The title of this book is a statement with two dimensions. On a general level, it says that after 6 August 1945 the human psyche no longer was what it had been before, and on an individual level that survivors of the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered psychological harm of a kind not known before. Both claims are discussed at length, supported by a great deal of evidence based on meticulous research.
Zwigenberg traces the work of psychologists such as Kubo Yoshitoshi, a Japanese doctor hailing from Hiroshima who connected his experience to psychological research on the survivors and later became an antinuclear activist. Kubo was tasked with collecting testimonies of survivors, about which he raised the question of what they could contribute to promote peace in the world. How did this attitude impact Japanese psychology, and in particular, Japanese psychologists dealing with surviving victims of the atomic bomb, the hibakusha? This is the question motivating Zwigenberg’s interest in the work of Kubo and some of his colleagues. From the very beginning of the American occupation there were US psychiatrists investigating the psychological fallout of the bombs, notably Alexander Leighton who interviewed hundreds of survivors. Such interviews and other testimonies are the materials Zwigenberg examines for his appreciation of psychological views on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to weigh the question of whether there is or should be an A-bomb psychology.
As is well-known, for decades after the war the hibakusha received relatively little attention. Some argue they were largely ignored by Japanese officials as well as by the medical profession. Often noted in this connection is the contrast between much support of Holocaust survivors by psychologists in the West and outright neglect of hibakusha in Japan. Why was that? Why did PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) research on hibakusha emerge so much later in Japan than of Holocaust survivors?
Can these two groups reasonably be compared, you may ask. Zwigenberg sides with those who confirm this, pointing out that “the Holocaust and the atomic bomb were seen until the 1960s, and arguably even to the end of the Cold War, as comparable and interchangeable symbols of the worst that humans can do to other humans” (p. 4). In passing, it may be noted that an Italian book about Hiroshima, published in 2010, bears the title Hiroshima. Storia e memoria dell’olocausto nucleare [Hiroshima: History and memory of the nuclear Holocaust]. The association of both catastrophes has not faded into the background with the end of the Cold War, and the “nuclear Holocaust” – as Shimon Peres among others referred to it – is still an important reference point.
Zwigenberg explicitly and convincingly connects the history of nuclear trauma with the history of Holocaust trauma. History, or rather historicity, is the point to be emphasized here. His book can be read as a (post-WWII) history of psychology which, as he demonstrates with many examples, is invariably entangled with politics, culture, gender and racial issues and economic development, although this is often ignored or even denied.
The question of why only few Japanese doctors treated hibakusha’s suffering as a health problem of a special kind before the 1990s calls for an explanation. Zwigenberg offers several reasons. One is the “American campaign of denial and neglect of the A-bomb’s long-term effects” (p. 4); another that after the war Japanese scientists – not just psychologists – who were eager to be reintegrated into the international scientific community tended to avoid problematic topics and to emphasize scientific “objectivity”. That and the insistence on “apolitical science”, he argues, had “a stifling impact on hibakusha research” (p. 8). Another explanation he discusses is that surveys of bombing victims, such as the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USBS) carried out as early as November 1945 and several others, took a quantitative approach and put the results “in endless charts and tables that added up to a ‘moral index’” (p. 68). They highlighted the effects on society at large rather than the mental damage caused by the bombing to individuals.
Further, racism, Zwigenberg also mentions, may have prevented Japanese scholars from investigating psychological suffering through a transcultural lens. For, unlike the German enemy on the European battlefield, “most Americans did not view Japanese as fully human” (p. 45), a notion many Japanese consciously or unconsciously wanted to correct and were therefore hesitant to claim peculiar characteristics of the Japanese psyche that deviated from Western patterns.
Two forces come together here, the unprecedented destruction of a whole city by a single bomb and the formative influence of cultural tradition on the human mind, that not only support but demand an approach that recognizes the possibility of hibakushas’ very specific mental health problems.
Against this backdrop, Zwigenberg emphasises the importance of vagueness for a concept such as trauma, which is not a historically stable phenomenon. He also argues that not just the scientific discovery of trauma, but also the experience of it is historically conditioned. In other words, earlier generations before the Holocaust and Hiroshima did not experience suffering in the same way; a nuclear mind did not exist.
What hibakusha really experienced, and how the human psyche was affected by the advent of the nuclear age, remain open questions, though. By uncovering differences between “conventional” area raids on Tokyo and other Japanese cities – or Hamburg, for that matter – on the one hand, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the other, and by trying to fathom how psychological shock and trauma relate to changes of political attitudes, this book takes us a significant step further. Yet, following its author’s own argument about the contingency of psychology and other social sciences that from their inception were implicated in European colonialism and Euro-supremacist views of non-whites, we must continue to review and revise their histories.
By interpreting and making accessible testimonies of A-bomb survivors, the book contributes to a better understanding of what mass destruction does to the human mind. This is unfortunately timely and unexpectedly relevant today, when the possibility of nuclear war has re-entered international political discourse after more than seven decades of taboo.
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Florian Coulmas
Florian Coulmas is Senior Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen. His most recent book about Japan is Japanese Propriety, Past and Present. Disciplined liberalism (Routledge, 2023. He also authored a book about Hiroshima, in German: Hiroshima, Geschichte und Nachgeschichte [Hiroshima: History and Aftermath] (Munich: C.H.Beck).