Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [140]
13. ‘Nothing, Nothing’: Memories of Hiroshima
To be sure, there was more than a little self-censorship surrounding the surviving victims of the bombs, the hibakusha. Few wished to be reminded of the terrible day; even those, like (Ota, who felt compelled to write about the experience of Hiroshima, wished they did not. The victims’ vulnerability seemed to embarrass them. They also felt ashamed of their appearance and for the burden they placed on friends and family for their medical care. ‘Hibakusha were not welcome compatriots in the new Japan,’ John Dower has written. ‘Psychologically if not physically, they were deformed reminders of a miserable past.’ Occupation censorship and Japanese self-censorship concerning the bombs thus worked in tandem to the probable satisfaction of all parties; there existed, according to Robert J. Lifton, a guilt-induced ‘ “conspiracy of silence” between instigators and victims’ of the bombs. In what may have been an act of displaced guilt, or perhaps just spite, in November 1945 Groves ordered the destruction of Nishina’s cyclotron at the Riken. US soldiers using torches, sledgehammers, and crowbars dismantled the machine and dumped its pieces in the bay. Nishina watched and wept.59
Some who survived in Hiroshima expressed resentment of or hatred for the Americans they blamed for their misery. ‘I think they must have been crazy,’ said a bar worker of the Americans. ‘[Toward them I felt] nothing but hatred.’ A businessman who lost his son in the bombing acknowledged the ‘wonderful things America has done for us’ during the occupation, but added that ‘until the moment I die I will feel resentment toward America’, while another survivor focused his ‘strong hatred’ on President Truman, whom he characterized as ‘a cold-blooded animal’. In general, though, the anger felt by survivors was either directed elsewhere, or was sublimated, denied, or transformed into some other emotion entirely. Kenzaburo Oe blamed Japan’s accelerated modernization for leading to Japanese aggression in Asia, and, inexorably, to the atomic bombings. Michihiko Hachiya spared both his emperor and the Americans his rage, settling instead for ‘hating the military authorities’ who had ‘betrayed the Emperor and the people of Japan’, and another writer agreed: ‘the anger we felt at the end of the war’, she told Lifton, ‘was not toward the bomb but the Japanese militarists.’ Toyofumi Ogura blamed himself and his fellow citizens for allowing the military to pursue its disastrous course: the bomb must be accepted as an ‘expiation of these sins’. For others, there was neither anger nor blame, for the bomb was a powerful abstraction, a ‘surreal new dimension of existence’ that was beyond the control of any human being, even those who had ordered it built and dropped. No one could be blamed for a force beyond human comprehension or control.60
Mostly, the survivors suffered, and grieved, and tried to get on with their lives, with the articulate or artistic or merely thoughtful among them occasionally coaxing forth their responses to being bombed. There were the writers, like (Oe, Tamiki Hara, and Yoko (Ota, the last of whom in 1955 published the story ‘Residues of Squalor’ (or ‘Pockets of Ugliness’). Five women and girls