Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, by Robert J. Liften

...Yet as an American, he also had to meet the objection that once again —as in the bomb and as in medical research on radiation thereafter—Japanese were being used as guinea pigs by the American invaders...

...He had examined after the Korean War some of the American prisoners of war who had been disoriented in Chinese Communist captivity...

...These movements, like those here at home, are fragmented, and quite recently there have been Japanese scholars and publicists who have taken their cue from American strategists like Herman Kahn and Thomas Schelling, and who have dismissed the pervasive Japanese opposition to nuclear weapons as sentimental and unbecoming a great power...

...Lifton develops the subtle and interesting concept of "counterfeit nurturance," a relationship in which the dependent person is resentful of help which he sees as only confirming his own weakness, while the helper is regarded as a condescending person who could not really be interested in an authentic relation with a contaminated and weakened one...

...Lifton also discusses the reaction of Japanese physicians to the seemingly excessive complaints of hibakusha, the younger, more scientifically trained men tending to reject the understandable belief that all later illness and malaise could be linked to the bomb...

...They are potentialities which reflect the very fact, underlined by Dr...

...But the rest of America was unharmed, and soon the Red Cross would come, and the National Guard to prevent looting, and the order of the universe was readily restored...

...Lifton describes both the immediate and the long-term impact of the bomb on Hiroshima...

...Understandably, given the dimensions of the bomb, people who were desperately trying to save themselves and their kin behaved in that all too human way we term inhuman, closing themselves off from the cries and mute appeals of others beyond their strength to save .2 In Japanese society, more than in other Oriental and highly populous societies, people do consider themselves in some measure obligated to those who are not their kin...

...Indeed the main focus of the book is on the kind of guilt that accompanies such an overwhelming experience as death, where the survivor feels that his own survival is somehow at the expense of those who died, a guilt reinforced in this case by the continuous encounter with death long after the bomb...

...On the psychosomatic border there remained many victims who could only survive through the mercy of others, and who came to feel even as they improved that they were marked— literally as well as figuratively—and that they were no better than beggars...

...Hence, a nonJapanese investigator is a help not only to other outsiders in interpreting Japanese reactions to the tragedy, but perhaps also to the Japanese themselves...

...I regard some of these writers as exploitative, in spite of the rationality of their warnings among which I include George Orwell's 1984 and Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure and even occasionally the work on the Nazi concentration and death camps...

...He describes the efforts to memorialize the bomb in some fitting way: yet what was the right symbol—the Cenotaph or the Dome, or the anniversary anti-bomb meetings every August, now splintered into several Communist and anti-Communist factions: all ambivalent, all incommensurable with the disaster...

...The survivors both of Hiroshima and of its somewhat neglected sibling in disaster, Nagasaki, also took a hand in the enormous effort to assimilate the consequences for their own personal lives, for the civic life of their cities, and for mankind...

...Dr...

...Twenty years later these questions are far from extinct...

...Lifton is no such Luddite, but because I share with him the belief that Hiroshima has changed fundamentally our understanding of the future and our potentialities...

...It would seem possible that some Japanese may regard Dr...

...It sometimes turned out that those who reacted best were policemen or firemen or other officials who had no relatives around to look after and to distract them from their assigned roles, while those who feared for their families might look first after them...

...The city had prepared for fire-bombing by demolishing wide fire lanes, and many began to be perplexed about why (like Kyoto) the city had not been bombed...

...A few went to Hiroshima and wrote about it...

...Occasionally I felt that interpretations were forced...

...still others studied radiation damage and related matters...

...And how to cope with omnipresent America...

...Lifton presents vignettes then of what he terms heroic responses: among them, for example, a minor city official who, attempting to organize and rescue in the midst of flames, forgot himself and ordered people about, including the deputy mayor...

...It describes some American responses...

...Yet overall, the author appears in this work as candid, without flamboyance, quite unwilling to "sell the bomb...

...EVENTUALLY, As everyone knows, the bomb gave rise at Hiroshima and elsewhere in Japan to political as well as personal protests...

...Lifton's book itself as another example of counterfeit nurturance, analogous to the way some American blacks feel toward whites who write about their problems, no matter how discerningly, when Negroes "should have" done it themselves...

...The reader along with the writer is haunted by the opportunity of seeing in retrospect the frightfulness of the bomb and the way in which its legacy lives on in some survivors...

...others helped survivors...

...And these potentialities, for good as well as for evil, are evident in Death in Life...

...1 I share the belief of many that the use of theatomic bomb to compel Japan's surrender without an invasion was almost certainly unnecessary, since the naval blockade was already forcingsome Japanese leaders to seek negotiations whichthe dreadful doctrine of unconditional surrender made more difficult...

...That book includes reflections on the residues of guilt (which exist in everyone) thought reformers could use and play upon, and it illustrates the phenomenon of totalism as it manifests itself in milder forms in our own culture also, as in educational institutions or in psychotherapy...

...Perhaps the Japanese turn their anger inward rather more than most Americans would...

...There are writers of fiction and nonfiction, many of them of great talent, who have sought to force their readers to think about the unthinkable and the unbearable...

...There can be a pornographic element in arousing our anxieties about war, totalism, genocide, and other horrors, ancient and modern...

...Lifton discusses the way in which life returned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, often in ways regarded as obscene, as when flowers grew out of graves or maggots crawled in corpses, prostitution thrived, and babies were born of impaired mothers...

...Destitute, cism seemed to me to have been more importantin this decision than the effort to impress Stalinand the Soviet Union, which Gar Alperovitz emphasizes in Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, important as that book is in stimulating re-examination of the origins of the Cold War...

...The Hiroshima experience was wholly unanticipated...

...And the generalizations about which he forces us to ponder are imperative ones...

...In Japanese culture, these reactions were intensified by the fact that Japan, even more than America, is what might be termed a physiological democracy, that is, a culture in which outward appearances tend to count for more than ancestry and in which scarred people, or even mildly or potentially sick people are almost totally devalued in the market for jobs, marriages, and happiness—recall The Makioka Sisters in this connection...

...A A S WE LEARNED after Hiroshima, a number of the scientists who had worked on the bomb were concerned about its implications from the outset...

...with the work we leave behind...

...Apparently there was a feeble attempt at warning, but only one of Dr...

...Lifton, that life exists on the edge of death and can only be lived with sanguinity if we can conceive a future, an immortality not for us specifically as individuals, but for the group, for those with whom we identify: with our children, in the first instance...

...As a concerned American through whom the Japanese could achieve a kind of symbolic reconciliation, Dr...

...Here was a disorganized world, in which nothing took its natural course, in which children might die before their parents, and in which people lingered with mysterious illnesses which might or might not prove contagious (and with known ones such as leukemia...

...Misunderstanding of Japanand the momentum of Army Air Force fanati BOOKS DRAWING ON written and oral reports, Dr...

...Indeed, this concept has helped clarify for BOOKS me the reaction of many black Americans toward the solicitude of white civil rights activists, or the suspicions which Peace Corps volunteers often encounter when they are trying to help others—or more generally, that teachers, therapists, and parents discover in their relation with those who are younger or weaker or self-mistrustful...

...Death in Life is extraordinary in neither succumbing to an American's understandable guilt and apologia vis-a-vis the bomb, nor resisting defensively Japanese criticisms of being exploited by American doctors...

...This overwhelmingly compelling book is the work of a man with great capacity for introspection, for empathy and vicariousness, and for comparative analysis...

...The psychiatrist Robert Lifton, who had lived and worked in Japan intermittently since the Korean War, undertook the task of interviewing survivors, leading and vocal citizens as well as less articulate ones, as part of the larger effort on which his book reports, to discover what sorts of damage the bomb did to personal well-being, social fabric, and the sense of continuity or immortality with which people live...

...2 During the bomb-shelter building in this country, the United States had a kind of imaginarydress rehearsal of these sorts of inhumanity, whenpeople spoke of guarding their shelters with guns...

...Lifton possesses some unusual qualifications...

...Lifton's account as clarifying and straightforward...

...Still, survivors could not easily blot out the suffering of schoolmates or fellow workers or others trapped and calling for water, and years later, they accuse themselves and recall the staring eyes of the bereft and dying...

...some survivors including children and orphans, along with adventurers from elsewhere, engaged in looting and black marketing...

...In Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, he had presented case studies of men he had interviewed, mainly in Hong Kong, both Chinese and Westerners who had gone through often profoundly disturbing thought reform experiences...

...Such thinking ignored the difference between "ordinary" bombing to which people were somehow able to adapt over a period of time—to find a way of life within the terror—and which did not have the capacity to bring about delayed death through radiation effects...

...I did not then encounter racial interpretations of the bombs having been dropped on Japan, though I am told they are latent...

...DEATH IN LIFE: SURVIVORS OF HIROSHIMA, by Robert J. Lifton...

...nor does the book allow us to forget the forebodings for the future that this invention and use of the bomb awaken...

...After 1945, many people in various countries sought to reorient their way of thinking about war and conflict, to take account of this new weapon which, science fiction become all too real, could end life as we know it...

...In considering the complicated give and take between the hibakusha and their sources of succor, Dr...

...In the course of the controversy over civil defense, now temporarily quiescent, I had immersed myself in some of the scientific literature on disasters, studies which had been sponsored by American authorities who had sent teams to cities where there were explosions or tornadoes to study how people reacted...

...Many leftists, for example, have tended to blame their own military or the "monopoly capitalists"—but the heightened conflict in Vietnam, to which some Japanese were already sensitive at that time, may now have altered their attitudes in some measure...

...The Japanese are inhibited in talking with each other about intimate experience, and this experience, so traumatic and so humiliating, they have found difficult to talk about with each other...

...Some, indeed, concluded that with careful civil defense the United States could absorb a nuclear attack and recover...

...above all, with the world we leave behind...

...He makes us see in a more intimate way than even the readers of DISSENT are likely to have done hitherto that it does not impair our sense of immortality to realize in some abstract way that eventually the sun may cool, but that the bombing of Hiroshima does impair it...

...Indeed, the effort to blur the somewhat mystical distinction between so-called tactical nuclear weapons and conventional weapons was in my judgment an immoral effort to erase one of the few limits which still bind the headstrong and often self-justifying Americans...

...Lifton had a particular role...

...however, long quotations from interviews and other firsthand material permit the reader to venture his own, perhaps less cosmic, conclusions...

...Feeling weak and humilitated, some hibakusha masochistically identified with the aggressor, admiring his power and technological proficiency, but many more identified with the dead...

...When I was in Japan in the fall of 1961 during the resumption of bomb-testing by both the Soviet Union and the United States, I was aware that quite unideological and ordinary Japanese felt that any rain shower might contaminate, any vegetable poison them as the Bikini fishermen had been poisoned...

...Sometimes he was resented for stirring up old griefs and nightmares, although in other in BOOKS stances he was welcomed as a stranger for the opportunity to talk freely about fears and shames...

...The book deals not only with survivors, but with the whole sequence of Japanese responses—military, medical, psychological, political, personal, and artistic...

...I say this not as an emotional Luddite, opposed to systems thinking, and Dr...

...Lifton's work has no suggestion of this: he recorded very honestly his own reactions, his feeling of being affected by what he terms psychic numbing, and his temptation to become unduly professionalized, in the process of having to cope with the recitals he evoked from survivors (called hibakusha by the Japanese), many of them maimed, some of them guilt-ridden, most of them unable to forget an event that was both literally and metaphorically earth-shattering...

...and finally, comparing the traumatic experience of the atomic bomb to that of the Nazi concentration and death camps, it reminds Americans (and others who cling to nuclear weaponry) of the irrevocable transgression of the even very tenuous limits on warfare by a weapon that instantaneously and indiscriminately destroys all life within its radius and far beyond, a weapon in quite a different category from that of those terrible instruments of mass destruction dropped on Dres den and Tokyo, Hamburg and Osaka...

...This reviewer has some familiarity with the various strands of the Japanese peace movements, and regards Dr...

...The author speaks both for the best American and most universal values in reminding us through this book, which is both sober and evocative, that we, the relatively unharmed, are also survivors for whom hope is a duty, prevention a mandate...

...Lifton pursued his work in the belief (which this writer shares), that Americans bear a special burden vis-a-vis the bomb, a special responsibility for understanding and for control...

...whereas many of the older physicians, succumbing to pressure from their patients, tended to see the bomb as being the pervasive cause of illness with radiation effects everlasting—a temptation resented by the beleaguered but sometimes insensitive American doctors of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission...

...Every new bomb test, every threat of escalated war, agitates survivors...

...Or, the other extreme, later, when beautifully rebuilt, the city seemed to be no longer Hiroshima for many because it was too new and strange, and the very beauty of it seemed to deny the horror of their suffering...

...Lifton describes the way in which suffering shuts people off from each other, making solipsists of us all...

...In the face of inner and outer resistance, Dr...

...Lifton's interviewees recalled seeing a leaflet American planes had dropped, with words so vague that, given the unrealistic atmosphere in Japan at the time, no one took them seriously.' The bomb fell without warning, after an "All Clear" had been soundel...

...Many of the survivors accused those who joined political movements of "selling the bomb"—a purist reaction related to their guilt feelings about the dead and whose counterparts, for different reasons, one can find among idealistic young Americans...

...Death in Life draws on interviews with 80 of Hiroshima's bomb survivors which must have been, for a conscientious and sensitive American, extremely painful to obtain...

...Continuously, he reaches beyond his immediate material, drawing as I have noted on the concentration camp literature, or on the experience of parents whose children are dying of leukemia, or on records of the plagues in earlier epochs —on anything that will help us understand BOOKS such processes as psychic numbing, or counterfeit nurturance, or the ways in which minds and bodies react to damage and loss, by efforts at repair which sometimes become new forms of disease...

...My own view is that the Japanese commitment to disarmament, far greater than that of any other victim or victor in the Second World War, is a great potential resource, with which it is unwise to tinker, even by introducing strategic considerations that might in the different political climate of the United States serve to limit rather than promote belligerence...

...These reactions led some hibakusha to try to flee the city or to hide their impairment, only to feel guilty, while others magnified their impairment or sickness, only to feel guilty...

...The silence, the fires, and the total disorder immediately following the atomic explosion were terrifying and incomprehensible to those who found themselves still alive...

...Death in Life deals with another extreme situation where the central theme is also guilt: the complex and paradoxical guilt of the survivor...