Unbearable light/ness of the bombing: normalizing violence and banalizing the horror of the atomic bomb experiences

Abstract

On 21 October 2008, the word “pika”, drawn by a small airplane’s exhaust, appeared in the sky over Hiroshima. “Pika” is an onomatopoeia that indicates a flashing light, and historically “pika” refers to the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. Instigated by this performance, brought force by an art group, Chim↑Pom, and its subsequent controversy, the paper explores the ways in which the atomic bomb experiences have been understood through representations in media by the general audience. In fact, examining their representations shows that the horror of the atomic bombing was too often not properly transmitted, but rather normalized and even banalized. To inquire this point further, I investigate a group of women, who suffered from keloids and disfigurement. Some went to Osaka and Tokyo to receive reconstruction surgeries, while others – later called the “Hiroshima maidens” – were invited to the United States for the same purpose. Tracing their media appearances, or lack thereof, I argue that normalization of the horror of the atomic bombings had already begun in 1950s, when these women appeared in media, and that utilizing the injured bodies of women has justified collective violence in the United States, reinforcing white, middle-class, heterosexual Christian family values, as well as in Japan to reconcile its war crimes and to prepare for the future remilitarization. Thus, I conclude that Chim↑Pom’s performance was not a disruption, but a continuation of normalizing violence, in which we do not even understand the weight of the light emanated from the atomic bombs.

Keywords:

• the atomic bombs
• the light
• the Hiroshima maidens
• normalization
• banalization
• Chim↑Pom

Introduction: lightness of the light

This year, 2015, marks the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The average age of the 192,719 atomic bomb health book holders has risen to 79.44 years (Asahi Shimbun, 10 July 2014).¹ As the number of hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors, dwindles, it becomes more urgent that they pass down their first-hand experiences to future generations. Under such circumstances, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been making efforts to leave hibakusha’s experiences to the next generation by archiving their stories through videos, memoirs, and drawings. Documenting and disseminating the atomic bomb experiences do not depend on hibakusha’s first-hand accounts alone. Non-hibakusha as well have attempted to do so using the venues of literary works, movies, graphic novels, and TV shows.

In the field of contemporary art, one attempt was made in 2008 to represent the atomic bombing by a group of ambitious artists, Chim↑Pom, who are “the young Japanese art provocateurs’ collective”, as described by documentarian Linda Hoaglund (2012).² On 21 October 2008, the group chartered a small airplane to draw the word “pika” with its exhaust five times between 7:30 a.m. and noon over Hiroshima. Simultaneously, they filmed and photographed this performance from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park so that they could frame the word “pika” as it appeared over the Atomic Bomb Dome. “Pika” is a common Japanese onomatopoeia for a flashing light. However, in the context of Chim↑Pom’s performance, the word obviously alluded to the atomic bombing.³ Because its blinding flash (“pika”) was followed by the roar (“don”) emanating from the explosion, the atomic bomb was long referred to as “pika-don” or simply “pika” in Hiroshima.

After witnessing the performance, some uninformed Hiroshima citizens, as well as hibakusha, asked the local newspaper Chugoku Shimbun to find out what the performance was about, while others complained that they found the performance ominous and unpleasant. Responding to the citizens’ reactions, the director of Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (HCMCA), Machida Yasuo, made a public apology the following day, as the HCMCA staff had acknowledged Chim↑Pom’s performance plan and were present while they were filming the performance in the Park. The city of Hiroshima added its own apology, because of its responsibility for overseeing the HCMCA.

Soon after, the city hosted a meeting between Chim↑Pom and seven hibakusha groups. Ushiro Ryūta, representing the artist group, apologized to the five hibakusha groups present at the meeting for their insensitivity to hibakusha’s feelings. Their performance resulted in the cancellation of their exhibition at the HCMCA, only 1 week before the opening had been scheduled.⁴ This series of incidents – from Chim↑Pom’s performance to their apology, the cancellation of their exhibition, and the following discussions on the controversy and reconciliation with some hibakusha – were later compiled in a volume entitled Naze Hiroshima no sora o pikatto sasetewa ikenainoka [Why it is wrong to “pika” in the sky of Hiroshima, hereafter Why not pika] (Chim↑Pom and Ken’ichi Abe 2009).

The book contains essays contributed by 22 artists, art critics, and hibakusha. Among them, art critics Sawaragi Noi and Fukuzumi Ren in part condemn the lightness and shallowness of Chim↑Pom’s performance and in part condone it precisely because of its lightness and shallowness (Sawaragi 2009; Fukuzumi 2009). Drawing upon Theodor Adorno’s statement “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today” (Adorno 1983, 34), Sawaragi reminds us of the impossibility of representing such tragic events as the atomic bombing. Since no efforts properly represent the atomic bomb experiences while maintaining the dignity of the victims, Sawaragi argues, Chim↑Pom’s performance might be a way after Auschwitz to avoid “violence of representation” by eschewing “sophisticated aesthetics” (Sawaragi 2009, 47–8).

Certainly, a relationship between the representing and the represented is asymmetrical, which could be founded upon, and translated into, violence. And, as Sawaragi claims, avoiding such violence of representation may necessitate “lightness” and “shallowness”, that is, benign and banal expressions. However, it seems to me that there are two kinds of banality in representing violence: banality to normalize violence and banality to reveal normalized violence. When Hannah Arendt, for example, called the Nazi genocide the “banality of evil” over 50 years ago, she did not mean that the genocide itself was banal (Arendt [1961] 1996). Rather, she drew out the horror of banality by referring to the process of mass murders being normalized and thus requiring no “thinking”. Judith Butler summarizes Arendt’s argument: “In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity ‘banal’, [Arendt] was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance” (Butler 2011).

Let us look more into a banal expression of revealing normalized violence. Robert Hariman and John Lucaites examine images in photographs to see the function of banality in art, noting, “an aesthetic resource reveal[s] what otherwise risks going unseen: how violence is being normalized” (Hariman and Lucaites 2011). The statement may accord, to some extent, with the explanation given by Chim↑Pom’s leader Ushiro Ryūta: their performance in Hiroshima was an attempt to “inspire the people in the world to think about the reality of peace, and mirror the state of today’s society with its vague and blurred memories of peace and things past” (Ozaki 2008). With a banal expression of the atomic bombing, the performance was to call for the viewers’ self-reflection on the reality, in which the atomic bombing had been forgotten while people in Japan enjoy peace.

However, I wonder if their performance did correspond to the objective Ushiro had articulated, or if their particular performance was the best course of action to reach their goal. In illustrating the banal expression in art, I return to Hariman and Lucaites’s use of one photographic image, in which a member of a bomb squad in Kathmandu, Nepal, wearing a protective suit and headgear, is carrying a pressure cooker. Apparently, this pressure cooker set off a false alarm. The incongruousness of the images of a bomb squad member and a pressure cooker, while they might appear comical, evokes some eeriness, as the banal and everyday commodity of a pressure cooker accentuates the immanency of violence. The horror of normalized violence is, thus, saliently illuminated by a mundane pressure cooker juxtaposed with an unordinary outfit worn by a squad member. The power of banality to reveal normalized violence works, in part because of the contrast, and also in part because of the shared knowledge of the meaning of the squad’s protective suit with headgear, and the consequences of a landmine.

Banality to reveal normalized violence presupposes the viewers’ understanding of the horror of violence itself. For this reason, I believe, Chim↑Pom’s performance failed to reveal normalized violence, but, rather, banalized the atomic bomb experience by attempting to re-enact it from the perspective of American pilots. Consequently, their performance was not a radical challenge to people in Japan, who, they once claimed, were heiwaboke, or indulged in peace, but rather betrayed their own heiwaboke, to the extent that they could not imagine what they imposed upon hibakusha who went through this violence.

Nor do I take Chim↑Pom’s performance as a disruption to the atomic bomb discourse or as a misunderstanding of hibakusha experiences. Rather, I see their performance as a continuation of normalization of the atomic bomb experiences. Historian Ran Zwigenberg, for example, poignantly observes, “Hiroshima’s tragedy was rendered harmless to the status quo by the particular way in which it was remembered. Commemorative work in Hiroshima was largely used to normalize and domesticate the memory of the bombing” (Zwigenberg 2014, 2, emphasis mine). Normalization of the horror of the atomic bombing did not begin in the twenty-first century but had already happened in the 1950s, both in the United States and in Japan, followed by censorship by both governments (Braw 1991).

How, though, could such violence be possibly normalized? To respond to this question, I investigate the ways in which the early atomic bomb discourse set a tone to normalize the abnormality of the destruction by nuclear weaponry, which turns out to have contributed to national narratives convenient to each country. While it is understandable that hibakusha, especially those who suffered disfigurement and discrimination, desired to lead normal lives again, the atomic bomb discourse exploited their experiences to normalize the violence of the nuclear attacks. In examining prevailing narratives, I argue that such normalization began in the 1950s, utilizing the injured bodies of women, especially the vulnerable Hiroshima maidens, justifying collective violence in the United States to reinforce white, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian family values, as well as in Japan to reconcile its war crimes and to prepare for remilitarization.⁵

To this end, I will begin with a brief introduction of the use of women’s images in the war experience to show the rhetoric that this type of narrative uses to divert our attention from the horror of violence. Then I will move on to a group of hibakusha women, called Hiroshima maidens, who were used for forgiveness and reconciliation both in the US and in Japan. To this end, I will examine American perceptions and interpretation of hibakusha women’s injured bodies (the Hiroshima maidens) and will compare and contrast the use of them (genbaku otome) in Japan. In doing so, I claim that the early hibakusha narratives have already used the vulnerable hibakusha’s image to justify violence, serving the national narratives in their respective countries. In conclusion, returning to the 2008 Chim↑Pom performance, I further discuss the concept of banality and the difficulties of representing violence.

War and gendered discourse

To examine the use of the female image in relation to war and violence, Iris Marion Young notes that a tragic event often provides an opportunity to promote a “national security” agenda, employing women’s bodies as the loci of “masculinist protection”. In this context, women’s images are constructed in relation to the ideal male image – that is, a role of protector.

An exposition of the gendered logic of the masculine role of protector in relation to women and children illuminates the meaning and effective appeal of a security state that wages war abroad and expects obedience and loyalty at home. In this patriarchal logic, the role of the masculine protector puts those protected, paradigmatically women and children, in a subordinate position of dependence and obedience (Young 2003, 2).

This gendered discourse, according to Young, allowed a number of Americans (and those outside the United States as well) to justify the US military deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11 (Young 2003, 2).

In prewar Japan, too, the gendered discourse functioned in constructing the image of ideal women, juxtaposed with the male protector – women were being protected but also were “assisting” the male mission of protecting the country. Yet, a loss in war is often translated as a failure of the protector, and therefore the dichotomized framework of the male protector versus female protected loses its foundation. Given that, how did the gendered discourse take place, if it even existed, in postwar Japan? According to Lisa Yoneyama, the male protector figure only shifted from the Japanese male to American counterparts, in which a group of injured women played a crucial role. “The so-called Hiroshima maidens”, writes Yoneyama,

constituted a specular image of the oedipal relation between Japan and the United States. Though hinting at a possibility of miscegenation, the dominant images of these women – pure, virgin daughter – loyally figured the nation in its relation to the paternalized America, at least in popular discourse. (Yoneyama 1999, 202)

The case of the Hiroshima maidens thus epitomizes the gendered discourse to justify violence, and, I believe, to normalize the horror of the atomic bombing.

Hiroshima maidens in the US

The name “Hiroshima maidens” conventionally refers to 25 female hibakusha who were scarred and disfigured by the atomic bombing, and who were chosen to go to the United States for a series of reconstruction surgeries. The execution of the Hiroshima maidens project was owed primarily to two males: Methodist minister Kiyoshi Tanimoto and Saturday Review editor-in-chief Norman Cousins. Tanimoto was born in 1909 in Sakaide city, Kagawa Prefecture. After graduating from Kansei Gakuin University, Tanimoto went to the US and earned a degree from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in 1939 (Barker 1985, 56). Returning to Japan, he was appointed in 1943 to minister the Nagarekawa church in Hiroshima. On 6 August 1945, he experienced the atomic bombing 3 km (1.86 miles) from the hypocentre. After taking part in relief acts, he suffered from acute radiation sickness but miraculously recovered. Following his recovery, young women who were scarred from the bomb began to come to his church to seek comfort. Witnessing those women’s physical pains, emotional plights, and withdrawal from society, Tanimoto was compelled to work to alleviate their suffering for their reintegration into society (Tanimoto 1976).

Tanimoto’s appearance in John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which had been widely circulated in the United States since its publication in The New Yorker in 1946, made him known to the United States. His public recognition in the US led to an invitation from the Methodist Church Mission Board for him to give a series of talks in the US in 1948, a time when the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) strictly regulated Japanese citizens leaving the country. In his speech, Tanimoto addressed American audiences: “Hiroshima citizens regret the Pearl Harbor attack, and they do not hold a grudge against Americans for dropping the atomic bomb. They are now pleased with generous policies carried out by General MacArthur and the SCAP” (Takao 2010, 4). It was during his speaking engagement, which lasted for a year and a half, that Tanimoto met Cousins, another crucial figure for the Hiroshima maidens project.

Immediately after the Hiroshima bombing, Cousins wrote a long editorial piece, entitled “The Modern Man is Obsolete” and published in Saturday Review, expressing his guilt over the US’s use of nuclear weaponry. This initial concern urged him to visit Hiroshima three times prior to engaging in the maidens project: in 1949, 1950, and 1953. After his second visit, he launched a “moral adoption” programme, in which American “parents” supported war orphans in Hiroshima by sending letters and small gifts. On Cousins’ third visit in 1953, Tanimoto arranged for Cousins to meet a group of women with scars at his church. Cousins’ encounter with the young, scarred women motivated him to embark on a project to bring those women to the US to receive reconstruction surgeries. Cousins successfully raised funds for the project in the US, which enabled 25 women – later labelled the “Hiroshima maidens” – to leave for the US on 5 May 1955.

The stories of Hiroshima maidens were widely publicized in the United States as well as in Japan. Two of the maidens, Toyoko Minowa and Tadako Emori, were even invited to the popular TV show This is Your Life, together with Tanimoto, his family, and the Enola Gay co-pilot, Captain Robert A. Lewis; they did not “appear”, though, as they stood behind the screen during the show (Serlin 2004, 74–5). In addition to the TV show, the maidens’ stay was often publicized in the mass media. By examining the Hiroshima maidens’ exposure to media, I will show how the narratives around the maidens were constructed.

Historian Michael J. Yavenditti, for example, interprets the maidens’ visit as the manifestation of American goodwill, signifying forgiveness and reconciliation between the US and Japan. “The project’s overt theme”, writes Yavenditti, “of reconciliation and its unspoken message of mutual forgiveness were compatible with American benevolence also accorded with American desires for good US–Japanese relations” (Yavenditti 1982, 34). As his understanding reveals, the maidens’ visit was neither about the horror of nuclear attack nor about their continuous physical and emotional suffering. Rather, the maidens’ visit to the US highlighted the American altruism that made the reconstruction surgeries possible. That is to say, what was reconstructed was the American identity – benevolence, generosity, and forgiving. In turn, little reflection was given to the destruction and aftermath of the atomic bombing. Yavenditti attests to where the focus is placed: “As a philanthropic, almost joyful, episode in reconciliation, the ‘curing’ of the Maidens symbolized the healing of wartime hatreds and projected an image of American compassion, benevolence, and generosity toward a former foe” (Yavenditti 1982, 21). In this narrative, the horror of the aftermath was rendered as “curable” as a broken relationship, through advanced American medical technology as well as American civilian virtues.

Historian Robert Jacobs summarizes this kind of story as a “triumphant narrative of science and compassion”, upholding Americans as a parent figure (Jacobs 2010). “In this narrative”, states Jacobs,

the Japanese are allowed to be present but only in a childlike, dependent and ultimately grateful position. The heroes are the US doctors and philanthropists, who make the decisions, bear the costs and perform the miraculous surgeries, thus restoring life, happiness, and beauty to the Japanese women. (Jacobs 2010)

Another pattern of storytelling renders the maidens’ experiences of courage and resilience overcoming the tragedy personal narratives. Then, the maidens’ virtuous traits were attributed to the parental care they received in American homes.

The rhetoric of family is, thus, used to institute and reinstitute the parent/child, or the protector/protected, relationship in postwar relations between the US and Japan through the Hiroshima maidens’ publicity. Scholar of American studies and literature Christina Klein points out the frequent use of family metaphors by Cousins, such as his projects of “moral adoption” and “Hiroshima maidens”. She also notes that “Cousins offered a vision of America bound to Asia through ties of familial love”. For example, Cousins once stated,

Suppose…that some people have a philosophy of life which enables them to regard all human beings as belonging to a single family…the same love that members of a family feel for one another can be felt by these people for all others, especially for those who are terribly in need of help. (Klein 2003, 149)

The family in Cousins’ mind reinforces American supremacy as parent or protector. American writer and poet David Mura suggests that the Americans’ paternal attitude towards Japan was also complemented by the gender stereotype embedded in the East/West discourse: “The [Hiroshima maiden] project’s promotability stemmed from how the Maidens’ gender accommodated the mythology of Western subjugation of the East in ways that Japanese males would not” (Mura 2005, 610). Hibakusha women’s bodies were, thus, ironically used to reconstruct American’s paternal image, drawing upon the Orientalist stereotype of the “East”.

While utilizing the image of the Hiroshima maidens, the reconstructed American identity did not embrace all and excluded some. The reconstruction of the American ideal in the 1950s revolved around the image of a white, middle-class, Christian, and heterosexual family based on a patriarchal structure. The US media often portrayed Hiroshima maidens’ adoption of American housekeeping and lifestyles as the process of recuperation from their physical and psychological wounds, as if becoming like American women in suburban middle-class families were a process of healing and a goal for them to attain.

This publicity yet again reconstructed the American ideal, as Caroline Chung Simpson argues. Through the domestication of the Hiroshima maidens, American media in fact “celebrated white, middle-class American mothers” (Simpson 2002, 124). The restitution of American ideals was not only that of protective males but also was extended to women, highlighting a heterosexual marital relationship that supports family values upheld by suburban and middle-class Americans. As Mura claims, “The project also reflects postwar fears of threats to US heteronormative values” (Mura 2005, 610). The Hiroshima maidens’ publicity contributed to excluding homosexuals and single-parent families from the American ideal.

The exultation of American “Christian” values, as the foundation of an ideal family, was emphasized, in comparison with Japanese religious and social values. The author of Hiroshima Maidens, Robert Barker, explained retrospectively in 1985 the maidens’ bewilderment of facing the generosity of American host-families:

Historically, philanthropy was an alien cultural and philosophical concept in Japan. A traditional reluctance to get involved in the troubles of others, plus the absence of the “Good Samaritan” ethic in Japanese religion, generally explained why there were so few philanthropic foundations or programs in Japan. While the Japanese had a strong sense of obligation in certain situations, such as to Emperor and family, they were largely lacking in feelings of altruism. (Barker 1985, 130)

The socioeconomic structure of the 1950s United States determined the families who could afford to have Japanese guests stay at their houses. Inevitably, the hosts tended to be rather affluent, and middle-class, and Christians. The Quakers’ hospitability to the maidens was noted, but in the midst of the Cold War, being “good” Christians was part of propaganda. For example, Christian ethicist Amy Laura Hall analyses a1956 Methodist Ad Council’s poster and claims that the poster was “promoting religion in American life, ‘faith and the Atomic age’, featuring the church-going, nuclear family. The text and image queried the ‘fit’ of the faithful individual and the middle-class family in the Atomic Age” (Hall 2008, 383). Thus, American narratives around the Hiroshima maidens also served to emphasize Christian virtues.

Perhaps the most notable exclusion from the Hiroshima maidens’ publicity, according to Simpson, was the two women who accompanied the maidens in the US as interpreters: Helen Yokoyama and Mary Kochiyama. Their history of being Japanese–Americans in wartime United States, especially Kochiyama, who was born and grew up in San Pedro, California, but was relocated to the internment camp in Arkansas, earned no media recognition. Behind the reconciliatory gesture read into the Hiroshima maidens’ visit, another reconciliation opportunity towards Japanese-Americans remained neglected. “Although the Hiroshima Maidens project”, writes Simpson,

ensured that neither the Russians nor the Japanese could compete with the miracle of the suburban American lifestyle, it was ironically a Japanese American, one excluded from the national privileges extended to the Japanese bomb victims, who would be most instrumental in promoting the Americanness of unconditional love and domestic tranquillity. (Simpson 2002, 128)

Simpson’s juxtaposition of the Hiroshima maidens with Japanese–American women saliently reveals the role of the maidens in American media (Fox 2014, 127; McEnaney 2000; Sharpe 2007).

Such domestication of both American and hibakusha women under the protection of the American male, according to David Serlin, predictably slid into the domestication of the weaponry:

Like a housewife coaxing marital fidelity out of her recalcitrant husband, the commitment to domesticating the atom’s wayward side became a national obsession during a period in which the United States maneuvered its resources and rhetoric in order to take charge as the globe’s scientific and economic leader… Reconstructive plastic surgery on the Maidens, offered one possible strategy for producing control in an out-of-control situation. (Serlin 2003)

In the context of the 1950s Cold War, the US, on the one hand, needed to emphasize the horror and threat of nuclear weaponry behind the iron curtain to rationalize its own possession of the weaponry. On the other hand, the damage done to human bodies (and the environment) by the bombs must be downplayed to justify its own use at one point. To this end, the experiences of the Hiroshima maidens and the horror of violence were normalized as they were reduced to benign American mainstream ideals.

The Hiroshima maidens in Japanese discourse

What about the maidens’ stories in Japan? Prior to the Hiroshima maidens’ visit to the US in 1955, similar projects were launched domestically in Japan. Several women were invited from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Osaka and Tokyo to receive reconstruction surgeries. The first such trip was initiated by author Shizue Masugi. Masugi first encountered the so-called genbaku otome (literally meaning “the atomic bomb maidens” hereafter “the maidens”)⁶ coordinated by again Kiyoshi Tanimoto, upon her visit to Hiroshima at a lecture meeting sponsored by a publisher in May 1952 (Tanimoto 1976, 172). This personal encounter with the maidens urged Masugi to fundraise immediately after returning to Tokyo, allowing her to invite the maidens to Tokyo for reconstruction surgeries. In the following month of June, she brought nine maidens to Tokyo, accompanied by Kiyoshi Tanimoto and Kiyoshi Kikkawa, a male hibakusha who was referred to as genbaku ichigō or “the atomic bomb victim no. 1” (Takao 2010, 4).

Intriguingly, it was not only the hospital that the maidens visited but also various Tokyo landmarks, such as Teigeki (Teikoku gekijo, or the Imperial Theatre), Kabuki theatre, and the Daiei movie studio, while they were interviewed for a radio programme and women’s magazines (Kikkawa 1981, 84–5). Kikkawa, the only male hibakusha, could not help wondering if the maidens were used as poster girls. He also began to feel excluded from the narrative Tanimoto unfolded for the media, as Tanimoto did not mention Kikkawa’s own hardships to make the hibakusha’s plight known outside Hiroshima. What drove a wedge between Tanimoto and Kikkawa was when Kikkawa learned that the maidens were scheduled to visit the Sugamo Prison, where war criminals were incarcerated. For Kikkawa, it was preposterous and even insulting to the dead in Hiroshima that hibakusha, who went through extreme hardships, visited the prison to express sympathy for the war criminals who had been willingly complicit in, if not led, the reckless war. He opposed the idea, but the visit had been already scheduled without his consent. At the end, however, Kikkawa went along with the group out of curiosity.

When the group arrived at Sugamo, Kikkawa saw the inmates chatting, smoking, and snacking, far from the sad and regretful inmates he had imagined. First, the greetings were made to the maidens by two inmates, Hiroshima-born politician Kaya Okinori, who served as Minister of Finance during the war, and the former Army General Hata Shunroku, who was stationed at Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. Yet, Kikkawa wrote, neither of them uttered a word of repentance or remorse for having caused such tragedy to the hibakusha. After their greetings, the two maidens, representing the group, replied that they had once held a grudge against the military leaders for the loss of their youth and beauty, but now that 7 years had passed, they began to realize that the war criminals’ plight was the same as theirs. The maidens’ response deeply disturbed Kikkawa. Later that night, he contacted Yoko Ota, hibakusha and the author of Shikabane no machi [City of Corpses] to discuss this visit. Ota disclosed her discontent to Kikkawa that journalism was preying upon the maidens, and her complaint confirmed Kikkawa’s suspicion that the visit was made to give an impression to people in Japan that they should come to terms with the war, just as the maidens did with the bomb, the war, and the war criminals. Thus, the prison meeting symbolized reconciliation not only between the maidens and the war criminals but also reconciliation between people in Japan and the war (Kikkawa 1981, 88).

One of the Sugamo inmates, Kawabe Ryōji, also found this visit troublesome. He was informed about the maidens’ visit at breakfast on that day. At first, it made no sense to him, as the victims would be paying a visit to those who victimized them. His reaction was quite similar to that of Kikkawa. The maidens were among those who suffered the most from the war, while the Sugamo inmates were war criminals who were either directly responsible for the war, or were accomplices (Kawabe 1992, 229). He was determined to apologize to the maidens upon meeting them, kneeling down on the ground. However, Kawabe received a visit from a friend, which coincided with that of the maidens, and as a result, he missed the maidens’ visit.

Hearing from his fellow inmates what had happened during the maidens’ visit, Kawabe’s anger surged:

I hate even more the military leaders who are responsible for the disfigurement of those women, yet showed no regret. I also hate myself. I had no intention back then. Instead, I took up a gun, being carried away by the military government’s propaganda … taking part in the aggressive war. (Kawabe 1992, 230)

During his conversation with other inmates, one of them questioned whether Tanimoto or Masugi had realized the significance of the maidens’ visit at Sugamo. Also, the inmates saw this visit would segue into the remilitarization of Japan:

The actual war criminals who got away from the consequences are now calling for remilitarization and arms production incorrigibly … if people read the newspaper article on the maidens’ visit, they may take it as a beautiful reconciliation story between the maidens and war criminals. That would only please those real war mongers. (Kawabe 1992, 232)

Testimonies by Kikkawa and Kawabe attest that women’s scarred bodies were also used in Japan for reconciliation, which could aim at the possible remilitarization of Japan.⁷ The timing was also crucial. According to sociologist Aiko Utsumi, the year 1950 saw “sympathetic visits to Sugamo” (senpan imon) becoming popular, beginning with a visit by dancers from the famous Ishii Baku Dance Company, followed by rakugoka (traditional Japanese storytellers), Japanese traditional dancers, stand-up comedians, singers, theatre actors, and even baseball players (Utsumi 2004, 146). Especially after 1952, when the governance over Sugamo was transferred from the SCAP to Japan, the prison became a popular tourist site in Tokyo. Prefectural associations (kenjinkai), for example, would begin to make pilgrimages to Sugamo.

Utsumi notes that in 1952, the petition to release war criminals from the prison culminated (Utsumi 2004, 143–149), which was “a process of chipping away war responsibility” (Takao 2010, 6). The popular Sugamo visits and release movements of war criminals changed the average Japanese people’s perception of the war criminals, from looking at them askance to seeing them as war victims and even war heroes. Placing the maidens’ Sugamo visit in this context, the Sugamo visit was not entirely unforeseen, and Tanimoto as well as Masugi were most likely aware of the significance and the influence of media promulgation of the maidens’ visit.

After this Sugamo visit, the maidens went to Tokyo University’s Koishikawa clinic for examination of their wounds. Since the surgical treatment would require a long period of time, the maidens went home to get ready for a long stay at the clinic for surgeries. Their surgeries in Tokyo were successful, which later encouraged Cousins to promote the Hiroshima maiden project in the United States. When the maidens visited the clinic in Tokyo for the first time, Kikkawa again opposed the idea. “The reason of my opposition is that simple”, he wrote. “Hiroshima doctors are more experienced when it comes to surgical treatment of keloids. Taking maidens to Tokyo seemed to me an insult to Hiroshima doctors and their medical experiences” (Kikkawa 1981, 89). It is beyond the scope of the present research to determine medical adequacy for the maidens’ surgeries, but the fact that journalists and photographers were waiting for the maidens’ arrival at the Koishikawa clinic in Tokyo perhaps signalled to Kikkawa that the maidens were being used again to fulfil the nation’s political agenda. Moreover, their Sugamo visit and the maidens’ response downplayed their sufferings, as if such plights were over after only 7 years, and as if the penance for war criminals should be over after 7 years.

While the Hiroshima maidens’ visit to the US was used to reassure the American mainstream values – the values of the patriarchal system with white, middle-class, suburban, heterosexual, and Christian family – in Japan, they were again used for reconciliation with Japan’s own past, thereby contributing to the obfuscation of war responsibility and the promotion of remilitarization. As Kawabe describes, he and his fellow inmates believed that many military leaders in Japan were not held accountable for their war crimes, nor were their American counterparts held accountable for dropping the nuclear bombs. This was how normalization of the bombing was made in both countries across the Pacific Ocean.

When incorporated into the postwar Japanese narrative, the scarred women’s stories often represented a pro-American standpoint. In this regard, however, Yoneyama observes a sharp division between the representative images of mother and daughter. “The Hiroshima mothers”, writes Yoneyama, “dominant in peace and antinuclear discourse, came to signify that which was antithetical to American militarism and imperialism” (Yoneyama 1999, 202). Hiroshima feminist scholar Kikue Takao also questions the Hiroshima mothers’ silence over the maidens’ scarred bodies:

I doubt that they [married women and mothers] were indifferent to the maidens, as their US visit was largely publicized. Yet, I have not come across any record informing that mothers supported the Hiroshima maidens, or even criticize them for that matter. (Takao 2010, 15–6)

Takao speculates that the mothers’ silence may indicate divisions among hibakusha, and resentment towards the maidens. She introduces stories of a married woman who was divorced by her husband due to her keloid scars from the atomic bombing, a male hibakusha who withdrew from society because of his self-consciousness of his keloid, and other scarred maidens who were not chosen to go to the US for surgeries (Takao 2010, 15–6; Jacobs 2010).

Whether or not the mothers’ ambivalence, or even resentment, motivated their peace movement, what propelled their action came in 1954, when the Japanese tuna fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū maru [Lucky Dragon No. 5] was affected by the explosion of a hydrogen bomb test conducted by the US at Bikini Atoll, despite their location out of the designated testing area. Discovering that the crew was affected by radiation and that the tuna was irradiated, mothers in Suginami ward in Tokyo began to collect petitions to stop nuclear tests. Petitions spread throughout Japan, which resulted in the two conferences Nihon hahaoya taika [Japan Mothers’ Assembly] and Sekai hahaoya taikai [World Mothers’ Assembly] in 1955. Takao argues that, as the discourse that equates the mother to the pacifist became prevalent, this pacifist image of mother painted over the mothers’ support for the war in pre-1945 Japan (Takao 2010, 16). Even though the mothers’ pacifism appeared as an anti-American political stance, both the innocent daughters and the peace-aspiring mothers representing Japanese women emphasized their innocence and victimhood, which was convenient for the Japanese national discourse that did not want to revisit its wartime atrocities.

While the mothers’ antinuclear movement spread and gained popularity, the Hiroshima maidens disappeared from the public discourse after their return from the US. Takao notes that the Hiroshima maidens were not welcomed back in Hiroshima, due in part to jealousy over both the free plastic surgeries and the transformations from pitiful scarred maidens to independent women immersed in the advanced American lifestyle. On the maidens’ end, they had guilt about having been chosen, or had reverse culture shock. The Hiroshima maidens withdrew from the public eye and kept silent after their return to Japan (Takao 2010, 11).⁸ However, their actions were not the only cause of their disappearance from public discourse. The Japanese public was perhaps less interested in the triumphant narrative of the maidens’ recovery than in the image of purity and innocence in their suffering. In Japan, the war memory is always rife with loss and sadness, mirroring the failure of the male protector. Consequently, the whole story of the maidens’ recovery has been often disregarded. Unlike their scars that never leave them despite numerous surgeries, the horrors of the flashing light that burned their body were eventually erased from the public mind.

Conclusion

By introducing Chim↑Pom’s performance in Hiroshima in 2008, I claimed that their light and shallow performance failed to show the horror of violence. Reenacting this historical event, in fact, further banalized the horror of the atomic bombing. However, instead of attributing the banalization to Chim↑Pom alone, I see it as the result of a long tradition of normalization of violence in both the United States and Japan. The horror of the violence of the atomic bombing – the flash, roar, blast, radiation, discrimination, disfigurement, keloids, and so on – has rarely been represented and disseminated. Rather, the Hiroshima maidens’ experiences have been appropriated to reinforce the 1950s American mainstream ideal in the US, or to obscure war responsibility and promote possible remilitarization in Japan. Chim↑Pom’s performance, thus, may not be a surprise or a shock but rather a natural consequence of the atom bomb discourse.

To revisit the performance, and to see the incongruence between the word “pika” in conventional use and its weight in Hiroshima, I will draw upon acclaimed children’s book writer Cynthia Kadohata’s explanation of the word. In an interview about the publication of her book Kira-Kira, Kadohata said, “The name I originally suggested for [the book] was Pika Pika, which in Japanese means ‘sparkling’ or ‘bright’, as with a flashlight. My sister…told me it would make kids think of Pikachu, the cute little character in the Pokémon computer game whose tail flashes” (Nilsen and Kadohata 2006, 313). But the common use of the term goes further than cultures of video game and animation. Kadohata continued, “When she [Kadohata’s sister] told me that a popular Japanese commercial for a toilet bowl cleaner uses Pika Pika as its catchphrase, I went looking for a new title” (Nilsen and Kadohata 2006, 313).

It is an interesting coincidence that Kadohata mentions “Pikachu” here, as Chim↑Pom in (2006) presented taxidermied rats that they had caught in Shibuya, painted yellow to resemble Pikachu (Super☆Rat, 2006). The association of the word “pika” with the cute character in the computer game, rather than with the atomic bombing, may be more real to the youths who are heiwaboke, or indulged in peace, whom Chim↑Pom wanted to wake up.

In contrast, in considering the weight of the “pika” and the meaning of light in Hiroshima, the following anecdote may be suggestive: photographer and Hiroshima native Sachiko Miyamae once remarked that her friends living in Osaka mistook Nobel Prize laureate Oe Kenzaburo for a Hiroshima citizen. Such a misconception may not be uncommon, construed from the association of his books about Hiroshima and his concerns for nuclear weaponry and energy. But, Miyamae observes, “If Oe were from Hiroshima, he would not have named his son ‘Hikari’ (Light)” (personal communication, 15 December 2014). Besides her birth in late-1960s Hiroshima, and her upbringing in 1970s Hiroshima, Miyamae has no familial relations to the atomic bombing, yet feels ambivalent towards the word. While her statement did not intend to accuse Oe over naming his son Hikari, it poignantly reveals the sensibility of hibakusha as well as of Hiroshima citizens towards the light and its associations, such as with the word “pika”.

The term “hikari” in Japanese, like its English translation “light”, commonly connotes a hope and future; the first bullet train introduced in Japan in 1970 was named “hikari”, indicating not only the train’s light-like speed but also technological advancement and its promise of a bright future. Thus, in general, the word “pika” and its association with light evoke cuteness, brightness, cleanness, and even hope, and do not necessarily convey the ominous association (once) widely perceived in Hiroshima. Perhaps ever since Toyoko Minowa and Tadako Emori stood behind the screen on the American TV show This is Your Life, we have continuously been blinded, and have failed to understand, what is behind the screen. As a result, we only see their shadows – shadows made by the light.

Unfortunately, Chim↑Pom’s performance not only banalized the horror but also brought about harm, as artist Yukinori Yanagi argues: “Art can definitely embrace something harmful. But Chim↑Pom did not know to whom they want to reveal the harm, and resulted in harming hibakusha.” (Hariu, et al. 2009, 242). Here, returning to Butler’s explanation of the “banality of evil” is helpful. Butler explains that what is banal is not the mass murder, but people’s non-thinking. Eichmann and others executed such a horrendous mission without “intention”. That is to say, the action was instituted and ingrained in their lives, so that even an action of mass-scale murder did not require each subject’s “intention”. “Intention” in this context is, according to Butler, to “think reflectively about one’s own action as a political being, whose own life and thinking is bound up with the life and thinking of others” (Butler 2011).

Sugamo inmate Kawabe’s self-reflection and regret for not having his own intention resonates with Butler’s analysis. Also, it redirects our thoughts to Chim↑Pom’s performance. Perhaps the failure of the performance can be attributed to this lack of intention: to whom did they want to send a message? How would the word be perceived by people on the ground? As Yanagi points out (Yanagi 2009, 246), if they wanted to shake up people who had forgotten about the horror of nuclear attacks, they should have enacted a performance over the American Embassy in Tokyo, as the US still maintains 4760 nuclear warheads (Kristensen and Norris 2015), or the Japanese Parliament House, which has chosen to be protected by the US’s nuclear umbrella.

Hibakusha were the last people who needed to receive Chim↑Pom’s message to “Sober up!” Even when Ushiro claims that he was influenced by Nakazawa Keiji’s Hadashi no Gen [Barefoot Gen] – and perhaps drawing the word “pika” on the sky was inspired by the expression employed by the graphic novel – Chim↑Pom members were far from being on the side of hibakusha. Unintentionally, they identified themselves with the bombers, who were trained not to think of what was happening on the ground, under the flashing light of the atomic bombing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Health books, or Hibakusha kenko techo, were given to hibakusha (those who were in a designated area at the time of bombing; those who came within 2 km of the city within 2 weeks; those who helped more than 10 patients per day at the triage or shelter; and those who were prenatally exposed and were born within 9 months of the bombing).

2. The group consists of Ushiro Ryūta, Ellie, Hayashi Yasutaka, Okada Masataka, Mizuno Toshinori, and Inaoka Motomu.

3. The group’s only female member, Ellie, was not a part of this performance.

4. Their exhibition was scheduled to open on 1 November 2008.

5. Needless to say, such normalization of violence is not particular to the atomic bombing. One of the most despicable examples is the “comfort women” issue in Japan, where some argue that systemizing sex slavery was not uncommon during the war.

6. It is important to note that the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum removed the name, genbaku otome, from their exhibition in 2004, as a response to the complaint from one of the Hiroshima maidens that the label genbaku otome is distressing. Now, the museum’s explanation describes them as hibaku shita wakai josei tachi or “young women who suffered from the atomic bombing” (Takao 2010, 1).

7. While the Japanese Constitution announced the renouncement of war in article 9, when the Korean War broke out in 1950, the Allied Powers established an army-like organization called Keisatsu yobitai [National Police Reserve], which later became the Self-Defense Force.

8. Only four out of 25 maidens are publicly active in disseminating their experiences and antinuclear messages, despite Tanimoto’s wishes (Takao 2010, 11).