Hiroshima and two paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity

Abstract

For the Japanese people, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 are singular moments of holocaust which have produced collective memories so powerful that repeated attempts by Japanese policymakers to introduce or even discuss a nuclear deterrent have been severely contested and sanctioned. Even so, Japan’s enduring rivalries with nuclear-armed China and North Korea have produced a powerful conviction among Japanese policymakers that US extended nuclear deterrence cannot be given up. Thus, two of the most pronounced paradoxes of the nuclear age are (1) the social construction of Japan whose people are simultaneously “allergic” to nuclear weapons but who do not wish to have it “treated”, and (2) successive Japanese governments which are forced to endure the “nuclear allergy” but which also will not be rid of the “allergens”. This paper develops a theoretical account of the discourse of “nuclear allergy” and thereafter explores more fully the paradoxes of nuclear allergies which must never be treated and allergens which must never be expelled.

Keywords:

• atomic bombing
• Hiroshima
• nuclear allergy
• nuclear allergen
• nuclear perplexity

Introduction

The August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were singular moments of holocaust for the Japanese people which have become so powerful in collective memory that repeated attempts by Japanese policymakers to introduce or even discuss the acquisition of a nuclear deterrent have been severely contested and sanctioned. The cultivation of a “memory culture” around the stories of the atomic “bomb-affected people” – i.e. the hibakusha – and the sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as icons of atomic victimhood have contributed to the emergence of a formidable antinuclearism. This antinuclearism has in turn put significant pressures on Tokyo and other national capitals since the 1950s to abjure the possession of nuclear weapons (see, for example, Orr 2001; Wittner 2009; Zwigenberg 2014). Moreover, this memory culture of atomic victimhood has contributed to the sustained imagining of Hiroshima as a “peace city” whose aim is to abolish nuclear weapons and even warfare itself.¹

Notwithstanding this profound antinuclearism, Japan’s enduring rivalries with nuclear-armed China and North Korea have also produced a formidable conviction among some key policymakers that Japanese security requires nuclear deterrence at some level (see, for example, Gavin 2012, 89–91; Solingen 2007, 66–79). In 1951, Tokyo entered into a security arrangement with the United States and its extended nuclear deterrence regime. Thereafter, Tokyo was pulled in opposite policy directions: i.e. to respect and represent to the world their people’s antinuclear convictions while simultaneously maintaining the security arrangement with the United States, who sought to station nuclear weapons on Japanese soil, or nuclear-armed ships in Japanese ports (Hook 1984, 263–4). By the mid-1960s, the Japanese people’s hypersensitivity to the introduction of US nuclear weapons was constructed by their government as a “nuclear allergy” in need of “treatment”, and by the late 1960s the domestic political contestation over the government’s commitment to US nuclear deterrence became entrenched.

Two pronounced and interrelated paradoxes eventually emerged in Japanese political culture as this contestation over nuclear weapons progressed. One is that the Japanese people began to regard their “nuclear allergy” as necessary for realizing nuclear abolition and hence not a condition to “treat” or eliminate. The second is that Tokyo could not be rid of US nuclear weapons qua “allergens” for reasons of national security even though the people remained “allergic” to them. These two paradoxes characterize a sustained and truncated dialectical relationship between the Japanese people and their government that reflects a collective moral perplexity, and it represents to a great extent the same moral perplexity of the international community towards nuclear weapons (see, for example, Doyle II 2015a; Walker 2012).

This paper aims to develop a more detailed theoretical account of the metaphor “nuclear allergy” and the implicit recognition of a cluster of “nuclear allergens” in Japanese political discourse than what currently exists in the academic literature. The first step is to briefly recall elements of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s account of “grammar” to the general discursive category of political metaphor. Thereafter, the paper investigates the genealogy of “nuclear allergy” and applies Wittgensteinian insights to the pro- and anti-nuclear discourse in Japan in light of the larger effort by this issue of Critical Military Studies to (re)imagine Hiroshima. The paper will conclude with the claim that the “game” of Japanese nuclear contestation, although currently ensnared in a seemingly intractable stalemate, must be played to win by those who never want their “allergy” to go away.

Wittgenstein, “grammar”, and political metaphor

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asserts that discourse or “grammar” is “the shadow of possibility cast by language on phenomena” (Wittgenstein 1958, para. 329; Pin-Fat 2011, chap. 1). One way to read this assertion is that discourse functions to expand, contract, or eliminate the possibilities of understanding and acting on social phenomena within a system of social practices. A “language game” is constituted by the diverse moves of actors in accordance (or sometimes in conflict) with a set of governing norms. Accordingly, the shadow which “language” casts – literally or metaphorically – serves to constitute definitions, descriptions, or assessments in which conceptions putatively linked to the phenomena of concern are included or excluded from “sight”. For instance, the moral “grammar” of nuclear abolition casts shadows of moral condemnation on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An instance of a literal use of “grammar” is found in the Nippon Times’ condemnation of the two atomic bombings on 10 August 1945:

How can a human being with any claim to a sense of moral responsibility deliberately let loose an instrument of destruction which can at one stroke annihilate an appalling segment of mankind? This is not war; this is not even murder; this is pure nihilism. This is a crime against God and humanity which strikes at the very heart of moral existence. (Quoted in Bailey and Kennedy 1994, 397–8).

To say that atomic or nuclear warfare is nihilistic and “strikes at the heart of moral existence” is to discursively construct the possibility of the annihilation of moral value (along with that of humanity) and then to proscribe that annihilation. By so doing, the antinuclear grammar casts a shadow of impossibility directly on the notion that nuclear weapons can ever constitute or produce a lasting moral benefit.

In contrast to the Nippon Times’ literalist “grammar”, the shadows cast by metaphor on phenomena depend on implicit comparisons between a source-concept and a target-concept for the purpose of structuring reality and constituting a corresponding range of possibilities or impossibilities for action (Hook 1984, 260–2). A metaphor taken as a near-literal comparison should generate near-literal entailments, while one taken non-literally should do the opposite. Even so, the resort to metaphor already belies an inexact explication of the relevant social phenomena. Indeed, it has been convincingly argued that metaphors are not substitutes for literal claims; rather, they construct the very similarities which are (disingenuously) asserted as antecedently existing (Hook 1984, 261). Consequently, diverse shadows cast by competing metaphors on the same social phenomena can generate different constructions of social realities and entailments for action.

In this light, the meaning and entailments of the metaphor “nuclear allergy” depend on its source-concept which is located in medical discourse. “Allergy” refers to a physical condition where an individual’s hypersensitivity to an allergen (e.g. pollen, animal fur) produces minor bodily irritations or perhaps major failures of bodily systems. Although one might endure minor allergic reactions without much difficulty, serious reactions require immediate medical treatment and then a possible relocation to an allergen-free environment. Unfortunately, allergy medicines can also produce allergic reactions. If one produces an anaphylactic reaction, for instance, first-aid procedures are immediately rendered to prevent death or severe incapacity.² The existential import of such “allergies” implies an urgency in the elimination of life-threatening allergens from one’s environment.

It follows that the implicit comparison in the metaphor “nuclear allergy” strongly suggests existential risk and, accordingly, that the practical stakes of its usage are high. In particular, it strongly suggests that the Japanese people’s hypersensitivity to nuclear weapons or pro-nuclear discourse is unhealthy and that it must be treated (Hook 1984, 265). To say that the “nuclear allergy” is unhealthy is also to say that nuclear weapons are normal instruments of national and international security practices and that there is nothing especially worrisome about them. Furthermore, it is to say that the antinuclearism arising from a collective memory of atomic victimhood and from a perception of Hiroshima as a recovering city of peace might rest on a mistaken appreciation of international political realities in which nuclear abolition is imprudent. A deeper and more critical theorization of “nuclear allergy” must therefore seek to problematize these entailments. A first step in this deeper and more critical theorization is to trace the genealogy of “nuclear allergy” and take note of the shadows actually cast by it in Japanese political culture.

The genealogy of “nuclear allergy”

The term “nuclear allergy” entered Japanese public discourse in 1964, before which the terms used were “atomic bomb disease” or “bomb-affected people” (i.e. hibakusha). Since the Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors suffered diverse internal and external physical maladies from their exposure to the atomic bombs’ effects, including significantly higher rates of cancer, the term hibakusha cast a near-literal shadow on their varied experience (Ham 2011, 433–9). In particular, those suffering from external disfigurements – i.e. from keloids, which are slight to major skin disfigurements treated by plastic surgery – experienced greater shame than those suffering from internal disorders (Ham 2011, 329, 433). From the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, Japanese society generally regarded keloid-affected hibakusha – and, to a lesser extent, all other bomb-affected people – as “untouchables”. They were ostracized from family, jobs, marriage, and association, and even prevented from receiving government compensation for their injuries (Ham 2011, 439). The hibakusha’s ostracism helps explain in part why, in the first few years after Hiroshima, the notion of atomic victimhood remained latent and undeveloped. The memories of Allied conventional firebombing were more pronounced, and it was only after the US occupation’s censorship ended that Hiroshima slowly emerged as a contested icon of the national war experience (Orr 2001, 40–1). The moderate and conservative governments in Japan did not treat Hiroshima’s status as exceptional, regarding it more along the lines of a natural disaster.

Tokyo’s disregard for the hibakusha during this period did not, however, discourage antinuclear activists from invoking their suffering and the image of Hiroshima to the ends of nuclear abolition and a general peace. In 1951, Kuno Osamu wrote an essay in the periodical Sekai which began to cultivate more fully the notion of atomic victimhood. He wrote:

The only role given to us can be nothing other than bearing witness in front of the world to our first experience as [the atomic bomb’s] victim. It is the governments and peoples of the US and the USSR that have atomic bombs, not us. It is necessary to solidify our resolve to produce no more victims, but there is no danger that we ourselves will become victimizers. The calls for “No More Hiroshimas” carry sorrowful echoes because of this reality of powerlessness behind them. (quoted in Orr 2001, 44)

For Kuno, the notion of atomic victimhood and the call for “No More Hiroshimas” were the necessary grounds on which activists could anchor the mission of preventing any future nuclear holocaust. Yet, his voice and the voices of others were unable to resonate with the wider Japanese public at the time.

Japanese attitudes towards the hibakusha and atomic victimhood began to change after the US nuclear test at Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954. The 15-megaton explosion was equivalent to roughly 700 Hiroshima bombs. Its radioactive fallout dispersed over a much larger area of the South Pacific than expected, and 23 crewmen from the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon suffered significant radiation poisoning and one fatality (Ham 2011, 447–8). Japanese society regarded the Bikini Atoll test as the third use of atomic weapons on them and, with the corresponding fear of radiation poisoning spreading rapidly, a petition drive in the Suginami prefecture to ban the H-bomb was overwhelmingly successful and motivated similar petition drives across the country. Indeed, by October 1955, the various petition drives had collected around 30 million signatures (Orr 2001, 48). On the other hand, the Lucky Dragon incident reinforced a different set of understandings which Tokyo had employed to put an honourable face on their 1945 surrender to the United States. Rather than admitting that Imperial ambitions had failed dishonourably, Tokyo framed their wartime defeat as a martyrdom of innocents slain in the atomic fire. Specifically, Tokyo “was able to surrender without conceding defeat on the battlefield, … [and] the Imperial forces were able to capitulate with military honour intact” (Ham 2011, 486). By this discursive move, the Japanese government embraced the atomic bomb as the object which could excuse an otherwise inexcusable surrender. Tokyo’s embrace of the atomic bomb played an important background role in the emergence and evolution of the “nuclear allergy” metaphor a few years later.

One more element of the pre-1960s historical context is important to mention. In August 1955, the tenth anniversary of the atomic bombings was celebrated in Hiroshima by the first world conference on banning atomic weapons. A professor of international law at Tokyo Imperial University, Yasui Kaoru, became the conference chairperson, and he began to mobilize an antinuclear movement which earned the respect and participation of all political factions in Japan. One of Yasui’s tasks was to promote the narrative that Hiroshima was “an icon of Japan’s past as innocent war victim and a beacon for its future as a pacifist nation” (Orr 2001, 52). This effort succeeded, and hereafter conservative and liberal Japanese administrations were persuaded to pursue peaceful nuclear energy and prevent the United States from stationing nuclear weapons on Japanese soil (Orr 2001, 50–62; Mizumoto 2004). In the context of Yasui’s efforts to build an antinuclear movement, disarmament activists evidently did not regard their nuclear aversions as unhealthy or irrational (albeit fearful) responses to the possibilities of future nuclear warfare (see, for example, Orr 2001; Wittner 2009). Indeed, 71% of Japanese citizens favoured nuclear disarmament at the time while only 1% opposed it, leading to all four major Japanese political parties adopting a non-nuclear stance in their electoral campaigns without indicating any belief that antinuclearism was in any sense a disease (Wittner 2009, 70–1).

It was in this context that, in August 1964, a Japanese reporter working for the leading newspaper Asahi Shimbun introduced the term “nuclear weapons allergy”. The reporter noted that

As the US government is fully aware of the extreme sensitivity of the Japanese people to the expression “nuclear weapons”, it adopted a prudent attitude towards the problem throughout, taking great pains not to give the impression of having, in a word, “put pressure” on the Japanese government [to allow nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines to dock in Japanese harbours]. (quoted in Hook 1984, 263)

As this account suggests, the operational requirements of extended nuclear deterrence within the US–Japanese security alliance helped produce an “extreme sensitivity” in the Japanese people to the very words “nuclear weapons”, to the weapons themselves, and to the naval vessels which bore them. Yet the US Navy did not want to be forced to offload nuclear weapons from their vessels before docking in Japanese ports, as this would add unwanted costs and time to the mission. The US Navy expressed concern to Tokyo about Japanese attitudes, as the reporter later indicated: “In the background seems to be the US government’s desire for the Japanese to put greater trust in the US, expecting that, if enough time goes by, Japan’s ‘nuclear-weapons allergy’ will be eliminated” (quoted in Hook 1984, 264).

The reporter’s use of scare quotes signalled that this metaphor, or one very close to it, already enjoyed official currency. As it happened, the term “nuclear allergy” had been coined by John Foster Dulles in 1954, and it is plausible to assume that the reporter’s knowledge of Dulles’s neologism informed his choice of terms³ (Solingen 2007, 67).

A Wittgensteinian analysis of this reporter’s account suggests that a “shadow of possibility” cast by this metaphor on the phenomena of nuclear aversion was one of “allergic reaction” to pro-nuclear discourse as well as to the very weapons themselves. Any exposure to any of these “allergens” would elicit expressions of “extreme sensitivity” by the Japanese people against any entry of US nuclear weapons into Japan. The United States opposed any constraints produced by antinuclear pressures, and it sought for the elimination of this “allergy”. Japanese antinuclearism had thus been constructed as a “disease” which needed to be treated. The other shadow cast by the reporter’s metaphor excludes from “sight” the possibility that nuclear aversion is a healthy or normal attitude which ought to be cultivated and upon which constraints on US nuclear force projection are justified.

In October 1964, the Communist Chinese government tested a nuclear device which immediately triggered existential anxieties of the United States and Japan (Gavin 2012, 75). In December 1967, the Japanese Diet reconsidered its nuclear nonproliferation posture, and a Member of Parliament (MP) Akira Kuroyanagi asked a question of Prime Minister Sato Eisaku:

it is said that the nation, the whole of Japan, is suffering from a nuclear allergy. I have heard that also within the Liberal Democratic Party discussions are being held on how to eliminate the people’s nuclear allergy. In short, the nuclear threat and nuclear [weapons] are fearful; I think this is certainly so. At the same time, there are some scholars who say we have arrived at a time when we should go one step further and should correctly understand nuclear [weapons] and should provide a precise understanding of nuclear [weapons]. What is the view of the Prime Minister regarding this situation? (quoted in Hook 1984, 267)

Akira’s remarks began by recalling the 1964 “nuclear-weapons allergy” metaphor, although the term now was the more concise “nuclear allergy”. Besides the change from “nuclear-weapons allergy” to the more concise “nuclear allergy”, Akira’s remarks raise for the first time the prospect that the Diet ought to work to “eliminate” the people’s nuclear aversions by providing a treatment of a “precise understanding” of them. Prime Minister Sato’s response reinforced and elaborated on this construction:

the question of the nuclear allergy has been raised. I think it is necessary to eliminate this, the nuclear allergy. I think it can be said to be the result of not having a correct understanding of nuclear [weapons]. If there were correct understanding, then there would not be the so-called nuclear allergy. Again, in regard to peaceful use and so on, I think there ought to be a higher appreciation of nuclear power. So, as was just pointed out, I think it is necessary to strive even harder for correct understanding. Yet, this is not simply in respect of weapons, so in this sense it is necessary to have correct understanding. (quoted in Hook 1984, 267–8)

Sato reinforced Akira’s depiction of “nuclear allergy” as a negative condition deserving “treatment” of “correct understanding” to nullify its constraining effects on government policy. Indeed, in 1969, Sato claimed that

I do not regard it as a complete system of defense if we cannot possess nuclear weapons in the era of nuclear weapons. I will, nevertheless, adhere faithfully to the pledge I have made to the people. We will not possess, manufacture, or permit the introduction of nuclear weapons. (quoted in Solingen 2007, 73)

Sato’s 1969 remark shows that Tokyo’s desire to be rid of the political constraints produced by the “nuclear allergy” had endured for the previous 5 years. Nonetheless, Sato felt compelled to reaffirm the Three Non-Nuclear Principles. The “nuclear allergy” had not been effectively treated, and it still constrained Japanese nuclear weapons policy.

On Wittgensteinian terms, the shadows of possibility and impossibility cast by Akira and Sato’s securitizing discourse solidified and expanded the understandings of “nuclear allergy”.⁴ Of particular note are their efforts to portray the core nuclear allergen as the Japanese people’s incorrect understanding of nuclear weapons and, on that basis, recommend a treatment of desensitization via increasing the number of port calls by US nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, initiating public criticism of antinuclear emotions from a “common sense” standpoint, and starting a propaganda campaign to introduce the “correct understanding” of nuclear weapons and their role in Japan’s security (Hook 1984, 268–9). The increased number of port calls by US ships presumably would produce a numbing of the Japanese people’s emotions which would then facilitate the government’s need to not disturb the nuclear element of their security alliance with the United States. The second and third planks of desensitization would follow – i.e. the international “common sense” would ameliorate any popular fears of the utility of nuclear deterrence and of nuclear energy’s economic promise.

It bears repeating that Japanese antinuclear activists from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s did not depict their opposition to nuclear weapons as a disease requiring treatment (Wittner 2009, 70–1). If they had, it would have signalled that antinuclearism was somehow illegitimate since, in the shadow cast by a near-literal use of the metaphor, (1) it is generally assumed that an allergen is harmless to ordinarily healthy people and therefore that (2) antinuclear activists aren’t healthy or normal, and (3) they should undergo treatment to rid themselves of this unwarranted hypersensitivity (Hook 1984, 264). However, Japanese antinuclearists surprisingly “could and did use the self-same metaphor” at various moments in the months and years after its introduction (Hook 1984, 264). Even so, its adoption by the antinuclear movement excluded any of the metaphor’s near-literal entailments. Rather, a paradoxically contrary shadow was cast – i.e. that the activists’ belief that nuclear weapons are existential threats to Japan and the wider world is correct, healthy, and rational. It would then have to follow that the existence of nuclear weapons, the prospect of radiological poisoning in the wake of a nuclear detonation, and the pro-nuclear discourse of the Japanese government must count as the set of true “nuclear allergens” which required treatment.

This last point seems warranted in light of the history of the Japanese disarmament movement. Recalling Wittner’s account of Tokyo’s intimidation over the Japanese super-majoritarian commitment to nuclear disarmament, and the corresponding civil society antinuclear pressures, never does he report the use of the term “nuclear allergy” nor employ it to describe the Japanese people’s attitudes. However, he claims that the “nuclear allergy” began to spread among South Pacific Islander states opposed to continued nuclear weapons testing and which had in 1985 signed and ratified the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the South Pacific (Wittner 2009, 185). This is an unusual application of the metaphor to non-Japanese peoples for whom, as for their Japanese allies, this “allergy” is not a disease in need of treatment; indeed, this is an “allergy” that paradoxically all the world’s peoples should contract.

Paradox one of two: nuclear allergens as that which must never be expelled

Having traced the genealogy of “nuclear allergy” in the preceding section, it is now important to explore the corresponding paradoxes and the moral perplexity which attends them. Paradoxes are conundrums which constitute disruptions or subversions of conventionally accepted and dualistic ontological categories for lived experience. Goods are transformed into evils, burdens are transformed into benefits, and one effect of such transformations is a profound disorientation or perplexity. Individuals and communities are no longer certain about the status of politically salient objects or dynamics, nor are they certain about how to act in relation to them. Nevertheless, these subverted ontologies can remain entrenched and as ideologies they can and often do resist change. For this reason, they can often continue to regulate perception and social practices. Hence, the paradoxes produced by the subverted ideological categories are often sustained and eventually produce a range of social, political, or moral dilemmas, or what Prividera and Howard call “double binds” (2012, 56–8).

A dilemma or double bind is a decision-making situation where, on the basis of a conventional ontology or ideology, all available courses of action are foreclosed in terms of intrinsic value or positive outcome. For instance, in Prividera and Howard’s discussion of the social discourse on women in the US military, the focal double bind produced by the conventional ideology of military heroism and gender is that a woman cannot be a soldier and a soldier cannot be a woman. Accordingly, a woman who joins the military not only denies her femininity but also denies the cult of the noble and manly hero affirmed by conventional gender stereotypes. Additionally, any valiant military service by a woman is not fully recognized as such even if a man with the same valiant service would be recognized. The enduring fact that women serve (valiantly) in the military is and remains paradoxical as long as the conventional gender ideologies regulate thinking and practise, and this can produce perplexity among many women who might otherwise have unqualified commitments about joining the military.

Accordingly, our genealogy of the Japanese “nuclear allergy” suggests two central paradoxes which in turn point to two corresponding dilemmas: one is that the nuclear allergens which actually trigger the Japanese people’s hypersensitivities must never be expelled, and the other is that the “nuclear allergy” is not something to be treated. Each paradox has been preceded by others (i.e. what I will call “precursor paradoxes”) which have then set the stage for an enduring moral perplexity over how to understand and act with respect to nuclear weapons. The remainder of this section will examine the first paradox, and the following section will examine the latter one.

It was suggested earlier that experience or historical knowledge of paradox can inspire one’s anticipation of future paradox, which in turn helps to construct a corresponding dilemma. This remark is particularly relevant for national or human security paradoxes.⁵ In the case of Akira and Sato’s deliberations on the evolving US–Japan security alliance, they apparently recalled that Tokyo’s pursuit of empire before World War II aimed to address perceived national security deficits linked to geography and access to natural resources in a rapidly changing and industrialized world. Moreover, they would have recalled that this militarism harmonized with the perceived Japanese values of national honour and pride. However, they knew intimately that militarism led to a humiliating surrender to the United States, and they knew that many Japanese held the government responsible for their suffering and international misfortune (Orr 2001).

From this recollection, an initial precursor paradox emerges: to the extent the former Imperial government avoided (some of) the humiliation of surrender by using the atomic bomb as the excuse for doing the inexcusable, to that same extent it must have struck the Japanese people and officials that an absolute evil had been (partially) transformed into a political good (Doyle II 2015a, 64–5; Mizumoto 2004, 261–3). For we recall that the Nippon Times editors’ charge of moral nihilism against the United States affirmed the conventional moral ontological categories of good/evil and value/disvalue in absolute terms. And yet, in the absence of the atomic bomb, the Imperial government would have lacked a face-saving explanation of their surrender to the Allies. Thus, a first precursor paradox is that the Imperial government discursively constructed the atomic bomb as that which provided a measure of honour for Japan in the midst of humiliating defeat. Since it was claimed that the Emperor had to surrender in the face of a looming atomic war, an absolute evil had thus been transformed into a political good, thereby subverting a conventional ontological dualism.

A second and related precursor paradox arose soon afterwards: namely, that Japan’s return to “full” sovereignty did not include the sovereign right for Japan to field a full military for national defence. Instead, Japan remained largely dependent on the United States for its defence, and in due time that meant US extended nuclear deterrence. The paradox of a sovereign state without the sovereign right to full-scope military capability is generated again by a subverted yet entrenched perception about international political ontologies. On the one hand, it is partially generated by the regulative norm of self-help in an international order of anarchy and, on the other hand, by the international political fact of Japan’s Peace Constitution, especially Article 9, which forbids it from fielding a full military.

These two precursor paradoxes establish the conditions of the possibility for one of the central paradoxes: i.e. the “nuclear allergens” which can or must never be expelled. For one former Japanese nonproliferation official, Tokyo must paradoxically embrace US nuclear weapons as guarantors of their security while at the same time regarding them as absolutely evil.⁶ In order make the government’s position appear coherent, it must reconstruct the identity of the “nuclear allergen” away from nuclear weapons and instead towards, as Sato aimed to do, the “incorrect understanding” of the Japanese people. It is in this sense that the metaphor does not identify antecedently existing similarities between the target- and source-concepts (i.e. the political discourse and medical discourse); rather, it creates a similarity which had not previously existed and then pretends that an “incorrect understanding” is akin to a nuclear pollen. The corresponding double binds forced on Tokyo’s security posture cannot be unwound unless the dominant security ideology is replaced. For the Japanese people’s “nuclear allergy” compels the renunciation of the use, manufacture, and possession of nuclear weapons even as Tokyo refuses to expel the US nuclear umbrella believed essential for Japanese security.

The Japanese government has attempted to artfully render this paradox and its accompanying dilemmas as a matter of balancing disparate political and moral values. In 2002, the former Foreign Minister, Yukiya Amano, responded to challenges that Japan’s dependence on the US nuclear umbrella contradicted its nuclear disarmament commitments.⁷ He argued that:

When Japan makes decisions on a disarmament measure, it considers the humanitarian value and the security implications of such a measure for Japan, the Asia Pacific region, and the world. These two interests are not always in conflict, but sometimes they do clash. In such cases, the government of Japan must strike a balance between them…. In most cases, … both dimensions – humanitarian and security – have equal importance for Japan. (Amano 2002, 133)

Amano’s distinction between equally weighted values of humanitarianism and security betrays the conventional security ideology which produces the dilemma in which “balance” is the only viable mitigation strategy. If Amano had rather assumed a human security framework, then the values of humanitarianism and security could be synthesized rather than uncoupled and then balanced. The paradox of nuclear allergens which cannot be expelled could dissolve, and the double bind of affirming contradictory political values would unwind in favour of the affirmation of the complex but singular value of human security.

One implication of this analysis is that the Japanese ruling class has a “nuclear allergy”, and not the Japanese people. University professor Ito Takeshi suggested as much in 1975 in discussing certain pressing problems for hibakusha aid activists. He said:

The Japanese government has cooperated closely with this American postwar strategy [of posing nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union]…. It is precisely because of this that the Japanese government is extremely sensitive to the “nuclear issue”. And might we not say that it is the subject on which it has been most vague with the people? It has not been the Japanese people who have had a “nuclear allergy” but postwar Japan’s ruling class itself. And this “high-level political” treatment of the nuclear issue by the United States and the Japanese government has inevitably led them to ignore atomic bomb victims’ various demands and build a political environment that discriminates in favor of the military and related persons. (quoted in Orr 2001, 170).

Orr correctly notes Takeshi’s insight into the relationship of the Japanese government’s early reluctance to embrace a robust hibakusha aid policy and their hypersensitivity to criticism of its reliance on the US nuclear umbrella (2001, 170). Extrapolating from Takeshi’s remarks, it is the Japanese government’s “nuclear allergy” – then and now – which has not been properly emphasized in the academic literatures. In particular, it is the government’s longstanding aversion to accepting completely the moral imperative of the humanitarian imperative to abolish nuclear weapons grounded in a proper identification of humanity with the suffering of the Japanese who died at Hiroshima/Nagasaki and the hibakusha who continue to carry atomic wounds.

Paradox two of two: a nuclear allergy which must or can never be treated

The second and related central paradox to emerge can be expressed thusly: to the extent the Japanese antinuclear movement accepted “nuclear allergy” as descriptive of their nuclear aversions, to that same extent it must never be “treated” if nuclear abolition aspirations are to be realized. Japanese nuclear hypersensitivity becomes an evil transformed into a good or a burden transformed into a benefit, given conventional security ideology. Indeed, it is an insecurity which must not be mitigated until a revolution in security theorizing diffuses across Japanese political society, their ruling elites, and perhaps the world generally. Until then, the “nuclear allergy” qua weakness is paradoxically the only strong and durable defence for the Japanese people who must never again experience Hiroshima/Nagasaki.

Two points seem to follow. One is that the project of (re)imagining Hiroshima must always have it reduced to atomic ash and rubble with a hot, radioactive afterglow. Paradoxically, Hiroshima must always stand as a perpetual atomic ground zero at the same time as it stands as a recovered peace city. Otherwise, the constitutive basis of the “nuclear allergy” is subverted and the urgency of nuclear abolition evaporates. Unsurprisingly, this first point carries its own paradoxical features. To say that Hiroshima/Nagasaki must be always reduced to radioactive ash and rubble is to say it must always stand as a Nothingness, as a perpetual moment of Moral Nihilism, which simultaneously is a marker for Being in all its positivity and for ultimate Moral Value. The embrace of atomic Death is transformed into an embrace of Life in the face of the perpetual atomic fire.

A second point is that the term hibakusha must no longer refer exclusively to the surviving victims of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Instead, it must refer to all actual and potential victims of nuclear holocaust. The scope of potential atomic victimhood begins with the identification of all Japanese citizens as hibakusha. As Orr correctly notes: “Radioactive fallout from the Bikini tests helped all Japanese to experience the Hiroshima A-bomb victimhood as their own, and Yasui Kaoru’s ban-the-bomb petition movement involved them in making atomic victimhood a peculiarly transcendent national experience…” (2001, 65).

If all Japanese become (virtual) atomic victims, then they possess the “nuclear allergy” as a matter of social fact. Accordingly, their weakness which is their strongest defence can sustain the domestic pressure against Tokyo’s nuclear aspirations.

This second point also carries its own paradoxical features. To say that all Japanese are now hibakusha is to say, recalling Jacques Ranciere,⁸ that those who have not counted in the Cold War (i.e. the actual hibakusha) are the ones which must be counted above all, and that those which did not count as such yesterday and today must now be counted as such – otherwise the “nuclear allergy” fades ever more with the death of every person exposed to the atomic holocausts in 1945 or 1954. It is to say that those with a lack of injury have been transformed into those with the gravest of vicarious injuries, such that the radiation sickness, the cancers, or the keloids have an ontological positivity that exceeds the ordinary health and well-being of people which lack these maladies. It is to say that the “nuclear allergy” has an ontological positivity which exceeds the hypersensitivity of the ruling elite to the criticism of their closeted nuclearism.

But perhaps a final and tragic paradox should be noted, which might help illuminate what appears to be an enduring Japanese nuclear perplexity: i.e. that the Japanese antinuclear movement’s urgent advocacy of “no more Hiroshimas” and hibakusha aid put Tokyo continually on the defensive and, more importantly, exceeded the national consensus on the question of national security. According to Orr, although “the majority of Japanese opposed nuclear weapons, most generally favored or at least felt it was best to assent to the government’s close relationship to the United States” (2001, 170). We have already noted how Professor Ito Takeshi, in the process of urgently advocating for hibakusha aid, charged that the Japanese ruling elites were the ones with the “nuclear allergy”. Sadly, the stridency of this antinuclearist advocacy helped to hinder sufficient assistance for the hibakusha and which prevented an adequate and united resolution over the regional security threats facing Japan (Orr 2001, 68, 170). Moreover, the constant refrain of atomic victimhood seemed to deprive the antinuclear movement of the necessary agency to offer responsible security alternatives to nuclear weapons (Mizumoto 2004, 267; Orr 2001, 68). Thus, a majority of Japanese have been consistently antinuclear in orientation but also supportive of the Japan–US security alliance, which has always included extended nuclear deterrence.

Conclusion: the paradox of Japanese nuclear perplexity as a Wittgensteinian language game

According to Kazumi Mizumoto, “Japan has four different faces regarding nuclear issues”: those of (1) an atomic victim, (2) a US ally under a nuclear umbrella, (3) an active promoter of peaceful nuclear energy, and (4) a peaceful nation promoting nuclear abolition (Mizumoto 2004, 259). In this light, the Japanese are indeed perplexed by nuclear weapons. The Japanese can neither effectively securitize nor desecuritize nuclear weapons, nor can they be effectively introduced or excluded. For the Japanese people, nuclear weapons subsist in a perpetual tension between positivity and negativity. Their political use presupposes their non-use, while their non-use presupposes the possibilities of their use. Moreover, Japanese political culture is perplexed by Hiroshima/Nagasaki and how they must be (re)imagined. Perpetually, Hiroshima/Nagasaki must remain unchanged and yet constantly rebuilt. It is the locality which is universal, the virtual residence of every occupant of the nuclear age. It must always be produced, but it must never be produced again.

I suggest that these perplexities (and others which might be identified) reveal a longstanding dialectical relation we might characterize as a Wittgensteinian “language game” or “form of life” in which the Japanese people and the ruling elites are attempting to navigate their complex domestic and regional environments (Hollis and Smith 1990, chap. 8). Indeed, it represents a global dialectic between the nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states inherent in the logic of nuclear restraint (Walker 2012). Framing this relationship in Wittgensteinian terms helps us to understand it as an evolution of agencies and structures in which the “rules”, “grammar”, and “play” of nuclear weapons politics are “made up as they go along” with no fixed end in sight (Doyle II 2015b). We saw originally the official disdain and disregard which accompanied the hibakusha’s atomic holocaust, and yet the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident made it impossible to sustain that official response. Afterwards, Japanese antinuclearism began to gain traction without any reference to nuclear allergies. However, we also saw that, after Japan returned to full (and yet only partial) sovereignty, Japanese antinuclearism was constructed as a “nuclear allergy” that required treatment. Surprisingly, the antinuclear movement co-opted the metaphor and ignored its conceptual entailments. Nuclear weapons, the military platforms which bore them, and the doctrines which justified them, were constructed as security instruments for the Japanese government, and the nuclear allergy was constructed as a condition which must never be treated. This fundamental stalemate in Japanese nuclear politics has remained largely unchanged since the days of Prime Minister Sato.

And yet, each side must play the nuclear “game” to “win”, or perhaps as if to win. Periodically, a Japanese official will state in public that Tokyo must seriously consider acquiring its own nuclear deterrent. Presumably such discursive moves aim to budge the entrenched antinuclearism of the Japanese people and to introduce some “correct understanding”. And, in response, antinuclear spokespersons will chastise such officials and pressure them to resign (see French 2002). This, too, is a discursive move to resist “treatment”. Other discursive moves add complexity to the game. For instance, every August the sitting prime minister must offer memorial remarks at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembrance Celebrations. And always the hope of a nuclear-weapon-free world is voiced, but without any corresponding action by Tokyo on changing the nuclear terms of the US–Japan security alliance or the nature of US extended nuclear deterrence in the world.

The description of this Wittgensteinian “language game” of Japanese nuclear politics is not meant to valorize it. Indeed, in this game’s international version, I would argue that some or perhaps all of the articles in this special edition of Critical Military Studies are deliberately trying to play the nuclear abolitionist “game” “to win”. I conclude with an anecdote on why the nuclear abolitionist game must be played to win and why it is important to subvert the conventional security ideology which underwrites the language game of nuclear armament in Japanese political culture and international society generally.

On 2 May 2012, the co-chairperson of the Japan Confederation of A- and H- Bomb Sufferers Organizations, Mikiso Iwasa, spoke to the First Preparatory Committee for the 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in Vienna, Austria. Now 83 years old, Mr. Iwasa recalled how as a 16-year-old boy he witnessed the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He recounted for the First Committee his experiences of finding his mother’s charred body underneath some rubble, of losing sight of his siblings and not ever finding them again, and of trying to help assist the injured survivors while the Japanese and US governments worked assiduously to cover up “the realities of the atomic bombings” while “abandoning the survivors to their fate without providing any help. (Iwasa 2012, 2). He recalled how the shock of the Lucky Dragon incident triggered in Japan a movement organized under the slogan “no more hibakusha”. He reported to the First Committee that he was fighting cancer linked to his exposure to the Hiroshima bomb, and he called on the assembled governments to accept their responsibility to prevent any future nuclear catastrophe by constructing a peaceful future. For, unless we can effectively (re)imagine nuclear weapons as having no capacity for bringing security – human or otherwise – we will suffer as nuclear hostages for the indefinite future. The first necessary step to nuclear abolition is to effectively stigmatize nuclear weapons. We can only hope that Mr. Iwasa in turn hoped that his “nuclear allergy” was intractably contagious.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See e.g. http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/top_e.html. Accessed 25 April 2015.

2. This remark is based on a personal experience. My wife once suffered an anaphylactic reaction to over-the-counter cold medication. She almost died, and since then she has carried an “Epi-Pen” which is injected to counteract such reactions if she reacts to a new medication. We also removed from our home all medications of the kind that produced that reaction.

3. Note: Hook’s 1984 analysis was unable to find any use of “nuclear allergy” from an American source, even though the reporter quoted alluded to its possibility. Solingen’s remarks correct the historical record.

4. For those unfamiliar with the term “securitizing”, political actors who want to highlight through speech or writing the security threat posed by some dangerous set of conditions commit an act of “securitization” by their speech acts. See e.g. Balzacq (2011) as one excellent source on the theories and application of securitization.

5. For the most recent treatment of these concepts and their interrelations, see Booth and Wheeler (2008).

6. Interview with Yasuyuki Ebata, Embassy of Japan, Washington, DC, 27 August 2008.

7. Note: Yukiya Amano currently serves as the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

8. For an extended discussion on persons who do and do not “count”, see Ranciere (1999).