Review: American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by Naoko Wake

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Naoko Wake’s American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki centers her eighty-six interviews with U.S. hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), conducted in English and Japanese from 2011 to 2017, and two other oral history collections in our memories of nuclear holocaust. By giving voice to the U.S. citizens who lived with sickness and scars for decades after August 1945, Wake dismantles the United States’s righteous atomic victory narrative. Wake’s work is indeed trans-Pacific, reflected by her definition of U.S. survivors as Japanese Americans with U.S. citizenship living in Japan in 1945 and post-war Japanese and Korean immigrants to the United States who became citizens, and by her focus on how survivors defied and deconstructed national boundaries and memories.After a detailed introduction to the project’s methodology and its themes of colonialism, justice, remembering, and gender, Wake organizes her work into six substantial chapters covering the 1880s to the early 2000s. She positions Hiroshima and Nagasaki as immigrant cities where American-born Japanese and Korean residents experienced layered identities that later undermined national narratives. Her analysis of American victims’ memories destabilizes ideas about belonging and shows how nuclear holocaust’s horrors crossed boundaries of “nationality, age, class, or gender” (pp. 74–75). These categories re-emerged as survivors interacted with each other: men focused on saving other victims while women made medicine and cared for hibakusha. Wake posits that U.S. survivors responded to their identity with silence from 1945–1960, marking an era of cross-national “hiding and healing” (p. 133). Starting in the 1960s, U.S. survivors used community ties, personal testimony, and alliances to create a collective memory that fought for medical care from the U.S. government.Wake’s meticulous analysis adds crucial strands to atomic bomb history, including her documentation of the erasures U.S. survivors experienced in America. She notably argues that the Korean War introduced U.S. survivors still in East Asia to U.S. service personnel, resulting in marriages and convincing Korean survivors to immigrate to the United States. Wake proves that the Cold War obstructed survivors’ voices as the U.S. fixated on future nuclear destruction, but their interactions with each other during this era resisted historical portrayals of the United States, Japan, and the Korean peninsula as purely national actors. American Survivors is grounded in immigration, identity, and the Cold War, yet it avoids familiar cultural and political assessments of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and geopolitics in favor of counter-memories that ask new questions about nuclear holocaust’s morality and that link the silences of hibakusha to those of the United States’s incarcerated Nikkei. One of Wake’s major contributions is her critique of the ways U.S. racism and nationalism forced survivors to negotiate their identities as Americans in a society that marked them as Asian and foreign. This affected medical care available to hibakusha—especially women—and caused American citizens to seek treatment in Japan, reminding them again of their status as “perpetual foreigners.”Chapter introductions are sometimes too lengthy, but provide the nuance needed for the oral histories that follow. Survivors’ stories are occasionally incomplete as Wake privileges analysis over narrative; this may be purposeful, but it does leave unanswered questions. Ultimately, Wake presents a complicated, ambitious addition to atomic bomb historiography in an accessible style that builds upon her scholarship on gender, medicine, and the Hiroshima Maidens. She gives power to unheard survivors, many of whom had never been interviewed. She questions the U.S. government’s refusal to confront the universality of the horrors it inflicted on its own citizens, including radiation sickness, discrimination, legal and human rights violations, and lack of American justice.