No specific censorship rules related directly to the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombings, but the CCD eliminated most statements about the nuclear attacks in print and broadcast journalism, literature, films, and textbooks. Public comments that justified the U.S. use of the bombs or argued for their inevitability were sometimes permitted, but subjects that continued to be censored included technical details about the bombs’ blast, heat, and radiation; the extent of physical destruction in the two cities; death and casualty counts; personal testimonies of atomic bomb survivors; and any photographs, film footage, or reportage of survivors’ suffering from atomic bomb injuries and radiation effects. Even phrases such as “Many innocent people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki” were banned. Nagasaki named its annual commemoration of the bombing the Memorial Day for the Restoration of Peace, calling it a “culture festival” to appease U.S. officials, who believed these services were Japanese propaganda tools that indirectly called for U.S. atonement and hindered U.S. efforts to promote Japanese war guilt.
Some hibakusha writings slipped by occupation staff and were published locally in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but numerous books written by survivors were blocked from publication, including a small book by fourteen-year-old Ishida Masako, Masako taorezu [Masako Did Not Die], which described in vivid detail her memories of the Nagasaki bombing. The CCD felt the book was historically significant but banned it over the concern that it would “tear open war scars and rekindle animosity” toward the United States and tacitly indict the Nagasaki atomic bombing as a crime against humanity.
Also banned was Dr. Nagai’s 1947 Nagasaki no kane (The Bells of Nagasaki), a personal account of the days and months immediately following the bombing in which Nagai offered unique perspectives as a physician, a man himself afflicted with radiation disease, and a Catholic—including his belief that Nagasaki had been chosen “to expiate the sins committed by humanity in the Second World War.” Although his message reinforced the concepts of Japanese war guilt and repentance actively promoted by occupation officials, The Bells of Nagasaki was not permitted to be published for reasons similar to those that led to the banning of Ishida Masako’s book. After numerous appeals, Nagai’s book was finally approved for publication two years later, with the stipulation that it include an extended appendix, written by U.S. military officials, that provided a graphic written and photographic account of Japanese soldiers’ complete destruction of Manila in 1945—including the torture, mutilation, rape, starvation, and burning of innocent women and children. Ironically, the inclusion of this appendix resulted in the juxtaposition of the U.S. atomic bombings with Japanese atrocities in the Philippines, which could have been easily construed as a statement of their moral equivalence.
CCD policies also impeded the efforts of hundreds of Japanese scientists and physicians racing to comprehend the nature of survivors’ numerous radiation-related conditions and develop effective treatment methods. Scientists were already required to obtain permission to conduct studies on the effects of the atomic bombings. Further, on the basis of maintaining “public tranquility” in Japan and protecting the United States’ exclusive knowledge about the bombs, all Japanese research findings had to be translated into English and submitted to censorship offices, where they were evaluated for clearance or shipped to the United States for additional review, with little hope of being returned. In either case, permission to publish was rarely given.
Numerous atomic bomb–related scientific reports were also blocked from publication in Japan, including the former Tokyo Imperial University’s extensive early postbomb studies and Dr. Shirabe’s meticulous 1945 study of the medical conditions of eight thousand Nagasaki hibakusha. Censorship actions were so pervasive, and the editors of medical journals were so afraid that their publications would be shut down if rules were broken, that the number of published atomic bomb–related scientific reports diminished to three each year in 1948 and 1949. Japanese scientists and physicians eager to support hibakusha health and recovery were further impeded by the United States’ 1945 confiscation of early Japanese research teams’ blood samples, specimens, photographs, questionnaires, and clinical records from victim autopsies and survivor examinations. Researchers’ and survivors’ grievances over this violation were later aggravated when they discovered that the United States claimed sole use of these body parts—taken without their consent—for military studies to help defend U.S. civilians against nuclear attack. Even after the CCD closed in 1949, research studies on atomic bomb–related topics were banned from discussion at Japanese medical conferences until 1951.
Prior to a postwar presentation at a university in Tokyo, Dr. Shiotsuki Masao, the physician who had painstakingly conducted and preserved hibakusha autopsy specimens at Omura Naval Hospital, received a note of warning. It read, “Please be careful what you say. There is a detective here from the Motofuji police station.” Shiotsuki, who by then was working in a different field of medical research and had no knowledge of the censorship imposed on Japan’s physicians and scientists, was dumbfounded. It would be years before he and others fully understood the U.S. policies that had constrained public dialogue of the atomic bombs, restricted doctors’ efforts to improve treatment methodologies, blocked hibakusha themselves from understanding their persistent illnesses, and kept survivors’ suffering almost completely concealed from public view.
• • •
In the United States, while the terrifying truth about Japan’s nuclear cataclysm continued to be obscured from American citizens, top U.S. military and government leaders conducted a new, hard-hitting media campaign to justify the use of the bombs and promote public support for nuclear weapons development. In what social activist A. J. Muste called “a demonstration of . . . the logic of atrocity,” the campaign’s message was delivered through a new round of official denials of the impact of large-dose radiation exposure on hibakusha, combined with decisive statements that the bombs were an absolute military necessity that saved innumerable American lives and ended the war. Officials also deflected opposition to the bombs’ use by making repeated statements that fueled U.S. wartime hatred and racism against Japan and built the foundation for justifying the bombings as righteous and deserving acts against a savage enemy. It is a matter of conjecture whether these efforts were needed to influence Americans’ sentiments; in the immediate postwar years, most Americans—even those who felt disquieted by the enormity of harm the bombs had caused—supported the use of the bombs for reasons that included hatred of Japan’s brutality during the war, pervasive anti-Japanese racism, and huge relief that the war was over.
Even so, in order to prevent potential questions about the necessity and morality of the bombs and abate disapproval of the nation’s burgeoning nuclear weapons program, U.S. officials continued to limit American media access to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. With few exceptions, news stories out of the atomic-bombed cities were abstract and impersonal, focusing on the rebuilding of the cities, healing and rebirth out of the atomic ashes, and potential reconciliation with the United States that—according to American journalists—many atomic bomb victims desired. Reporters typically referenced the atomic bombings in the context of government calls for heightened civil defense policies, appeals for international control of atomic energy, or praise of U.S. scientific ingenuity and achievement. Photographs of the mushroom clouds became the iconic images of the atomic bombings, with no representation of the hundreds of thousands who died and suffered beneath them.
Mainstream journalists rarely challenged the government’s perspectives. In early 1946, however, a small number of articles in the national press criticized the U.S. nuclear weapons program and examined the ethical dilemmas of the U.S. decision to use the bombs. These articles sparked a heated national debate. No formal opposition movement came together, but that summer new editorials and commentaries disapproving the bombs’ use on Japan, combined with an increased number of articles and books that explored the hiba
kusha experience, fostered new dialogues about the ethics of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Public engagement with the hibakusha experience swelled in August, when, in a single issue, the New Yorker published John Hersey’s new work, Hiroshima, a sixty-eight-page account of the Hiroshima atomic bombing through the eyes of six survivors. Hersey, a former war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer who had spent three weeks in Hiroshima in the spring of 1946, wrote a vivid nonfiction narrative that captured readers’ imaginations, helping them to see Hiroshima as a real place and empathize with hibakusha as real people with families, homes, and jobs. Hiroshima’s graphic descriptions of instantaneous death, human anguish, and the mysterious symptoms from radiation exposure evoked powerful emotional responses across the United States. The issue sold out at shops and newsstands, requests for reprints multiplied, and approximately fifty American newspapers republished the story in serial form. Albert Einstein ordered a thousand copies. The Book-of-the-Month Club distributed hundreds of thousands of copies free to its subscribers because, in the words of club president Harry Scherman, “We find it hard to conceive of anything being written that could be of more importance at this moment to the human race.” ABC Radio broadcast the entire text of Hiroshima in half-hour segments over four weeks. Letters, telegraphs, and postcards—most of which expressed approval of the story—poured into the New Yorker offices. By the end of October, Alfred A. Knopf had published Hiroshima in book form, and within six months, over a million copies were sold around the world. In Japan, however, the book was prohibited from publication for another three years over concerns that Hersey’s depictions might invite perceptions that the bombs were “unduly cruel.”
Immediately following the publication of Hersey’s article, statements by two influential figures that challenged U.S. justifications for using the bombs ignited further controversy. At a mid-September press conference about other naval matters, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was quoted as saying that the bombings were a mistake because at the time they were dropped, Japan was on the verge of surrender. Two days later, a scathing essay in the Saturday Review by renowned journalist Norman Cousins presented readers with a series of pressing questions to blast open some of the unspoken realities of the atomic bombings and the implications of U.S. nuclear weapons development. “Do we know, for example, that many thousands of human beings in Japan will die of cancer during the next few years because of radioactivity released by the bomb?” Cousins asked. “Do we know that the atomic bomb is in reality a death ray, and that the damage by blast and fire may be secondary to the damage caused by radiological assault upon human tissue?”
Apologists for the atomic bombings fought back. Nervous that negative views of their decision to use the bombs might intensify public perceptions of the atomic attacks as immoral or even criminal, concerned that such sentiments would damage postwar international relations and threaten U.S. nuclear development, and eager to defend genuine beliefs that the bombs were necessary, government and military officials hurriedly strategized ways to prevent what they considered “a distortion of history.” Their plan: to effectively argue the necessity of the bombs and suppress objections to their use. In the words of Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, a longtime friend of former secretary of war Henry L. Stimson, their intention was to silence the opposition’s “sloppy sentimentality.”
Their efforts worked. Two articles by prominent government officials published in late 1946 and early 1947 offered intelligent and persuasive “behind-the-scenes” perspectives on the decision to use the bombs that effectively quelled civic dissent and directed focus away from personal stories of people who had experienced the bombs. The first article was authored by Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a respected physicist who had helped develop the atomic bombs. In the December 1946 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Compton compared the death toll and damages in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with those from the Tokyo firebombing raids. Without mentioning the radiation effects and ongoing suffering caused by the atomic bombs, he provided casualty estimates for a land invasion of Japan had the war dragged on, claiming that the atomic bombs had prevented the loss of “hundreds of thousands—perhaps several millions—of lives, both American and Japanese.” By most historical accounts, these figures are far higher than those estimated by the U.S. military prior to the bombings. Compton concluded that using the bombs was the only rational decision that U.S. leaders could make, and that the delivery of the two bombs one after the other and the emperor’s decision to surrender less than a day after the Nagasaki bombing were evidence that the atomic bombs ended the war. In a short letter published in a later edition of the Atlantic Monthly, President Truman validated Compton’s perspectives, describing his article as “a fair analysis of the situation.”
Compton’s Atlantic Monthly commentary set the stage for an extended article by former secretary of war Stimson, published in Harper’s Magazine in February 1947, which Secretary of State James Byrnes hoped would “stop some of the idle talk” by those who opposed the use of the bombs. Though a team of military and political leaders contributed to Stimson’s final draft, it was Stimson himself who provided the rank, respect, and reasoned communication style to successfully shut down almost all public criticism of the bombs.
With clarity and unquestionable authority, Stimson told American readers that during the war, the U.S. atomic bomb policy had been a simple one: “to spare no effort” in securing the earliest possible development of an atomic bomb in order to shorten the war, minimize destruction, and save American lives. Like Compton, however, Stimson omitted many critical facts that would have given American readers a more thorough grasp of the numerous and complex factors involved in choosing to use atomic weapons on Japan: He failed to include key officials’ prebomb debates over modifying the “unconditional surrender” restriction that he himself had recognized as a possible key to bringing Japan to an earlier surrender. He explained that the Potsdam Declaration had provided adequate warning to Japan but did not clarify that the declaration’s wording made no reference to nuclear weapons. He justified the two cities’ death tolls by comparing them to an estimate of more than a million American lives saved by avoiding a costly invasion—without mentioning the impact of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, which would have caused Japan to fight on two fronts, altered Allied invasion strategies, and possibly ended the war prior to Allied forces landing on Japan’s main islands. In claiming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets, Stimson obscured the obvious fact that the atomic bombs did not discriminate between military and civilian locations and personnel as they obliterated the two cities.
Ultimately, Stimson claimed that the decision to use the bombs was “the least abhorrent” option that resulted in exactly what military and government officials intended: Japan’s surrender without a U.S. and Allied invasion of Japan’s main islands. By the article’s conclusion, Stimson had shifted readers’ moral focus to the United States’ obligation to retain international control over nuclear technology, weapons development, and testing to prevent other countries from producing or using atomic weapons. Nuclear weapons in U.S. hands, he maintained, would keep the United States and the world safe.
It would be decades before historians gained access to the internal memos and documents of Stimson and his team of contributors that would reveal the careful construction of the secretary of war’s arguments and the number of misstatements and omissions they contained. In the meantime, in the months following its publication, the Harper’s article was reprinted in its entirety by numerous newspapers and magazines across the country and quoted at length by dozens more. By virtue of his authority and careful reasoning, Stimson had created a singular atomic bomb narrative with such moral certitude that it superseded all others and became deeply ingrained as the truth in American perception and memory: The atomic bombings ended the war and saved
a million American lives.
The U.S. government’s campaign to justify the bombs and mute opposition had done its job. Media reports on the survivors’ lives—and the empathy they evoked—virtually ceased. Even with the popularity of Hersey’s book, the combined impact of occupation censorship and U.S. justification and denial diminished Americans’ ability to grasp both the colossal scope of damages and death in Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the unpredictable and odious aftereffects of radiation exposure. Referring to atomic bomb dissenters, McGeorge Bundy—a behind-the-scenes contributor to Stimson’s article and coauthor of Stimson’s autobiography—remarked, “I think we deserve some sort of medal for reducing these particular chatterers to silence.”
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Shrouded in silence, hibakusha entered a new stage of long-term atomic bomb survival. At Omura National Hospital, the bedsores on Taniguchi’s chest did not heal and were so deep that portions of his ribs and pulsing heart were visible. “Lying on my stomach with my chest wounds pressed down into the bed—the pain was excruciating,” he said. New sores continued to develop on Taniguchi’s lower left jaw, his knees, and both sides of his body near his hips—anywhere his body made contact with the bed. Powerless to move anything except his neck and right arm, Taniguchi lay drenched in pus secreted from these wounds and the swollen and festering burns on his back, arms, and legs. He was constantly enveloped in the smell of decomposing flesh that pooled around his body. Taniguchi’s red blood cell count remained dangerously low, his pulse was strained, and he frequently experienced fevers that spiked to perilously high levels. When he was able to eat, he was forced to do so while lying on his stomach. Food often became stuck in his throat, and on at least one occasion he choked and stopped breathing. Sometime in 1946, his father returned after sixteen years in Manchuria. In Taniguchi’s hospital room, father and son met for the first time since Taniguchi was an infant. Except to confirm that it happened, Taniguchi barely spoke of this moment. After their visit, his father moved to Osaka, where Taniguchi’s sister and brother lived.
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