The Bombed:.

Abstract

Hara Mieko, who was a youngster in Hiroshima when the city was bombed, later wrote of herself that “the Mieko of today is completely different from the Mieko of the past.”1 Most hibakusha experienced this fracturing of identity, and for Japan as a whole the very meaning of time was altered by the atomic bombings of 6 and 9 August 1945. Such a profound sense of disjuncture was, of course, not peculiar to Japan. For much of the world, the holocaust in Europe and the nuclear genocide of Hiroshima/Nagasaki signified the closure of “modernity” as it had been known and dreamed about until then and the advent of a new world of terrible and awesome potentialities. In Japan, however, the situation was unique in two ways. Only the Japanese actually had experienced nuclear destruction. And in the years immediately following, only they were not allowed to publicly engage the nature and meaning of this new world. Beginning in mid-September 1945, U.S. authorities in occupied Japan censored virtually all discussion of the bombs.