Lifton - Death in life · survivors of Hiroshima

Lifton, Robert Jay, 1926

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The atomic bombing of Hiroshima in theearly morning of August 6, 1945, is even to-day one of the most debated and disturbingevents in world historv. No one in Hiroshimawas prepared for what happened. For thecity had escaped serious bombing despite itsstrategic wartime significance, and the peo-ples attitudeeven on that morning as theyhurried into the citys center to their jobswas a combination of amazement at its goodfortune and fear that its turn would come.

Robert Jay Lifton, who has lived andworked in Japan for several years, is the firstperson, American or Japanese, to undertakea wide-ranging study of those who survivedthe atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He in-terviewed people in Hiroshima who hadexperienced the bombamong them com-munity leaders, politicians, clergymen, ad-ministrators and directors of survivor andpeace movement groups, medical personnel,scholars, writers, artists, foreigners residentin the city, and visitors to itand quotationsfrom the interviews interwoven with thetaut and coolly analytic narrative provideinsight into survivors struggles and prob-lems: fear of physical afterefi^ is in them-selves or their children, cont i) iiig immer

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STATE OF VERMONT; DEPARTMENT OF U8RARIESREGIONAL U3RARYRD 2 BOX 244ST. JOHNSBURY, VT 05819

ALSO BY R O B E R 1 JAY L I F T O N

Thought Reform and the Psychology of TotcdismA Study of ''Brainwashing in China

The Woman in America (editor )

DEATH IN LIFE

Survivors of Hiroshima

BY ROBERT JAY LIFTON

To the memory of my father and the world of my children

7^//

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: RESEARCH AND

RESEARCHER 3

I HIROSHIMA 13

II THE ATOMIC BOMB EXPERIENCE 13HI INVISIBLE CONTAMINATION 37

IV A - B O M B D I S E A S E 103

V A-BOMB MAN 163

\T ATOMIC BOMB LEADERS 209

yn RESIDUAL STRUGGLES; R U S T , PEACE,AND MASTERY 233

VHI PERCEIVING AMERICA 317

IX FORMULATION: SELF AND WORLD 367

C R E A T I E RESPONSE: 1 ) '

literature/ 397

X

A -BOMB

V 1 1 1

C O N r E N 1 s

XI CREATIVE response: 2 ) ART

DILEMMAS 451

XII T II E S U R V I O R 479

APPENDIX 543NOTES 557INDEX 577

LIST OF SURVIVORS QUOTED

I S T I C

DEATH IN LIFE

Survivors of Hiroshima

INTRODUCTION:RESEARCH AND RESEARCHER

Research is a form of re-creation. I have tried to record the mostimportant psychological consequences of exposure to the atomic bombin Hiroshima. In order to relate the atomic survivor to general hu-man experience, I extended the inquiry to include a wider concept ofthe sur\avor as an entity,highly relevant to our times. These concernsm turn led to a stud\- of death symbolism and the overall impact ofnuclear weapons, which will be published later as a separate volume en-titled The Sense of Innnortality.

Hiroshima stimulates ready resistance within the would-be researcher.It does so partly because of its specific association with massive deathand mutilation, and partly because of the general reluctance of those inthe human sciences to risk professional confrontation with great his-torical events which do not lend themselves to established approaches orcategories. In any case, I have little doubt of my own resistance toHiroshima; I had lived and worked in Japan for a total of more than

four years, over a ten-year period, before I finally visited the cih- in earlvApril of 1962.

At that time I was completing two years of research on Japaneseyouth, as part of a long-standing interest in the interplay betweenindividual psychology and historical change, or in "psvehohistorical

process. In Kyoto, wlierc I was working, I thought only occasionallyabout the worlds first atomic bombed city, which lay about twohundred miles to the southwest. Nor was Hiroshima mentioned par-ticularly frequently by the young men and women, mostly uniyersityundergraduates, whom I was interviewing dailyexcept by those vv'hohappened to haye grown up in its general area. I'he great majority hadeither no memory of the war at all or only the most meager recollectionsof it. But \yhat became clear when I explored with them their sense ofthemselvT'S and their world was the enormous significance for them,hovyeyer indirectly expressed, of the fact that Japan alone had beenexposed to atomic bombs. 'This historical 'fact had much to do withthe power of the peace symbol for all Japanese. It played a veryimportant part in the anti-war sentiment of the mass demonstrations of1960, an extraordinary spectacle which I was able to obserye closelv' andto discuss with militant young participants when they could free them-selvcs for a few moments from their demanding activities on the streets.And it was a matter to contend with eyen in the Reviv^al Boom whiehfollovyedthe reawakened interest in war films, military music, and theliterature of militarv strategy.

These seemingly opposite tendencies can be understood as relatedparts of a general struggle to cope with an unmastered past and athreatening future, a struggle in which Hiroshima faces both ways. T heatomie bombings were experienced, eyen by Japanese born after theytook place, as both an annihilatory culmination of a disastrous period ofhome-grown fascism and militarism, and a sudden infliction of a newand equally unfortunate historical destinya destiny which could,morcoyer, be repeated, and which vyas open to everyone. \\ hat I amsaving is that nuclear weapons left a powerful imprint upon theJapanese which continues to be transmitted, historically and psycho-logically, through the generations. But I could not begin to understandthe eomplexities of this imprint until I embarked upon my work withHiroshima victims thcmsclycs.