as an aggressor was downplayed. The atrocities committed by
Japanese nationals in Asia were not openly discussed. In the dominant narrative,
the Japanese nation was first and foremost a war victim – and even, the ultimate
war victim because it was the only nation17
to have endured nuclear destruction.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incorporated into
the official narrative, which claimed that Japan’s tragic loss was necessary for its
peaceful and prosperous rebirth (Igarashi, 2000, p. 17). The suffering caused by
the atomic bombings was diluted in a history of progress, and soon the state that
dropped the bombs became a close ally. During the Cold War, Japan and the
United States were ideologically aligned and left behind their mutual animosity.
The reconciliation with yesterday’s foe was made possible by a peculiar narrative
that Igarashi (2000, p. 20) calls the “foundational narrative” of U.S.-Japanese
post-war relations. He expands on the narrative’s plot:
At the end of the war, the United States and Japan cast themselves in a
melodrama, so to speak, that culminated in the demonstration of the atomic
bomb’s unprecedented power. Through the bomb, the United States, gendered as
male, rescued and converted Japan, figured as a desperate woman. Hirohito’s so-
called divine decision to end the war participated in this drama by accepting the
superior power of the United States. Despite its hyperbole, this popular narrative
was effective in defining the two countries’ perception of the war and how it
ended. (Igarashi, 2000, p. 20)
In other words, the United States “liberated” Japan from its authoritarianism and
backwardness. The atomic bomb was awful but indispensable to “shock” Japan
into surrender and to transform it into a modern democracy with technological
mastery and economic wealth. Convinced by the world-shattering power of the
17
The representation of the atomic bombings as an exclusive Japanese experience is deceptive.
The victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not solely Japanese nationals. Indeed, it is estimated
that roughly 70,000 Koreans were exposed to the atomic bomb blasts (Ropers, 2015). Many
Koreans had been brought to the Japanese archipelago to provide forced labor. Dower (1995a, p.
294) observes that “such laborers were, in effect, double victims - exploited by the Japanese and
incinerated by the Americans.” Moreover, students from China and Southeast Asia, and American
prisoners of war were also subjected to the nuclear explosions.

44
bomb, the Emperor Hirohito gracefully accepted surrender and hence saved his
people from extermination. As Truman’s decision in the United States, Hirohito’s
capitulation was construed as “a benevolent lifesaving act” in Japan (Igarashi,
2000, p. 23). In this narrative, the sanctity of the Emperor as the sovereign ruler
was untouched.
Furthermore, the responsibility of Hirohito for the war and its atrocities
was deleted from national memory. The emperor was misled by a handful of
militarists and thus could not be blamed. The bomb was his “wake-up call”: it was
the violent warning he needed for realizing the gravity of his country’s situation
and intervening to end the conflict. If the emperor was not responsible, the
Japanese nation, whose will was just an extension of the emperor’s will, was not
responsible either (Igarashi, 2000, p. 27). Hirohito and the Japanese people were
all innocent. In fact, they were all victims. They were all “Hiroshima.” The atomic
bombings were memorialized as absolute traumatic events that redeemed the
nation in its totality.
The nation was blinded by the flash of the atomic explosions, a flash
“brighter than a thousand suns”18
, and therefore was willing to turn a blind eye to
its past as a victimizer. Lisa Yoneyama (1999, p. 12) contends that remembering
the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has significantly contributed to
the forgetting of the history of colonialism and racism in Asia. Likewise, Philip A.
Seaton (2007, p. 30) states that “the broadest mainstream is a narrative of
Japanese victimhood […] that avoids explicit reference to Japanese war
responsibility.” Accordingly, Hiroshima has become the symbol of Japanese
wartime suffering and a site of national consensus: “discussion of the ‘passive
victims’ of Hiroshima is less risky and provokes far less acrimonious
confrontation than discussion of the conduct of the ‘active agents’ in the Japanese
military” (Seaton, 2007, p. 25). Seaton (2007, p. 25) affirms that victim
consciousness is the one mode of discourse that allows “a modicum of national
unity about war history.” The memorialization of the atomic bombings rallies the
Japanese nation and enables amnesia for its war crimes. John W. Dower confirms
18
This expression is borrowed from the title of Robert Jungk’s book Brighter Than a Thousand
Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. The title is itself based on the verse from the
Bhagavad Gita that J. Robert Oppenheimer reportedly cited after the first atomic explosion in New
Mexico on July 16, 1945: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky,
that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
(quoted in Todeschini, 2001, p. 102)

45
Yoneyama’s and Seaton’s critique of Japanese national memory. He considers
that:
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. […] it can be
observed that nuclear victimization spawned new forms of nationalism in postwar
Japan. (Dower, 1995a, p. 281)
Nevertheless, when “remembering” Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nation
has forgotten about the actual survivors of the nuclear attacks. As Dower (1995a,
p. 281) points out, official accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki generally “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.” In postwar Japan,
authorities sequestrated the experience of the atomic bombings, abstracted from
its lived context, and conveniently inserted it into a narrative that flatters national
self-image. The atomic bombings became assets for the sovereign and were used
to pursue its interests. Hibakusha were reduced to the role of exemplary victims.
They should suffer and die in silence while the nation speaks on their behalf. They
have no say in how their own pain is remembered, represented, and interpreted.
The sovereign nation has the authority to confer meaning to their lives and deaths.
The authoritative narration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is imploded by
literature with its multiple narrators and narratives. Literature creates a
kaleidoscope of Hiroshima(s) and Nagasaki(s) that disturb the single-voiced
narrative of the state, be it Japanese or American. Even though some authors may
harbor nationalistic sentiments, the simple fact that there are many authors, and
thus many versions of the same story, undermines the narrative monopoly of the
nation. The atomic bombings cease to “belong” to the states involved. They take
on various and manifold artistic forms. They are told and retold from different
points of view that decentralize the mainstream narrative. By pluralizing
Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s depictions, literature formally challenges the “official
and statist nationalization of Hiroshima’s memory” (Yoneyama, 1999, p. 14).
In this sense, literature performs politics. Jacques Rancière (2007)
indicates that the politics of literature is not the politics of writers, with their
personal commitments and political beliefs. The expression “politics of literature”
implies that literature intervenes, as literature, in the partition of the sensible, i.e.

46
the demarcations between spaces and times, the visible and the invisible, speech
and noise. For example, regardless of Gustave Flaubert’s opinions about the
people and the Republic, his prose, as such, was democratic. For Rancière (2007,
p. 17), Flaubert’s prose was “the incarnation of democracy” because it treated all
the words equally, overthrowing the hierarchy between noble and vulgar subjects,
narration and description, foreground and background, men and things.
In the works of atomic bomb literature, the plurality of literary forms
dealing with Hiroshima and Nagasaki disrupt the uniformity and unity of Japanese
national memory. Besides, the hierarchy between memory and forgetting is
reversed: moments, places and subjects that were considered irrelevant or
dishonorable for the nation, and hence were “forgotten”, appear and are
remembered through literature. Michael J. Shapiro (2014, p. 280) argues that
aesthetic texts can provide counter-memories that contrast with “the mythic
consensuality that has been the basis of the presumption that states contain a
unitary and coherent national society.” These counter-memories break the silences
of the nation-state sovereignty story. This violent story has muffled discordant
voices, dislodged alternative places of belonging, and hence “fails to register
much of the experiences of both citizen subjects and those without recognized
political qualification” (Shapiro, 2014, p. 285). Therefore, this study turns to
writings that articulate these unsung experiences.
In the short story “Fireflies”, Yōko Ōta (1985) addresses the isolation
experienced by atomic bomb survivors. Many hibakusha felt alienated from
Japanese society. They were excluded from the vibrant “new Japan” that
flourished with the postwar economic boom. In “Fireflies”, the narrator, a writer
and hibakusha as Ōta herself, perceives the gap between the Japanese who have
withstood the ravages of nuclear war and those who have not. The story takes
place in the 1950s Hiroshima. While riding on a streetcar, the narrator sheds light
on the internal frontiers that divide the city:
The streetcar was moving through the central district of the city. We passed the
bank whose stone steps had a human shadow burned into them. It was two
hundred meters from ground zero. Near the bank was a new shopping street.
(Ōta, 1985, p. 98)
Distinct temporalities and territories coexist in the same urban space. On the one
hand, the bank stands for the past of nuclear devastation and reveals a space

ATOMIC SILENCE Contrasting Narratives Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

ATOMIC SILENCE Contrasting Narratives Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to ATOMIC SILENCE Contrasting Narratives Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

Similar to ATOMIC SILENCE Contrasting Narratives Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki (17)

More from Amy Roman

More from Amy Roman (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

ATOMIC SILENCE Contrasting Narratives Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki