Hibakusha Identity

Abstract

The Japanese word hibakusha has no exact equivalent word in English. It refers to people who have experienced an atomic blast. In the history of the world thus far, the only hibakusha are the people who were in Hiroshima Nagasaki in August of 1945. Many of the hibakusha who survived felt compelled to write their memoirs of the bombings and how they have fared since. Their work stands in a genre of non-fiction that is singular in the theme and description. They write attempting to describe the "indescribable hell" that shocked the world as humanity envisioned its self-created means of destruction. As such, their efforts are landmark and should have less trouble finding an audience. As John Treat points out, "...the Japanese experience of, and the varied responses to, their own catastrophes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not, by and large, been disseminated outside of their own language and geography. The sources used in this essay are all from Hiroshima: the personal accounts of four authors who were in Hiroshima, and selections from hundreds of survivors who were surveyed in 1989. The four authors are the main sources, as their personal histories and characters are known, but the anonymous witnesses provide a stark bluntness in their brief accounts that is at times more eloquent then the trained writers. Only Hiroshima survivors will be studied in this essay due to the limited scope of resources I could read in ten weeks. In reading the works of the hibakusha , there are four areas in which distinctive changing themes can be observed; physical identity, individual identity, group identity, and how the hibakusha respond to the nation's identity of militarism. This essay is divided into four parts and will examine those changes and offer conjectures as to how these changes occurred. It is my argument that the hibakusha have collectively altered identities in all four of the aforementioned categories. The next section will briefly describe what I mean by "identity" and why it became the theme of this essay. Each of the following sections corresponds to one of the four themes of identity.