Teikoku Doumei Rhapsody BLUE MOON (Japanese Edition)

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Understanding the Power Structures Behind the 3. Koide Hiroaki Interviewed by Le Monde. For a complete list of APJ articles on 3. Radiation and its consequences for People and Environment in Japan and the World. Sasamori died in June , after this preface was written. The law was later passed and came into effect on July 14, This article looks at her criticisms of the nuclear disasters at Tokaimura in and Fukushima ongoing , and her emphasis on the dangers of radiation as one which affects all humanity.

The experience would forever change her life and, eventually provide the central theme during her later career as a writer. For Hayashi, the problem of radiation damage does not end with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rather, it has consequences that affect all humanity. Writers of atomic bomb literature including Hayashi have long focused on the dangers of nuclear weapons, including the ongoing suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hibakusha.

Few have directly criticized nuclear power. While Hayashi was no exception to this, her attention to the lingering dangers of radiation as a problem that can affect people and the environment for generations to come, is applicable to problems of nuclear power as well. Furthermore, in more recent works Hayashi has turned her. In linking nuclear power with nuclear weapons she has created a powerful critique of all forms of atomic energy.

While the disaster at the Fukushima TEPCO nuclear power plant in March put the dangers of nuclear power in the world spotlight, Japanese nuclear plants had experienced earlier disasters including the accident at a JCO nuclear fuel conversion plant in Tokaimura, Ibaraki, an incident which had a large impact on Hayashi. While she was writing From Trinity to Trinity 5 , a mishandled nuclear fuel conversion procedure at a JCO processing plant for nuclear fuel exposed three workers to deadly amounts of radiation and made more than other workers hibakusha.

Approximately , residents over a 10 kilometer radius were told to remain in their homes after radioactive particles, as well as neutron and gamma rays, leaked out of the plant. Ultimately at least people were dangerously exposed to radiation. This prompts her to write a letter to her friend Rui,. Just about an hour ago when I returned to my hotel room, I overheard news of the Tokaimura incident on television. Tomorrow I depart for Trinity. One of the three workers exposed to high-level radiation is carried by stretcher from the JCO plant.

It is also the terminus for me as a hibakusha — from Trinity to Trinity. The narrative is broken at many points as she recalls stories from the past, or reflects on things she has read. Much of the story is written as a letter to Rui, who is described as a younger, female friend.

Hayashi expands her focus in Trinity to include nuclear power in her criticism of nuclear weapons, and to move beyond the experiences of atomic bomb victims to include victims of other nuclear disasters. One example of this occurs in the language with which Hayashi frames nuclear weapons and nuclear power. This was not the case though, the first hibakusha had been right here. Additionally, there is the use of the word hibaku. The first refers to being bombed, especially by an atomic bomb, and contains the nuance of receiving radiation damage.

The issue of internal radiation exposure has been of the greatest concern for Hayashi. Many of her works were written as victims of the atomic bombs suffering from radiation sickness were attempting to gain recognition from the government. Ultimately, Hayashi writes, the Japanese government refused to recognize the link between radiation sickness from internal exposure and the atomic bombs.

Katakana can also be used when the writer wishes to delineate certain boundaries or insert ambiguity around a meaning which might otherwise be implied were the word to be written with Chinese characters. The novel depicts the character Rui as a younger friend, however, it is natural to think that the author also implies that Rui represents humanity. One strongly thinks that atomic energy versus human beings and the earth is a larger theme than that dealt with in her previous works, which were based on personal experiences as an A-bomb victim. In Human Experiences Over a Long Time Hayashi illustrates the danger of radiation with an increased sense of urgency, reflective of the magnitude of a problem such as nuclear energy versus human beings, a danger illustrated in a number of different scenes in Trinity.

This ever present danger is wonderfully illustrated through the metaphor of the intruder. Awakened by a sound during the night, she glimpses the outline of a man outside the door to her garden. The man walks away, but the narrator is terrified and checks to see that all of the doors are locked. In the morning, she is unsure of whether she really saw him, but when she finds something the man had left behind, she is sure. She mentions that, after this event, she installed a security system and was more careful to lock the doors.

I had been embracing a groundless sense of security, thinking that our daily peace was protected. On hot summer nights, I would leave the glass door in the hallway open a crack to let the wind blow in and sometimes would forget to lock the door. Danger is always within close proximity. But somehow it sounded wrong. Was it alright to be so complacent?

mangotradersonly

This short story depicts an elderly farmer and his son who live right next to the nuclear processing plant. In scenes that eerily anticipate the tragic events later to unfold at Fukushima, the reader witnesses a nuclear disaster unfolding only meters away through the eyes of the main character.

Uninformed about the details of the plant next door to his farm, the main character — 74 year old Yamada — goes about his day in typical fashion until the faint sound of sirens within the plant walls begins to sound. Learning about the accident only after watching the news on television, Yamada is eventually told to evacuate along with the rest of the surrounding area.

However, unwilling to leave his farm right before the harvest, he decides to stay. What is both striking and tragic in the story is the lack of knowledge of the characters about nuclear power — so much so that the nature of the accident is almost completely beyond their comprehension. Coupled with this is the fact that the language used by the characters could equally be addressing an atomic bomb explosion as another form of nuclear disaster. Here again, Hayashi breaks through the boundaries between nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

Near the beginning of the story, Yamada reflects on the wall which was erected right next to his field, to block off the plant. All he knew was that, after the wall had been put up, one part of his potato field had been cut off from sunlight. After the disaster, Yamada and his son are in danger. Although they hear sirens inside the plant, they receive no warning and are forced to get their information from the television news.

This, however, proves to be of little help as. There was no room for groundless rumors or gossip and no materials with which to compare how things really were. Eventually, Yamada chooses to remain in his home and complete the harvest of his sweet potatoes. After most of the surrounding area has been voluntarily evacuated, news crews begin to move in right next to his home and scientists come to monitor the level of radiation in his fields. Here again though, Yamada is given conflicting information about the levels of radiation. Radioactive particles are detected in 33 different soil samples from the surrounding area, but he is told that the levels are much lower than normally found in nature.

Salt — an indicator of radioactivity — is taken from his house, but the results of this test are never returned to him. One week after the accident, Yamada and his son harvest the potatoes, unaware of whether the fields have been contaminated by radiation. It is this disbelief that strikes a nerve with Yamada, who had never been informed that he was in danger. Officials monitor radiation levels at a radish field, 1km away from the Tokaimura plant The nuclear disaster that Hayashi depicts in Harvest through the Tokaimura incident of takes on new meaning following the nuclear meltdown at the TEPCO-operated nuclear power plant in Fukushima.

Unfortunately however, as American University History Prof. It had forgotten the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sakuhin to Shogai ga Kataru Living the Bomb: Reflecting on her wartime experiences and career as a writer, Hayashi elaborates on the background behind From Trinity to Trinity , and ties together the dangers of radiation from bombs and nuclear power, especially in light of the disaster at Fukushima.

Hayashi again confronts nuclear energy as the combined danger of nuclear weapons and nuclear power through her use of the word kaku. In speaking of her trip to the Trinity site, she reflects on the problem of radiation for the modern age. The Ground Zero monument that stands at the Trinity site is the warning sign that humans have plunged into the nuclear kaku age. Later, she reflects further on how her visit to the Trinity site was intended to bring closure to her personal journey fighting against nuclear weapons, and to break away from August 9 th.

However, seeing the damage that nuclear power caused to the animals and environment at the test site, and observing the lingering effects of radiation, she was led to think of the effects of radiation on humanity and nature in larger terms than before. People today think of nuclear energy only as a fuel source. There are still many hibakusha from August 6 th and 9 th alive in Japan. At least politicians and experts are supposed to understand this.

Once again, it is internal exposure naibu hibaku that concerns Hayashi.

This removes the previous linguistic boundary that distinguished A-bomb victims and victims of other radiation damage. After Fukushima, Hayashi spoke with renewed urgency, and at times abandoned metaphor to speak more directly. Atomic bombs are different from what powers nuclear plants.

Yet, at their core, they are the same nuclear matter. When you carry this line of thought to connect August 9 th and Fukushima, it is apparent that both pose problems of how one thinks about human life. The value of human life is fundamental for Hayashi and it runs through all of the works examined here.

As an atomic bomb victim, she has witnessed and shared the history of hibakusha, from their struggle to gain recognition from the government, to their discrimination in society and lifelong suffering from radiation. One of these examples is the metaphor of the Spanish conquistadores in Trinity. The narrator uses the story to transition between her time just after visiting the National Atomic Museum and just before traveling by car through the New Mexico countryside.

Santa Fe is interesting in the history of conquest. Any land that people set their eyes on seems to have an enticing charm before it has ever been trodden… Enticed by the native American legend, exploration parties passed through Santa Fe as they made their way east and west in search of the city of treasure and gold. The explorers either suffered from internal divisions or became entangled in local disputes that ended in bloodshed. Beneath the surface of this critique of European expansion, these words touch on a more fundamental issue for Hayashi — the concept of center versus periphery.

The nuclear power plants in Japan, such as those at Tokaimura and at Fukushima are located far from the hub of empire — Tokyo. When accidents happened, it was not the people of Tokyo who were threatened, but the people who lived near the plants — the farmers, and members of other rural communities.

This is something that Shimamura, in his discussion with Hayashi, elaborates on in Living the Bomb where he exposes the harsh reality of the power politics involved in the Japanese nuclear industry. Speaking first to the origin and connection of the Trinity Site with the European colonizers, he points out,. The European colonizers chased the Native Americans out one after another and snatched up increasingly large portions of their land.

It was on that land that they conducted the nuclear test. In other words, it was built upon the plunder and cheap purchase of lives. I think that nuclear power plants are the same — they are founded upon lives which are looked down upon and cheaply bargained for. Whether in Fukushima or Aomori or Fukui, nuclear power plants are located where there is a bounty of nature. In other words, none are located in urban areas or industrialized areas. The issue of discrimination of center against periphery, central to both Trinity and Harvest , is one on which Hayashi elaborates on in Living the Bomb.

Relating a story of a conversation with her friend, a doctor who had worked with hibakusha since the end of the war, Hayashi asks why the United States would set an 80 kilometer evacuation zone, while the Japanese Government only set a mandatory 20km evacuation zone around the crippled nuclear plant in Fukushima. Hayashi states that only from one other person — a doctor who had worked with patients of the Chernobyl disaster and urged mandatory evacuation 30km around the plant at Fukushima — did she hear similar words used in the mainstream media.

In return for accepting nuclear reactors, struggling rural economies like those in Fukushima received subsidies from the central government, and the promise of jobs and prosperity. Like nuclear power plants, U. When Hayashi speaks of discrimination and the value of human life to lament the actions of the government after the disaster at Fukushima, she speaks from a lifetime of living with the damaging effects of radiation as a hibakusha, and out of concern for future generations.

Recalling the struggles of Nagasaki and Hiroshima hibakusha to gain recognition from the government, she worries about how the long term human effects of radiation from Fukushima will be dealt with, stating:. Amongst my hibakusha friends, many have repeatedly been in and out of the hospital. However, even if they submitted the forms to gain recognition as suffering from radiation sickness, their claims were continually rejected on the grounds that there was no connection between the atomic bomb and their sickness, or that the cause was unclear.

Recognition based on the often invisible effects of internal radiation damage, the issue that has been most important for Hayashi, was repeatedly denied by the government. After the disaster at Fukushima, however, the issue of internal radiation damage naibu hibaku was raised publically for the first time. Through metaphor and language in From Trinity to Trinity , Harvest , and other stories in Human Experience Over a Long Time , Hayashi directs her lifelong message about the dangers of radiation and the struggles of hibakusha to encompass atomic power in general.

In this way, she effectively directs comment and criticism that speaks to contemporary issues of nuclear power—both the atomic bomb and nuclear energy. Transcribed by Shimamura Teru. Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. University of Chicago Press, Yuki Tanaka and Peter Kuznick. Shimizu Shuji and Noguchi Kunikazu. Rinkai Hibaku no Shougeki: Tokaimura Rinkai Jiko no Machi kara: Morimoto, , Justin Aukema is a graduate student at Sophia University in Tokyo. His current research is focused on the Japan air raids, as well as anti-war authors and films in Japan.

Including Wisconsin Perspectives on the Atomic Bombings. He can be reached at aukemajk gmail. Justin Aukema, 'A Problem for all Humanity: More on the uses of the word will be discussed later. Speaking from a Life and Works Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, , The Tokaimura incident occurred on September 30 th , For more in depth analysis see, for example, Nanasawa Kiyoshi.

Human Experiences Over a Long Time. Kodansha, , March, , Nihongo Daijiten , Vol. Shogakukan, , ; Nihongo Daijiten, Vol. Kodansha ; Gakken Kokugo Daijiten. Shogakukan, ; Kojien. The two writings of hibaku are often confused, and some dictionaries list them under the same heading.

It is one of the marvels of our time that the nuclear industry managed to resurrect itself from its ruins at the end of the last century, when it crumbled under its costs, inefficiencies, and mega-accidents. That mainstream media have been powerful advocates for nuclear power comes as no surprise. Everyone knows that radiation at high dose is harmful, but the Hiroshima studies reassure that risk diminishes as dose diminishes until it becomes negligible.

This is a necessary belief if the nuclear industry is to exist, because reactors release radioactive emissions not only in accidents, but in their routine, day-to-day operations and in the waste they produce. If low-dose radiation is not negligible, workers in the industry are at risk, as are people who live in the vicinity of reactors or accidents—as is all life on this planet.

Its legacy is for longer than civilization has existed; plutonium, with its half life of 24, years, is, in human terms, forever. Japan, which has the distinction of being twice nuked, first as our wartime enemy then in as our ally and the recipient of our GE reactors, has also been the population most closely studied for radiation-related effects, for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings created a large, ready-made population of radiation-exposed humans.

But sufficient numbers did voluntarily come forth to make this the largest—and longest—study of radiation-related health effects ever. No medical study has had such resources lavished on it, teams of scientists, state of the art equipment: Since it is assumed in epidemiology that the larger the sample, the greater the statistical accuracy, there has been a tendency to accept these data as the gold standard of radiation risk. Throughout the occupation years Japanese medical journals were heavily censored on nuclear matters. In late , US Army surgeons issued a statement that all people expected to die from the radiation effects of the bomb had already died and no further physiological effects due to radiation were expected.

The issue of radiation poisoning was particularly sensitive, since it carried a taint of banned weaponry, like poison gas. The first western journalists allowed in were similarly under military escort. Alice Stewart, an early critic—and victim—of the Hiroshima studies. During the Cold War, officials were assuring us we could survive all-out nuclear war by ducking and covering under desks and the U. This was not a normal or representative population: Her studies of childhood cancer had found that children incubating cancer became times more infection sensitive than normal children.

Children so immune-compromised would not have survived the harsh winters that followed the bombings, when food and water were contaminated, medical services ground to a halt, and antibiotics were scarce—but their deaths would not have been recorded as radiation-related cancer deaths.

Nor would the numerous stillbirths, spontaneous abortions, and miscarriages known effects of radiation exposure have been so recorded. Stewart maintained that were many more deaths from radiation exposure than official figures indicated. Besides, the survivors had been exposed to a single, external blast of radiation, often at very high dose depending on their distance from the bombs , rather than the long, slow, low-dose exposure that is experienced by people living near reactors or workers in the nuclear industry.

In the Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies, by contrast radiation exposure was estimated on the flimsiest of guesswork. The radiation emitted by the bombs was calculated according to tests done in the Nevada desert and was recalculated several times in subsequent decades. Researchers asked such questions as, where were you standing in relation to the blast, what was between you and it, what had you had for breakfast that morning, assuming that the survivors would give reliable accounts five years after the event. Stewart was also proved right on the issue of fetal X-rays, though it took her two decades to convince official bodies to recommend against the practice, during which time doctors went right on X-raying pregnant women.

It took her another two decades to build a case strong enough to persuade the US government, in , to grant compensation to nuclear workers for cancer incurred on the job. Yet this year old RERF data set continues to be invoked to dismiss new evidence—evidence of cancer clusters in the vicinity of nuclear reactors and findings from Chernobyl.

More than 40 studies have turned up clusters of childhood leukemia in the vicinity of nuclear facilities, reckons Ian Fairlie, an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment and a former member of the Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters an investigatory commission established by the U.

But in , something extraordinary happened, when a government-appointed committee formed in response to the pressure of concerned citizens turned up increased rates of childhood leukemia in the vicinity of all 16 nuclear power plants in Germany. The Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung von Kernkraftwerken study, known by its acronym KiKK, was a large, well-designed study with a case-control format cancer cases and controls.

This was inexplicable within current models of estimating radiation risk: As Sawada Shoji, emeritus professor of physics at Nagoya University and a Hiroshima survivor, confirms, the Hiroshima studies never looked at fallout: A bomb blast gives off radiation in the form of high-energy subatomic particles and materials that remain as fallout in the form of radioactive elements such as strontium 90 and cesium. Most of this is likely to remain on the ground, where it will radiate the body from without, but some may be ingested or inhaled and lodge in a lung or other organ, where it will continue to emit radioactivity at close range.

Infection, a virus, a mosquito, socioeconomics, chance say the experts quoted in The Guardian. When new evidence comes into conflict with old models, reinvoke the old models rather than looking at the new evidence. The world is flat. So is it flat in Chernobyl. The Times did not mention that the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA , which is mandated with the promotion of nuclear energy, has an agreement with WHO that gives it final say over what it reports, an entangling alliance much decried by independent scientists.

The authors are impeccably credentialed: Alexey Yablokov was environmental advisor to Yeltsin and Gorbachev; Dr. When he died in as a result of radiation exposure incurred flying over the burning reactor which gave us the only measurement of radionuclides released by the accident , his son Dr. Janette Sherman, consulting editor, is a physician and toxicologist. Every system in the body is adversely affected: The children are not thriving: Parallels between Chernobyl and Hiroshima are striking: The Hiroshima studies find little genetic damage in the survivors, yet Yablokov et al.

Such findings have provided radiation experts a chance to reexamine their hypotheses and theories about radiation effects, observes Mikhail Malko, a researcher at the Joint Institute of Power and Nuclear Research in Belarus. Radiation scientists denied that the thyroid cancer that increased exponentially after the accident could be a consequence of radiation: They explained the increase in terms of improved screening, iodine substances used to treat the children, or pesticides—even though epidemiological studies kept turning up a link with radiation contamination.

Finally in , a case-control study headed by Elisabeth Cardis confirmed a dose-response relationship between radiation and thyroid cancer in children in terms that had to be acknowledged. Chernobyl does not usually provide the kind of neat laboratory conditions that allow such precise dose-response calculations. But neither did Hiroshima , where radiation exposure was guesstimated years after the fact and recalculated several times according to new findings.

Comparisons with Chernobyl have been conspicuously absent from mainstream media, even when Fukushima was upgraded, in early June, to a level on a par with Chernobyl, level 7, the highest. Even when Arnold Gundersen, a nuclear engineer turned whistleblower who has been monitoring Fukushima from the start, asserted that this accident may actually be more dire than Chernobyl.

Gundersen, an informed, level-headed commentator who inspires confidence, points out that there are four damaged reactors leaking into the atmosphere, ocean, and ground in an area more populated than the Ukraine: What Chernobyl has wrought, which has been documented so clearly by Yablokov et al.

The New York Times has done good reporting on Japanese blunders and corruption. As laudable as some of the Times coverage has been, what it targets is the ineptitude and corruption of the Japanese, what happened over there as opposed to what goes on here, where our own dirty linen remains unwashed, as it were, and out of sight. How much easier to criticize the lax regulatory mechanisms and lack of transparency of the Japanese than to shine a light on ourselves, on the insidious but largely invisible working of the nuclear lobby and lobbyists in this country, on the complicity of our own government and media with the nuclear industry.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to rally support: Plant operators built lavish, fantasy-filled public relations buildings that became tourist attractions. What Onishi describes as happening in Japan happened in the U. This propaganda machine is described in the study Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology in America: The Times coverage of Fukushima has raised hopes in some quarters that this current disaster may have opened a space for public debate in mainstream media about nuclear power.

But how real is this debate, when so many fundamental issues remain hidden? How open a discussion can this be, when Chernobyl and the German reactor study go unmentioned, when we have to turn to alternative media to learn that the Yablokov study even exists—or to learn that, as Alexander Cockburn reports, 41 Obama was the recipient of generous campaign contributions from the nuclear industry which may cast some light on his enthusiastic support of nuclear power?

So RERF reassurances about radiation risk remain unchallenged and in place as the invisible buttressing of the nuclear industry, as the basis of radiation safety standards throughout the world. Contrast the response of U. And so nuclear power marches on: There has been precious little mention in U. A person in Seattle was breathing about five, that same month. They come to people that are weak-spirited, that brood and fret.

Yamashita Shunichi, 44 who has been assigned to head the official study of radiation health effects in the Fukushima population. Yamashita was sent by the Japanese government from Nagasaki University, where he was part of the RERF studies, revered for their long experience with the A-Bomb survivors. Mandated with addressing the concerns of the citizens and correcting their misconceptions, Yamashita rallies the population with stirring words: Fukushima has beaten Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From now on, Fukushima will become the world number 1 name. A crisis is an opportunity. This is the biggest opportunity. Gayle Greene, 'Science with a Skew: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences , link. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial, , Farrel, of the research commission of the Manhattan Project… said that at that time [Sept ] in Hiroshima and Nagasaki all those fatally ill had already died and no one was suffering from atomic radiation.

Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation , , Studies of the morality of A-bomb survivors. A fuller discussion of cancer clusters and the studies that dismiss them is in chapter 13 of The Woman Who Knew Too Much. German Federal Office for Radiation Protection. Consequences on Human Health, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, link. Int J Occup Environ Health , , 15 3: While that war is being fought, we should not talk about bankruptcy. Following the March Fukushima disaster, a host of commentators, in Japan and internationally, decried the corruption, smugness and shortsightedness that led Japan to choose nuclear power in the fifties.

Nothing demonstrates this better than the reaction of the city of Hiroshima to the introduction of the Atomic age. Significantly, the museum, which hosted the exhibit, one year earlier, had hosted the equally successful World Congress Against A- and H-Bombs, and it was also the museum that exhibited the horrors of the bombing. The Atoms for Peace exhibit was not accepted without some debate and resistance from activists. But opposition was overcome. The exhibit was instrumental in solidifying the dominant Japanese view that atomic energy was a legitimate, indeed essential, source of energy in a Japan that relied heavily on imported oil and natural gas.

This was especially clear in light of the fact that a similar initiative to use Hiroshima as a symbolic site for domesticating and repackaging of the atom, in the shape of a proposal to build an American-financed nuclear power station in Hiroshima, had failed only a year earlier. In the wake of the exhibit, opponents of the introduction of atomic power faced an uphill battle against an overwhelming political, economic and media campaign in support of atom power. If in opponents, at least in Hiroshima, could draw on the experience of Atomic victimhood, it was much harder to do so in when the exhibit came to Hiroshima.

As Yuki Tanaka recently demonstrated, many hibakusha supported nuclear energy, calling it "energy for life" in contrast to the deadly energy of the bomb. Following the Lucky Dragon Five incident and the radiation scares that came in its wake, the anti-nuclear movement in Japan received a tremendous boost. Millions of Japanese signed petitions, marched and showed solidarity with Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Lucky Dragon victims. The sudden rise and the massive size of the anti-nuclear movement came as a surprise to many in Japan and outside of it.

The incident seemed to wreck these efforts in Japan and beyond. A number of official initiatives followed culminating in a proposal on April 28th that the USIA organize exhibitions on the peaceful uses of atomic energy and promote contacts with Japanese scientists and engineers as well as with media figures and politicians who held favorable views of the United States.

These figures already had a history with nuclear energy. As Evan Osnos has observed, nobody in Japanese politics was more inspired by nuclear power than Nakasone. Nakasone, who had witnessed the Hiroshima blast, wrote: That moment motivated me to think and act toward advancing the peaceful use of nuclear power.

This did not mean that the scientific community opposed nuclear energy. This and other proposals were opposed by some scientists. If that meant there is a delay to Japanese civilization, so be it. Other nations are obliged to help Japan's effort. A delay in civilization was out of the question for most scientists and, it turned out, for most Japanese as well.

Indeed, the JSC had little choice in the matter as government and industry quickly moved to forge ties with U. The first nuclear cooperation agreement was signed in November and Japan moved ahead to build its first reactor. Opponents were also facing a huge public campaign to promote nuclear energy.

Shibata, who started his career by successfully breaking a strike at the Yomiuri Shinbun , first became involved with nuclear power when visiting the U. The head of General Dynamics, Vernon M. Hopkins of General Electrics. Watson, an alleged NSC operative in Tokyo.

We have a saying in Japan doku wo motte doku wo sei suru to control poison one must use poison ; we can use the good side of nuclear power to smash anti-nuclear sentiment. The groups had contacts with General Electric and Westinghouse dating to the prewar period. These connections led smoothly to the adoption of the American light water reactor LWR type despite serious safety concerns. Jigen Kaizoku De Scar!! Sega Ages Series Vol. Simple Series UltimateVol.

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Tetsu 1 — Densha de Battle! This site uses cookies. Materials of United States Administration Preparation , ed. Buell, The Native Problem in Africa , vol. The Macmillan Company, , Marshall, Learning to be Modern: Westview, , However, individual classes tended to limit the number of Koreans to approximately 10 percent, or three to four students per class. Japanese enrollees in Korean schools averaged about three to four percent. Japanese Diet Library, Koreans in Japan gained suffrage rights from and elected the first Japan-based Korean to the Japanese Diet the following year.

See also Carter J. Eckert, Offspring of Empire: This presentation, which has drawn over 19, viewers, has also received five-star ratings from people. A longer version of this presentation has attracted over 40, viewers. Underwood described the streets as follows: It has been aptly said that the city looks like a vast bed of mushrooms since none of the Korean houses are built more than one story high. American Tract Society, , East Asian Program, Cornell University, , chapter Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan , Berkeley: University of California Press, , History, Literature, and Landscape , Tokyo: Heibonsha, , Kajiyama, who grew up in Seoul, often wrote about conflict in Korean-Japanese relations.

The Making of a Korean American , Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, , A number of Korean-language magazines also managed to continue operations throughout the duration of Japanese rule. Even after this campaign had begun, Koreans who had changed their names used their Korean names on certain occasions, particularly when participating as instruments of Japanese wartime propaganda, such as in the media and cinema. Duke University Press, , University of Chicago Press, University of Washington Press, A very large number were women from Korea and China.

Other women…were rounded up at gunpoint…. Robinson argues this on two occasions. Myers and Mark R. Issues in Culture and Democracy, , ed. The following two Government-General reports, issued in the late s, warned that Korean national sentiment would continue to develop as long as the Japanese administration permitted Koreans exposure to their culture.

Japanese National Diet Library. Occupation and Japanese Politics and Society , ed. Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita, London: Routledge, , Everything was a strange contrast from what we had left; the cold colouring of Manchuria was replaced by a warm red soil, through which the first tokens of spring were beginning to appear. Instead of the blue clothing to which we had been accustomed, every one here was clad in white, both in town and country.

Rice fields greet the eye at every turn, for this is the main cereal grown. The only things that were the same were the Japanese line and the Japanese official, no more conspicuous here than in Manchuria, and apparently firmly rooted in both. Kemp had traveled through China several times before, but this was her first sight of Korea, and it gave her a vivid sense of entering a new world.

Kemp is an oddly forgotten traveler. While precursors and contemporaries like Isabella Bird and Gertrude Bell have been the subjects of much research and writing, Kemp remains a virtual unknown. Yet she was a remarkable woman: Most extraordinary of all, perhaps, was her impassioned love of China, which survived and grew despite the terrible fate that overtook her family on Chinese soil: Her journey through Korea was beset by problems from the very start: Chiao, to accompany them on their travels.

It was true that in the early twentieth century all Korean literati could read Chinese characters, but the travelers quickly discovered that most of the people they met on their journey were not literati, and the hapless Mr. Chiao spent much of his time hunting for local scholars or officials with whom he could communicate through messages written on scraps of paper or scratched into the dirt of unpaved roads. His task was not helped by the fact that their itinerary through Korea had been planned on a German map which rendered some place names into Germanized approximations that were utterly impossible to correlate with Korean, Japanese or Chinese equivalents.

In spite of these handicaps, with the help of missionaries, English-speaking Koreans and Japanese, sign language and Mr. The exchanges of ideas that she achieved across the language barrier left Emily Kemp with a generally warm and positive image of Korea: The formal annexation of Korea in August was the culmination of a long process of colonial penetration, rather than its beginning.

The European and other Powers who have wrangled over the possibility of commercial and political advantages to be obtained from the Chinese Government after the Boxer troubles have withdrawn to a certain extent, but like snarling dogs dragged from their prey, they still keep their covetous eyes upon it, and both Russia and Japan continue steadily but silently to strengthen their hold on its borders. These borders are Manchuria and Korea, and it is in this direction that fresh developments must be expected.

A century on, the region where Kemp traveled is once again in the grip of momentous transformations. The rise of China is overturning the old certainties of regional and global power relations. As the world confronts economic crises, China, the last major self-proclaimed Communist power, has ironically come to hold the key to the future of global capitalism. Above all, though, a century after the annexation, it is the fate of the Korean Peninsula that lies in the balance: Some of her stopping points: There is no way to travel directly from North to South of the Korean Peninsula, and our journey had to take a more complex and serpentine course.

Korea today is a peninsula divided, not just by barbed wire, mines and all the monstrous machinery of modern warfare, but also by words. Our North Korean driver Mr. The rival governments on either side of the divide have developed different systems for converting Korean characters into the Roman alphabet, causing endless problems for people myself included who write books in English containing place names in both North and South.

Most troublesome of all is the divide in the name given to the country itself. When Cold War Germany was divided in two, both halves at least still called themselves Deutschland. But in Korea, the regimes on either side of the Cold War dividing line chose to inherit different versions of the historical name for Korea.

The search for a shared name is just one of the multitude of roadblocks that litter the path towards reunification. The problem of names also has other, more subtle effects. Not only Koreans themselves but also their neighbours, the Japanese and Chinese, have come since to use their own versions of the two different names for the two halves of the peninsula and its people. But the debate also serves to deepen a strange shadow in Japanese memory — a shadow that obscures recollections of colonial expansion in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula.

Few of the Japanese media consider how Japan and its other neighbour, North Korea, might come together to commemorate the memory of the annexation. Chiao and the Korean missionary walking behind while conducting a silent conversation in written Chinese characters, the two women were carried in their chairs through streets lined with stalls selling a multitudinous array of unfamiliar foods: As the child of a socially-conscious industrial revolution pioneer, she wholeheartedly welcomed the modern medicine, hygiene and education which foreign intruders brought to Manchuria and Korea.

But, as a traveler who delighted in the exotic landscapes, sounds and physical sensations of Asia, she lamented the vanishing traditions displaced by modernity. Unlike other parts of Korea, where the heavy work of water-carrying was often done by women, the water-carriers of Pyongyang were mostly men, who bore their precious burden in pails on their backs.

By , however, the Japanese authorities, already in de facto control of the city, had just completed new waterworks on the banks of the broad Taedong River which flows through the centre of Pyongyang, and on Rungna Islet in the middle of the river itself. The Waterworks of Pyongyang under Construction, c. The waterworks were just part of a profound colonial reshaping of the city, whose influence can still be seen throughout the centre of Pyongyang today.

Visiting Pyongyang almost two decades before Kemp, the missionary James Gale had found an ancient city still enclosed in high walls. In the remote beginnings of recorded history, the area around Pyongyang was a place of intense interaction between Korean and Chinese kingdoms, and high on Moranbong, the forested hill overlooking the Taedong River, stood a weathered monument which for almost a millennium was revered as the tomb of the semi-mythical Chinese figure Kija.

Known as Jizu in Chinese, Kija was said to have fled from Shang China to Korea more than a thousand years before the start of the Common Era, and to have ruled the northern part of the country from Pyongyang. But in disaster struck Pyongyang. The city had the misfortune to lie in the path of Japanese troops as they marched northward towards the Yalu River, and of the Chinese army as it sought to confront them, and so became the site of one of the fiercest conflicts of the Sino-Japanese War of After the battle, the city of Pyongyang wrote Gale ,.

A Korean with his wife and three children, escaped through the thick of the fight, and by climbing the wall reached safety. He had been a man of some means, but of course had lost everything. He said he was thankful he had his three children spared to him. The little black-eyed girl had heard and seen that night what she would never forget — the rattle of Murata rifles and the other hideous accompaniments of war. In this new Pyongyang, however, parts of the old were carefully preserved. Emily Kemp climbed the forested slope of Moranbong and found the tomb surrounded by a dense grove of pine trees.

Like most visitors, they were captivated by the breathtaking view from Moranbong over the sparkling river and the fields and hills beyond. The further she traveled in Korea, the more Kemp became aware of a dark side to colonial modernity — a cultural violence that went beyond the irresistible retreat of the past in the face of encroaching modernity. Even in these final months before the formal annexation of Korea, the Japanese government continued to disavow any plans for full-scale colonization, insisting that their presence was merely a protectorate exercised with the consent of the Korean king.

It is little use to repudiate the idea of annexation, when they trample on the dearest wishes of the Korean, and treat him as a vanquished foe. The Pyongyang landscape which entranced Emily Kemp when she visited Moranbong can be seen in even greater splendour from the landmark to which every foreign visitor is taken today: Kija, with his foreign and colonial associations, has fallen out of fashion and his tomb has been destroyed; for Juche Thought is above all else profoundly nationalistic.

From the summit of the soaring white tower, surmounted by its stained glass flame, you can look out to every side across the city, and over the glittering midnight green waters of the Taedong river flowing serenely through its heart. The broad avenues and squares of the city are kept immaculately clean by legions of track-suited residents, performing their required civic duties with trowels, dustpans and brooms.

The occasional truck or bus clatters past, but most of the traffic is pedestrian. The people of Pyongyang — men in black suits or army uniforms, women in demure skirts and blouses, children in school uniforms or sports gear — move with the distinctive gait of those used to walking long distances: In the parks along the banks of the Taedong, with their neatly trimmed grass and disciplined topiary, the citizens fish, smoke, or squat in the shade of trees, reading books.

There is a strange resonance to the open spaces of Pyongyang, a deep silence lying beneath the blasts of martial music and mournful electronic midday and midnight chimes that issue from above the rooftops. Before a truck or bus appears, you can hear its approaching sound from far away, and the deepening grind of its engine continues to reverberate long after it has disappeared from view: When, in my early teens, I first lived in a big city, I would wake at night and listen in terror to that sound — the deep inhuman endless roar of the metropolis.

Now the sound of the city has become so familiar that like most people I no longer hear it; but in Pyongyang, I hear its resounding absence. At breakfast in the huge dining room of our hotel, with its white linen tablecloths and crystal chandeliers, there is no menu, but only a rather shy waitress who seems very eager to please. After some consultation and a long wait, she produces large quantities of bread and fried eggs, and quite drinkable hot coffee.

At the table next to ours an extended family, ranging from frail grandmother to small children, is conducting a conversation in a mixture of Korean and Japanese. Ryu, tell us that this hotel is often used by Korean families from Japan and even the United States who have come to North Korea to meet long-lost relatives. Later we see the same family on the steps of the hotel.

The grandmother stands shakily, bent double over a walking stick. There are tears pouring down her face. Ryu is up early, revising his text for the day as he waits to meet us in the lobby. Although he is a older than his female colleague, he is we discover a newcomer to this job, having completed his military service and also worked as a researcher for some years before becoming a guide. His English is less polished than Ms.

He does not really seem the military type, though. He looks more like a schoolteacher, which he was briefly before becoming a soldier.

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His black suit hangs loosely from his tall and gangly form, and the real loves of his life, I suspect, are his wife and the baby daughter whose photo he carries around with him in his wallet. In the car, as we drive beside the Taedong River, he rather bashfully shows us the little image of a tiny round face surmounted by tufty hair, and for a moment his eyes lose their sadness and are illuminated with a smile of pure fatherly joy. Just as most Japanese people have forgotten the devastation of Pyongyang during the Sino-Japanese War, so most Americans, British, Australians and others have forgotten or have perhaps never been aware of the obliteration of Pyongyang during the Korean War.

The North Korean government does little to remind them. The memory of war is tangible everywhere in the city, but the stories that are commemorated are those of heroic resistance and brilliant victory. And on the occasion of this war our Great Leader ordered that in one month we must liberate the whole South Korea. But our soldiers had not many weapons and the American aggressors brought massive reinforcements from their own country and from the Mediterranean Fleet and from the Pacific Fleet, and with these reinforcements they temporarily occupied some areas of the North, including Pyongyang, so our Great Leader Kim Il-Sung ordered our soldiers to temporarily retreat to the north.

The Chol Pass diorama, brought to life with the aid of melodramatic sound and light depicting enemy planes swooping low over the pass and the crackle of anti-aircraft fire, is she says very popular with children. But everyday stories of human suffering fit uneasily with this strident official narrative — in which North Korea the victim is instantly transformed into North Korea the victor. I look in vain for a commemoration of two days in the life of Pyongyang that I read about shortly before leaving Australia: As we leave the museum, our Mr.

Ryu remarks in passing, and without any noticeable sign of bitterness, that both his grandfathers and one of his grandmothers were killed in the Korean War. Such stories are commonplace here.

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The new city that rose from the chemical saturated rubble was revolutionary defiance expressed in concrete, stone and marble. Pyongyang was to be the living embodiment of Juche Thought. Its buildings would be grander, its entertainments more lavish, its culture more elevated than anything other capitals could offer. The Tower of the Juche Idea, at metres, is 70 centimeters taller than the Washington Monument, which it closely resembles. Ryu explains displaying the fruits of his careful homework it is sixty metres high and fifty meters wide, while the French version stands at less than fifty metres in height and is a paltry 45 metres in width.

The main road that once bisected the Japanese business district of Yamato Machi Japan Town was straightened and broadened in the s, and given a new name: Today it is Victory Street — like the Arch of Triumph, a commemoration of the defeat of colonialism. Pyongyang is a reward for virtue. To live in the capital is the ultimate mark of success, for more than almost any other capital city Pyongyang is dominated by the presence of the social and political elite.

Guard posts on the roads into the city carefully protect it from any influx of undesirable rural poor. The apartment blocks that face onto the wide main streets present a bland superficial face of modernity.

Emily Kemp would be horrified. Yet looking down from the summit of the Tower of the Juche Idea, you can see how each of the older apartment complexes forms a square surrounding and containing lines of rickety grey roofed one-story cottages: To one side, in a paved expanse worthy of the Palace of Versailles, torrents of surprisingly clear water flow though a series of fountains, waterfalls and ponds, between the crags of miniature mountains, around gnarled pine trees and over rocky causeways. A group of boys in pioneer uniforms — red scarves round their necks, the cuffs of their white shirts and blue trousers rolled up — balance perilously, with shrieks of delighted fear, on the boulders in the middle of the torrent.

Nearby, a newly-wed couple — the bridegroom in a grey suit, the bride in a high-waisted, wide-skirted pink chima jeogori adorned with golden flowers — laughingly play the rock-paper-scissors game as their wedding photographer darts around them selecting the best angle for his shots.

There seem to be few guests in attendance, but several passers-by stop to offer smiles and waves of blessing at the couple. North Korean marriages are still often arranged in traditional fashion by a go-between, who helps to check the political and social pedigree of the partners. But here as elsewhere in Asia, arranged marriages do not preclude love, and Mr. Ryu promises us that, when his fellow guide and driver are not around to hear, he will tell us the story of how he fell in love with his wife. Ri as we watch the bride pose in front of the fountains.

The imposing Methodist Episcopalian church, which Emily Kemp visited and whose bells rang out over central Pyongyang, was at that time just part of a rapidly growing network of Christian churches throughout the city. The first western missionaries to arrive in Pyongyang had not received a warm welcome. The voyage was a disaster that ended when the ship ran aground, the panicked crew fired cannons into a Korean crowd which had gathered nearby, and the incensed crowd set fire to the vessel, killing all on board.

But after initial hostility, in the first decade of the twentieth century the churches in the northern cities of Wonsan and Pyongyang experienced a sudden conversion boom — perhaps a response to the turmoil of war and encroaching colonialism. The Presbyterian Central Church, a lovely simple building in traditional Korean style, was large enough to contain a thousand worshippers, but when Kemp and MacDougall worshipped there it was often full to overflowing, and thirty-nine new churches had been set up in surrounding areas to accommodate the growing number of converts. Nowhere observed Kemp could there be found a more attractive sight than the hundreds of white clad women, carrying their books wrapped in cloth tied round their waists in front, or their children tied on behind, the little ones dressed in every colour of the rainbow.

These images invite speculation. But, rather unusually for a revolutionary site in a nation dedicated to the Juche Idea, Chilgol contains a church, built in and said to be a replica of the church attended by Kang Pan-Sok. The Chilgol church is just one of two Protestant churches in Pyongyang. The Pongsu Church, a little nearer to the city centre, is built in a similar unpretentious style, and is attached to noodle factory, where flour sent by Christian aid groups overseas is turned into meals for primary school children and the elderly.

Its services are, on special occasions at least, accompanied by hymns sung by a choir of students from Kim Il-Sung University.

Pyongyang also boasts Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, and a mosque in the grounds of the Iranian embassy. This strange presence of religious structures at the heart of an avowedly atheist country evokes all kinds of questions to which I expect no answers. Clearly, ordinary North Koreans are not free to choose their own religion. Unauthorized possession of a bible, indeed, is likely to bring down the most terrible punishments on the head of the offender.

Who, then, are the Koreans who attend the Chilgol, Pongsu and Catholic churches? Hwang Sok-Min stands lost in deep thought, gazing on the beautiful scenery…The inner stage is lit up, and fairies come down on it from the rainbow-spanned sky. In the revolutionary opera The Song of Kumgang-san Mountain , which premiered in , choruses of fairies provide a backdrop to the story of a family torn apart by the cruelties of Japanese imperialism.

After Liberation, the mountains — long denuded by the depredations of wicked Japanese landlords — are transformed into a socialist paradise bedecked with flowers. This is the very flute that the composer himself played long ago as a young man before being parted from his beloved family, and yes, Sun I is indeed his long lost daughter. The play-within-a-play concludes with the assembled cast heralding the glories of Kim Il-Sung, our Sun.

Emily Kemp, on her travels, often encountered pheasants in the forested mountains of Korea, and at Kumusan for the first time we catch a glimpse of a brightly plumed cock pheasant strutting across the manicured lawns. The opportunity to visit this place is a rather unexpected honour. Until recently, the palace was off limits to all foreigners except official guests of the state.

Today, this is the mausoleum where the Eternal President lies in state. Before entering the main precinct, we must hand in all our belongings except for purses. Cameras and cigarettes are particularly sternly forbidden, and a body search is carried out to make sure that none are secreted on our persons.

A green plastic shoe cleaner removes the detritus of the outer world from our feet, and we step onto a conveyor belt that glides silently along immensely long corridors, over the moat and into the realm beyond. Here in Pyongyang, the walls between which we move are lined with marble friezes of cranes — the symbol of eternal life.

In North Korea, there is a legend that on 8 July , the day when the Great Leader Kim Il-Sung died, a throng of cranes descended from the sky and gathered on the roofs and walls of his palace. Beyond the corridors lies a hall watched over by female attendants clad in black velvet Chima jeogori embroidered with golden suns. A vast statue of the lost leader is set at one end of the hall, against a background of the rising sun. As we enter the next chamber, a black-clad attendant hands us each an audio set with an English language explanation of the world beyond. As well as the Iranians, there are several other foreigners in the room, moving quietly through the hall amongst the large and orderly groups of North Korean visitors.

The taped narration is intoned in deep and dramatic cadences by a male voice with an unmistakable north-country English accent. Now we have reached the heart of the mausoleum, but before we enter it, there is a further stage of cleansing. We pass through a gateway where blasts of air sweep away impurities from our clothes and bodies.

In the middle of the sanctum beyond stands a glass case, with a long line of people waiting nearby. We join the line, and then go forward in groups of three to bow our heads before the glass case. I look at the faces of the others in the room. A few of the Korean women wipe away a tear, but the expressions on most faces are difficult to read.

The figure in the glass case wears a suit, and his head rests on a traditional Korean pillow. No longer monumental or giant sized, with faint marks of age on his face, he looks as though he is sleeping. Later, when we eat dinner with a group of guides from another tour party, Sandy who is better than me at asking forthright questions says to one of them,. Some people like to be buried. Some want to come back in another life.

Remembering the figure lying in endless state through days and long dark nights in the glass case at the heart of the Kumusan Palace, I suddenly feel filled with sadness for all the butterfly children whom Emily Kemp glimpsed, flying through fleeting shafts of sunshine into the winter gales ahead. She is the author of Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War. Her two most recent books are To the Diamond Mountains: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era. Harvard University Asia Center, Seikyo Sha, , Entente, , Davis, Korea for Christ New York: See the Japanese film footage of the devastation of Hiroshima on August 6, and its aftermath, the Bikini tests of July and the rapturous account of the American announcer shown in an American newsreel below.

This film includes the first images of hibakusha seen in the United States. The historical presentation nevertheless hews closely to triumphal American ideas about the bomb, the war and American power: What separates this film above all from its predecessors, is the presence of hibakusha, living witnesses to the horrors of the bombing. Three hibakusha relate their personal experiences in the bombings, bringing a focus to this film that is sorely lacking in most previous made-for-American-television Hiroshima documentaries. The hibakusha humanize a story usually told in the US with emphasis on the American participants and conveying exclusively their perspectives.

To be sure, Enola Gay weapon specialist Morris Jeppson, who died in April , is included in the film, but this time the Enola Gay crewmember is not the only person present in Hiroshima on that day to tell his story. Another important feature in the film is provided by the commentary of scholars. Rather than limiting their contribution to historical footnoting, the filmmakers include a series of powerful statements that address the morality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the impact of the bombs on the bodies and psyches of the victims at the time and down to the present, framing for the audience exactly why these events have affected the modern world so deeply.

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National Geographic is to be applauded for letting these voices join with those of Japanese hibakusha to be heard in American homes. The film is at its weakest when explaining why the bombs were used and what effects they had. Here we find a rote repetition of traditional American narratives of the bombing that can be traced back to August of At several points the film flatly declares, or presents Morris Jeppson the weapon specialist on the Enola Gay, stating that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki directly ended the war.

When Harry Truman introduced the new American weapon to the world and announced the successful nuclear attack on Hiroshima, he used magical language to describe the bomb. The legacy of this rhetorical strategy is evident when one visits any of the American museums devoted to exhibiting the history of nuclear weapons. These exhibitions invariably focus on the work of Manhattan Project scientists and engineers—emphasizing American techno-culture—rather than on the military use of the bombs and their legacy.

This point is made succinctly in the film by anthropologist Hugh Gusterson who points out that the American narrative of the bombing stops in August of , while the Japanese narrative of the bombing begins in August of and continues forward.

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The timelines of the American and Japanese narratives cross for only one month, and while the American narrative hails the triumphal technological achievement and then moves directly to victory, the Japanese narrative focuses on the destruction of the two cities, the death of hundreds of thousands, and the legacy of the bombing for survivors.

The magical discourse invoked by Truman was reinforced by the Japanese surrender a week after the bombing of Nagasaki. The idea that the nuclear attacks were the cause of the Japanese surrender is still hotly debated by historians: Consider the retelling of another American truism about the bombings: This classic logic of militarism, that killing is done to save lives, is presented as fact.

That was because we wished in the first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians. There are many points to consider here. First of all, as the film itself mentions, virtually every major city in Japan had been burned to the ground in the spring of by the firebombing squadrons of Curtis LeMay. This map purports to show up to 30 important targets in Hiroshima and their scale of damage after the nuclear attack. The map shows conclusively that the two or three most important military targets the Army transport base, Army ordnance depot, food depot and clothing depot are all located in the Ujina port area, and are outside of the area of destruction.

The map vividly reveals that the bomb did not target the military assets clustered at Ujina, but rather the city center: Clearly these battles go back to , and even to , within US discourse on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are, however, generally missing from mass culture presentations of this history in the United States. It is typical rather than unusual for this film to avoid such discussions. What sets this film apart however, is its inclusion of interviews and artwork done by hibakusha from Hiroshima. Considering the exclusion of hibakusha from the exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC where it is currently on display , this inclusion is noteworthy.

Throughout the film, three hibakusha talk about their experiences at the time of the bombing, immediately after the bombing, and about subsequent incidents in their lives. Tanemori Takashi was an 8 year-old boy playing hide and seek inside his school building with his friends when the bomb detonated. The school building collapsed on top of him and a soldier had to pull him out of the rubble.

Tanemori would go on to make many paintings of his experiences, publish a book, and found the Silkworm Peace Institute in California. The testimony of Koko Tanimoto Kondo opens a window onto the later life of the hibakusha. Tanimoto Kondo was only 8 months old when the bomb was dropped, and so she has no direct memory of the event, but amazingly she holds up the dress she was wearing on the morning that the bomb was detonated. Kondo, a prominent Hiroshima hibakusha and the daughter of Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, the Hiroshima Methodist minister who spearheaded the project that resulted in the medical trip to the US of the so-called Hiroshima Maidens, recounts her experiences as a subject of study by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission now known as the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.

The US was beginning to systematically manufacture nuclear weaponry and to plan for future nuclear wars. Detailed information on the effects of radiation on the human body was scarce and would become increasingly valuable as the Cold War began. The ABCC, originally staffed by American doctors, would later become a joint US-Japanese research institute and its studies still ongoing today would contribute to both military and humanitarian efforts. Kondo recounts her experiences as a subject of study at the ABCC, and her horror and anger at being made to remove her clothes in front of a room full of doctors just as she was entering puberty.

The power of her embarrassment and still tangible rage at this dehumanizing treatment and having her adolescent feelings disregarded in a setting of power inequity illustrates the revictimization of the hibakusha at the hands of the ABCC. An important contribution of the film is its introduction of paintings by the hibakusha. It is worth recalling, however, that these paintings, done decades after the bombings beginning in the s, have been tempered by time. Sociologist Akiko Naono has pointed out that many of the hibakusha she interviewed testify that they softened the depictions in the paintings from the hellish scenes they experienced in part to offer comfort to those who died.

A painting of bodies in the Ota River as Hiroshima burned. The film claims that images of the victims of Hiroshima were withheld from the American public because it was feared that exposure to these images would turn American public opinion against the bombings. This is largely, but not wholly true. It is certainly the case that the primary image of the atomic bomb that most Americans encountered, and still do encounter, is the mushroom cloud high in the sky.

Those who have seen images of the cities below have, for the most post seen images of an erased city, void of human beings, and photographed from the air. These images removed the people from the landscape and suggested that what was bombed was Hiroshima and not the people of Hiroshima. Typical early photograph of Hiroshima published in the United States, seen from the air and without any visible human beings.

These landscape images of the vanished city, and the ubiquitous image of the mushroom cloud, became the visual icons of the bombings commonly seen in the west. Photographs showing the dead and injured in Japan were banned in the US and Japan until Nevertheless, some images of hibakusha were seen in America before that ban was lifted. The first images that I have tracked were included in newsreel footage that discussed the Bikini nuclear tests in , and the first anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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