City of myth & reality

...Unable to return to the United States, to which they remained intensely loyal, they lived first with suspicions that they were spies and later, for those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was the additional suffering of having endured the atomic bombings...

...There were also individual acts of heroism...

...Their 1979 trip coincided with the incident at Three Mile Island...

...But Hiroshima and Nagasaki evoke a different power from that of Tokyo, London, or Dresden...

...These benefits are administered as a "special social security measure...

...Commonweal: 428...

...The word hibakusha translates literally as "explosion-affected person (or persons)" but has come to mean, with all the intimations of courage the word evokes, survivor...

...Once a military city unknown outside of Japan, Hiroshima did not return to anonymity after the war...

...Lifton emphasizes but tends to belittle the hibakusha sense that they were used as "guinea pigs" in a scientific experiment, a suspicion that, particularly in early years, was reinforced by the callous attitudes of American researchers at the Atom Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC...

...LISTENING TO HIROSHIMA'S SURVIVORS City of myth & reality RACHELLE LINNER WHEN HE VISITED HIROSHIMA in 1981 the Swedish diplomat, Olaf Palme, spoke of it as being "both myth and reality" because no "woman or man on earth can be insensitive to the very names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...Over and over hibakusha say, "It is war we hate, not Americans," a phrase that has come to symbolize "the spirit of Hiroshima," an achievement not of quiet speculation, but of years of effort to transform rage into compassion and to acknowledge their own complicity in the wars of the past...

...Their persistence has led to a commitment by hundreds of thousands to abolish nuclear weapons...

...Still, it is an important book to re-examine because Lifton's analysis has been accepted uncritically by many who have written about Hiroshima these past two decades...

...Worldwide there are 370,000 hibakusha, and legally that status is grarited not only to those who were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but to anyone who entered the cities during the two-week period when radiation levels were high, people searching for relatives, or medical and military relief workers...

...Death In Life is a seductive book because it is well- written and argued with the voice of authority...

...Rather than turning from the human community or the community of nations, hibakusha have become vulnerable by their work in Japan, and especially by their extensive travels throughout the world...

...Korean and American hibakusha have suffered an added 9 August 1985: 425 isolation...

...They speak passionately because their intense desire for peace is born of their unique knowledge of war...

...They said that nothing would grow again in Hiroshima's soil...

...the rusted watch, its hands forever fixed at 8:15, when the cargo carried by the Enola Gay from Tinian Island was exploded over the Aioi Bridge, ushering in an age that many fear will end with the world plunged into darkness...

...If he found that to be true in 1962, then the evidence in 1985 is all the more remarkable...

...More people were killed in the March 1945 firebombings of Tokyo than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined...

...The most intransigent is that Hiroshima is a city of "death in life," an image promulgated by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton...

...Tainted not by death but by facile rhetoric, hibakusha are perceived with pity, curiosity, or sentimentality...

...Annually since 1972 legislation has been introduced to provide limited financial assistance for medical costs, but Congress has never approved any of these modest bills...

...An elementary school girl, fleeing the disaster, offered her lunch, saying, 'I'm going to die...

...his characterization of hibakusha as being marked by unfocused anger, depression, psychosomatic symptomatology, paranoia, resentment, and a suspicion of all assistance as being "counterfeit nurturance": these bear scrutiny...

...The destruction wrought by "conventional" weapons had, by the summer of 1945, left more than a hundred Japanese cities in ruins, destroying both Japan's physical and psychological ability to conduct the war...

...The emotion of self-condemnation which Lifton argues led hibakusha to view the dead as the only "pure'' people in Hiroshima, developing such a strong "identification with the dead" that in their own eyes and in the eyes of others they became "the living dead...

...The reality proved different...

...One day a child came to him and asked, "Can you abolish nuclear weapons by sitting...

...They said that anyone who had been there would be dead within three years...

...Those who survived acute radiation sickness suffered and died from leukemia and other blood disorders, multiple myeloma, solid tumors of the thyroid, breast, lung and stomach, cataracts, keloid scars (the result of thermal burns, keloids are scars so thick they can cause underlying muscles to atrophy...

...There is an inscription on the Cenotaph that reads LET ALL THE SOULS HERE REST IN PEACE, FOR WE SHALL NOT REPEAT THE EVIL...

...And it became, Dr...

...Hiroshima's present population of 900,000 (nearly double its wartime size) settled there in its years of postwar expansion, but the city's power stems from the approximately 90,000 "hibakusha," survivors of the atom bomb, who returned to their homes from rural evacuation sites and hospitals, and who in many ways have labored for forty years so that there will be "No More Hiroshimas, No More Nagasakis, No More Hibakusha...

...In a vital way they give strength (and receive it) from the growing worldwide movement of opposition to nuclear weapons, extending to other nations Japan's profoundly anti-nuclear consciousness...

...It is this deeper meaning of Hiroshima that Lifton not only obscures but sullies, crippling both hibakusha and those who would, and must, learn from their stories and the witness of their living...

...They were different not only in the enormous destruction caused by a single bomb in one moment of time, but because of the radiation which was their as-yet-scientifically-unknown quantity...

...There are approximately 1,000 American hibakusha, citizens of Japanese or Korean ancestry who now live in large West Coast cities...

...But for many years hibakusha groups and the city governments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have sought the ' 'completion of A-bomb relief measures" under the national indemnity clause, a critical distinction, because present measures are "charity" for "victims...

...He also studied newspaper articles about hibakusha concerns, and examined novels, poetry, film, and autobiograpical accounts about the A-bomb experience...

...There are approximately 30-40,000 Korean hibakusha "hidden in the valleys," many of whom were in Japan as forced labor...

...In recent years when the nuclear debate has focused attention on the myriad results (from ecological to medical) of our numbed reliance on these suicidal weapons, the numbers and power of which make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like mere needle points, it is ironic that the knowledge of hibakusha is relegated to the margins...

...But there is also a chain reaction begun when the first hibakusha returned to their city...

...Established in 1947 to study the delayed effects of radiation exposure, ABCC was intended to be a strictly research and diagnostic (rather than treatment) facility...

...Yet they must be listened to not out of fear or from a desire to confirm pet theories, but with the silent reverence evoked by people who have endured great suffering, the luminous contours of whose story could begin to heal our nuclear paralysis...

...Instead, it was reconstructed as an international city of peace that has become a mecca, not only for the famous political and religious leaders who have visited, but for the thousands of ordiRachelle linner is a free-lance writer who lives in Boston...

...Included in the narrative of destruction were small dramas of compassion: "Teachers died trying to protect their students...

...It has been accepted, in part, because it confirms our worst fears about nuclear war, and feeds an atmosphere of despair that permeates even the peace movement...

...Despite the rumors, people began to return within weeks to live in shacks hastily constructed from tin or other salvaged materials...

...In 1962, in response to the increase in nuclear testing, one hibakusha, Dr...

...The bomb "initiates . . . the sense of a more or less permanent encounter with death...

...One reason hibakusha travel through the world, speaking eloquently and simply of their experiences, is to heighten such self-interest: it is all of us who will be victims if there is another nuclear exchange...

...They articulated their terror in the rumors that spread with the rapidity of the fires that destroyed their wooden homes...

...In 1975 ABCC was dissolved and replaced by the joint U.S.Japan Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF...

...The'image of radiation exposure has fed many myths about Hiroshima...

...Remembering has been Hiroshima's self-imposed obligation, its vocation...

...Too often it is not their words but Lifton's conclusions that are cited as testimony...

...All hibakusha testimony, whether written or oral, stresses the incidents of human kindness they credit with their survival...

...In 1983 Hiroshima's daily newspaper, the Chugoku Shimbun, published an English translation of its photographic history, The Meaning of Survival...

...In actuality, people behaved with greater courage, self-sacrifice, and active involvement than Lifton's arguments would suggest...

...When the physicians landed in San Francisco they were besieged by reporters anxious to learn about the delayed effects of radiation exposure, questions prompted by the immediacy of self-interest that had never before been extended to hibakusha during their many years of illness...

...An inability to save loved relatives led hibakusha to feel "guilt, self-condemnation and shame" which, along with fears of radiation contamination led them to feel' 'tainted with death.'' Despite economic and social discrimination, hibakusha returned to their city...

...They said that their city would be uninhabitable for seventy years...

...Lifton argues that the suddenness of the bomb and its massive effects led to an abrupt shift from normal life to "an overwhelming encounter with death," a "death imprint" that, instead of fading, is reinforced by public events (nuclear testing, the annual August o commemoration, debates about the city's reconstruction...

...Ichiro Moritaki (then a professor of philosophy at Hiroshima University), sat silently "with the dead of Hiroshima'' for twelve days...

...Lifton's profession (the Japanese do not accord psychiatry the respect we in the West do), style of interviewing, personality, and presuppositions affected his findings...

...In 1977 Japanese physicians began biannual trips to the United States to perform examinations, laboratory tests, and provide consultation reports to physicians of American hibakusha...

...The chain reaction begun at the University of Chicago and perfected at Los Alamos birthed an age that has affected all people of the world...

...Areas of rebuilt Hiroshima are indistinguishable from large, prosperous cities in any industrial nation, but its physical and spiritual heart is the landscaped Memorial Park, once the hypocenter, and now a restful oasis where visitors and residents listen to the silent witness of its many monuments...

...Fearfully watching for signs of radiation sickness, grieving for those who died but deprived of the comfort of ritualized mourning, hungry, fearing the American Occupation, they nonetheless began to recover, restoring social and service structures, and rebuilding their lives...

...Its pathology program was especially resented by hibakusha because of the intense pressures brought to bear on families to allow autopsies, a practice alien in Japan...

...Because no one can be insensitive to those names and because the reality of those cities are scenes of gruesome suffering and death, there have been accretions of myth to muffle the cries of those who died begging for water, of those who died without being consoled by parents or spouses, of those who died when they plunged into the Ota River to cool their charred flesh...

...Their stories are told in the Soviet Union and the United States not to engender pity or incite guilt but to remind us that if those weapons are unleashed from their silos, ' 'the living will envy the dead.'' They give voice to pain-filled memories so that, in learning from their experience, we will be spared the necessity of learning from our own...

...A change in funding would acknowledge that hibakusha have suffered forty years of radiation-induced illnesses because their government began a war in 1941...

...and by August 14 arrangements had been completed to house 15,000 injured...

...They had been trapped in Japan in 1941 (many were visiting relatives or receiving part of their education there when the war began...

...Moritaki says, "the great question of my life.'' He answered with a phrase:' 'the chain reaction of spiritual atoms will overcome the chain reaction of material atoms...

...They reshaped their lives...

...IN HIS introduction to Atomic Aftermath (an anthology of short stories about Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Kenzaburo Oe writes: "The fundamental condition of life, then, is that we are assailed by overwhelming fear yet, at the same time, beckoned by the necessity to rebuild hope^ however difficult, in defiance of that fear...

...There are stark and powerful images that Hiroshima has bequeathed to the world: the skeletal remains of what was once the Industrial-Promotion Hall, now preserved in its bombed state as the A-bomb Dome, a reminder of the consequences of nuclear war and a plea for peace...

...What is more, Lifton interviewed hibakusha during a period of heightened international tension and an increase in nuclear testing, one that saw a bitter ideological rift within the Japanese peace movement in which many hibakusha were involved...

...Their bombs were different...

...Lifton found that hibakusha, as with survivors of all disasCommonweal: 426 ters, natural or human, relied on certain psychological mechanisms, including shock and "psychic numbing," which allowed them to escape, and justified their survival in the face of the deaths of hundreds of gruesomely wounded people...

...When Pope John Paul II spoke the eloquent words of his "Appeal for Peace" at Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park in February 1981, he repeated, as a litany, the sentence, "To remember the past is to commit oneself to the future...

...In Hiroshima, Oe found models of authenticity and courage who serve to inspire not fear, but hope...

...Little Boy" and "Fat Man" are unique weapons for they have continued to claim victims year after year...

...nary citizens throughout the world whose hours there are a pilgrimage to the place which was the first to know atomic death, a remembrance of the past to embody hope for the future...

...because of cellular changes that affect healing abilities, keloids, unlike scars from normal burns, recur after multiple procedures), and perhaps most tragically, the severe physical and mental retardation that has afflicted the youngest hibakusha, those who were exposed in utero...

...The 1904 Japanese invasion of Korea resulted in the severe military and cultural oppression of Koreans, including not only the taking of their land with the consequent upheaval of a largely agricultural nation, but forced changes in religion, customs, names, and clothing...

...Within days Japanese scientists knew the nature of the powerful new weapon, but shocked and injured hibakusha — although they might have heard of the name radiation — could only ascribe magical powers to the bomb...

...Death In Life was published in 1967, a massive, tightly argued study that cannot, obviously, be summarized in a short space...

...It can be argued that Lifton's efforts, admirable as they were in exploring aspects of Hiroshima's story that had previously been neglected, attempted on the psychological level what ABCC did on the physical...

...Repatriated in the late 1940s, these American hibakusha have been denied any government support...

...Unalterably changed by the experience of the bombing, they deepened their efforts to give meaning to suffering and the fact of their survival...

...They reconstructed it physically...

...give this to your little girl.' " Like the sparse, evocative lines of haiku, these acts are a counterpoint to the raging fires and pain...

...Rather than the expected barrenness, that autumn a transformation caused by radiation led to an abnormal, frightening yet verdant growth of horseweed, sometimes as tall as a person, which when cooked provided a filling, if unpalatable source of food...

...An estimated one-and-a-half million Koreans were sent to Japan to work in deep mines and in road and tunnel construction to replace men sent to the front...

...She spent a month in Hiroshima in the spring of 1984...

...Since March 1957 when the first "A-bomb Medical Law" was passed, hibakusha living in Japan have had a means of financial and medical assistance...

...the Memorial Cenotaph, shaped like an ancient Japanese farmhouse, a shelter for those who died, their names resting in the black stone coffin beneath the Cenotaph...

...There were heroic efforts made to organize necessary relief efforts: by August 7, fourteen emergency and fifty-three temporary orphanages were opened...

...Lifton spent six months in Hiroshima in 1962 and interviewed seventy-five hibakusha, some anonymous, others known because of their writing, government and medical work, or peace activism...

...the stone steps of a bank embedded with the shadow of a person sitting there that morning who was evaporated by the intense heat of Gembaku, the atom bomb...

...thirty-three food distribution centers became operative by August 12...

...The tears shed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the same tears shed in Manchuria and Shanghai, in Bataan and Korea...

...Hibakusha have gathered and nurtured that chain reaction with a wisdom born of tears and pain, paying homage to those who died but also bequeathing hope to us who, as yet untouched by the fire they know, must spare the world of further and greater Hiroshimas, greater Nagasakis...

...Lifton suggests that hibakusha experienced "a vast breakdown of faith in the larger human matrix supporting each individual life, and therefore a loss of faith (or trust) in the structure of existence...

...Under the terms of the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty, the United States is exempt from financial liability...