Victims, Survivors and Genbaku Bungaku: The Art of Literary Witness and Collective Memory

Abstract

Today, the words "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki" are recognized as far more than just Japanese city names. The words themselves are suffused with meaning, standing as reminders of past and potential nuclear war, modern peace movements, and the intense suffering that humans can and do inflict upon one another during war. It is undeniable that, despite the range in symbolic import and meaning, these places have become symbols of the human condition and occupy a place in our contemporary collective memory. These words did not gain such symbolism overnight, however. The process of elevation from common place names to part of our cultural heritage took time and was influenced, among other things, by the growing genbaku bungaku, or A-bomb literature movement, of the postwar years. Genbaku bungaku is a powerful genre of literature that has been dominated by the survivor-writers such as Ōta Yoko, Hayashi Kyoko, Nagai Takashi, Hara Tamiki, Kurihara Sadako, and Toge Sankichi, although other well-established writers, such as Ibuse Masuji, Ōe Kenzaburo and John Hersey have lent their talents and contributed equally, if not more powerfully, to its development and the dissemination of associated political messages. Owing to the nature of war atrocity literature, political messages on victimization and war abound in these works, and the majority of the most famous genbaku bungaku writers have veritable leftist political leanings. The political nature of the genre has been extremely influential in buttressing the powerful sense of victimization that spread among postwar Japanese as the Occupation discredited the military and Japan's wartime leadersーblaming them for misleading the people in support of a doomed war. Ironically, the politics of genbaku bungaku, while nurturing leftist critiques of American, as well as conservative Japanese politics, have done little to infuse Japan's collective memory of WWII victimization by the West with an equally powerful recognition of Japan's own victimization of other peoples during its own brutal, imperialistic thrust into Asia.