Sunrise in the West

...When the tyrant Creon left Polyncices' body to rot in the sun and condemned the living Antigone to be walled up beneath the earth, he disrupted his world's sacred expectations and received Teiresias' resonant curse: "You have confused the upper and the lower worlds...

...This year The New Leader is again a highly valued and popular teaching aid in colleges and universities aroi nd the nation...

...Cries for help went unheeded but certainly not unheard and they echo today, scarring the hibakusha with what Lifton calls "guilt over survival priority...

...Lifton's work was not without difficulties...

...Added to this were the deprivations all wars inflict: too little of everything—food, clothing, shelter and medicine...

...Who to blame...

...He goes on to explain this cryptic phrase: "The identity of the hibakusha, then, in a significant symbolic sense, becomes an identity of the dead—taking the following inner sequence: I almost died...

...SI().()()) is a psychologist's attempt to measure the catastrophe that followed atomic holocaust...

...Many survivors, Lifton found, accept the two most serious charges—apart from dropping the bomb at all —brought against America: that our decision was based on racial considerations, and that we used the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as guinea pigs in a laboratory experiment...

...Has their test taught them nothing we can understand...

...it is a duty to understand the nature of our survival, and its lessons...

...and by living as if dead, I take the place of the dead and give them life...

...This is the singular quality of the bomb's suddenness...

...Yet there is a compulsion—and it is far more central and noble than a mere morbid itch for the grotesque?to hear from those who have passed through the fire to emerge alive...

...they must remain unmarried or make matches with other victims or with those unsuited for various reasons to marry "normal" people...

...In the spring and summer of 1962 he interviewed mam of the t)().00() survivors who still live in Hiroshima attempting to discover how the) differ from those of us who ne\er saw the sun rise in the West, l.ifton writes that he lived in Japan at irregular intervals for 10 years before he could bring himself to go to Hiroshima, and that those of his colleagues who began studies of hiba-kuslut?explosion-affected persons"—rarely were able to complete them...

...They came to be cured and were instead scrupulously examined, but therapy was largely ignored...

...Hochhuth examined hundreds of the most grotesque photographs from Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen...

...The message, Lifton writes, was that "none can escape the poison...

...Then the black rain began, chunks of filth that fell for six hours...

...On their way to work an air raid sounded, but that was nothing rare and was followed by an all-clear signal, reinforcing the atmosphere of security...

...who profit from calamity...

...But Lifton's monotonous tone is perfectly appropriate to another of his discoveries about Hiroshima, that of "psychic numbing...

...and because of their "continuing group relationship to world fears of nuclear extermination...

...Thus the conundrum: Should the wronged cultivate or surrender memory...

...When he asked survivors whether they hated Americans, he-was asked in return whether he hated Germans...

...There is great antagonism in Hiroshima against those who "sell the bomb...

...Or, as a young psychoanalyst who survived told Lifton more succinctly: "You can't hate magic...

...or if I am alive it is impure of me to be so...

...all shall eventually die...

...What secrets have they learned...

...family love was often shattered, as it was in the concentration camps, by the raw selfishness of the appetite for life, however degraded...

...At such times, perhaps, we wonder what it would be like and we ask what it was like...

...WRITERSfc^WRITING Sunrise in the West By Geoffrey Wolff That the sun shall rise and the rain cleanse and burial in the earth lend decency to our deaths—these are the co-ordinates by which we set our lives...

...The burden of the survivors is exacerbated by many in the classroom Every semester scores of teachers and thousands of students use The New Leader as source material in Political Science...

...The Japanese, in their attitudes toward Koreans for example, are not free of racial hatred and among themselves are sensitive to modulations of color...

...The manner and method of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission during the Occupation made many hibakusha feel they were merely the manipulated objects of research...

...The cause may be fear that the bomb will fall: more often it is the simple memor\ that it has fallen...

...He describes the extraordinary case of a hospital room full of sick survivors who, days after the holocaust, improved measurably when they heard their government had dropped atomic bombs on Cal'fornia...

...Yet Lifton also avoids the exphcitly tragic mode, avoids selling the bomb: "I have tried throughout this book to write with restraint about matters that make their own emotional statements...

...What would he do with his royalties'.' The author admits that he was unable to answer many of the questions he was asked...

...If you are not already using The New Leader in the classroom, take advantage of this special offer now by returning the coupon below...

...the epidemic is total...

...It is a presumption to pretend to speak authentically of events no words can properly describe...

...The people who suffered all this lay great emphasis on anticipating death with dignity...

...Desk copy free...

...Where a city stood, nothing remained...

...His technique was to interview a survivor several times—including as many prominent hibakusha as possible?assisted by an interpreter and a tape-recorder...

...The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war...

...Weariness interrupts the "work of mourning," making the inscription on the Cenotaph, "Rest in Peace," a cruel reminder that rest is a torment...

...Nothing disrupts our bearings more terribly than to have such certainties turned from their courses...

...The shock, and its timing, are indescribable...

...Government and History courses...

...At first they sickened him, but soon he began to ignore their content and to see only what esthetic merit they possessed—how gracefully this arm was twisted around barbed wire and that mouth was wrenched open in pain...

...The survivors of Hiroshima had no opportunity to attain such psychic numbing until long after the explosion...

...Minimum order: 5 subscriptions...

...I enclose...

...Perhaps the survivors would be healthier if they had someone to hate, an Eichmann let's say...

...most horrible to imagine, has their test taught them nothing at all...

...594 pp...

...The early interviews, he tells us, shocked him horribly, yet very soon he began to foreclose his natural reactions to the sight of keloids—the grotesque scar tissue that is the special mark of hiba-kusha—and the descriptions of children burned to their bare flesh...

...Causal relationships became irrelevant: ". . . the holocaust [was] too vast and incomprehensible for locating objects of hate...

...The lingering fear of contagion blocks hibakusha from normal intercourse, forcing them into what is often a contemptuous community of the scarred, many of whom believe in the justice of their fate...

...because the legend —or the reality—of persisting radiation disease left them permanent outcasts of their community...

...Death in Life drones like a chant, and like a chant its lessons are repeated obsessively: The survivors of Hiroshima are unique in the world's history because the death they witnessed was so sudden and total...

...There was no certainty that another attack would not come...

...The survivors are tainted...

...it is not that they envy the dead but that they feel inferior to the dead, feel they robbed the dead...

...The inhabitants heard (incorrectly) that Hiroshima would be unfit for life for 70 years, that all who lived there would die and flowers would never grow in their city again...

...the weekend had suffused Hiroshima's citizens with a feeling of rested well-being...

...The survivor of the concentration camp became, in a sense, conditioned to death before he saw it: in the ghetto, in the round-up for deportation, in the virulence of constant anti-Semitism...

...This suddenness was aggravated by the fact that until August 6, 1945, the city had not been bombed, despite its importance as a military complex...

...From the White House, the day we bombed Hiroshima, came an echo of that confusion in the form of a press release: The atomic bomb "is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe...

...I did die, or at least I am not really alive...

...He began to ignore specific horrors and hear only patterns...

...We too, of course, are survivors...

...Kuboyama...

...Lifton is a Jew...

...And six weeks later Hiroshima suffered terrible floods that killed thousands more, among them many of the doctors who had been sent to minister to the wounded...

...To test his apprehension he put Hiroshima, the paradigm of violence and death, on the psychoanalyst's couch...

...In short there was nothing to batten upon...

...The breakdown of red blood cells and the frequency of leukemia are not acknowledged by American science to result from radiation exposure, but the Japanese call such symptoms "A-bomb disease...

...This is only right, of course...

...The New Leader College Division 212 Fifth Ave., New York, N. Y. 10010 Please send me........subscriptions to The New Leader for the Spring Term 1968 at $2.00 per term per subscription...

...A young physician told Lifton: "You may look healthy from the outside but all of a sudden something goes wrong and you are sick fatally...

...The blackness seemed complete, perhaps the more so because it came from the heavens and from an unseen hand...

...I should have died...

...Looking for appropriate scenes to project on a gauze backdrop while his play progressed...

...Some survivors were darkened by exposure to the bomb's heat, and this increases their consciousness of the difference between the white men who killed and the yellow men who died...

...People seemingly unaffected bled internally...

...The survivors complain incessantly of exhaustion, of an inability to concentrate or work...

...scars and boils formed on their skin...

...For the most part, however, guilt obliterates hatred...

...Others wanted to know his angle...

...He explains why the interviews and compilations were so frequently broken off: "Ultimately, the ineffability of atomic bomb exposure—its relationship to cosmic mysteries that one can neither grasp nor explain—gives hibakusha an inner sense that all talk about it is inauthentic...

...anything I do which affirms life is also impure and an insult to the dead, who alone are pure...

...That August morning was bright and clear...

...Many-resisted him, saying they wanted to forget...

...This is the death in life of the book's title, a numb burden of weariness and futility at once a metaphor and a fact...

...We too are numbed by the dead, by their numbers and the grossness of their end...

...sexual desire and repression, have been displaced in our atomic age by the far more catastrophic ones of "unlimited technological violence and absurd death...

...Robert Jay Lifton's Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima ('Randon House...

...Soon the survivors' hair began to drop away...

...He has succeeded so well that his language and his book shield us from what should shock us...

...Lifton's thesis is that the internal secrets of Freud's age...

...But at Hiroshima there was a "sudden and absolute shift from normal existence to an overwhelming encounter with death...

...The author provides no scientific answer...

...Because of the uncertainties of hibakusha''s health they are often considered unfit for employment...

...Among some of the survivors Lifton found a negative formulation which says, in effect: "I can accept having been singled out for this special degree of suffering only if everybody else is put through it...

...From the deck of the Lucky Dragon, a Japanese fishing boat 87 miles off Bikini Atoll, Aikichi Kuboyama saw an even more chilling example of the confusion on March 1. 1954...

...their keloids are too ugly to behold...

...name of instructor name of college or university address other factors: The Japanese who did not experience the bomb are apt to treat those who did as pariahs...

...I can accept the A-bomb only if the world is engulfed in nuclear disaster...

...Our student rate represents a remarkable saving—S'2.00 per term per student for a minimum order of five subscriptions sent to the instructor...

...But, again, the suddenness of the bombing and its anonymity dilutes the energy of active revenge...

...On a clear, uneventful day an unexpected siren announcing the noon hour can...

...Then the bomb fell, killing from 80,000 to 220,000 people, depending on the statistics you care to believe, ours or theirs...

...That day the United States tested a hydrogen bomb over the atoll...

...Rolf Hochhuth tells a similar story about his research for The Deputy...

...for a moment, induce a feeling of dislocation and anxiety...

...In addition, we sense the rebuke of those survivors who saw the sun rise in the West while for us that day, as today, it rose in its proper orbit...

...Having passed the ultimate test, having survived the worst man or nature can inflict, one might think they would feel magically charmed, but according to Lifton this is rarely the case...

...There can be no objective measure of what happened at Hiroshima, and to bring to such examinations the quality of detachment would be unspeakable...

...who would die seven months later of radiation poisoning, saw an extraordinary flash beyond the horizon and declared to his fellows: "The sun rises in the West...