Naoko Wake's American Survivors examines the experiences and activism of hibakusha, or survivors of the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. Wake focuses particularly on US hibakusha—survivors who are American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry. The core contribution of the book is a counter-memory of the bomb, or a “memory both marginal and resistant to the national remembering in America, Japan, and Korea” (p. 2).Wake challenges the historical interpretation of the bombing as an American victory and a Japanese defeat. She argues that nation-bound memories assume or imply that all or most survivors were part of Japan's national polity and culture. American collective memory portrays the bombing as a necessity against enemy nationals. Meanwhile, in Japan, US hibakusha, despite their Japanese ancestry, were denied free medical treatment of radiation illness offered to Japanese citizens. Wake urges readers to consider the cross-nationality of US and Korean hibakushas’ memories to create a counter-memory of the bomb, one that resists the singular nation-based definition of the meaning of the nuclear bombs through highlighting the survivors’ multiple national belongings and cultural affinities (p. 85).Wake's main primary sources are 132 oral histories of Japanese American and Korean American survivors, their families, community activists, and doctors in Japan and the United States. Between 2010 and 2017, she personally collected 86 interviews via snowball sampling. She also uses eighteen interviews conducted by Friends of Hibakusha between 1976 and 1996 and twenty-eight interviews conducted by documentary filmmaker Shinpei Takeda from 2005 to 2010.Chapter 1 reframes pre-1941 Hiroshima and Nagasaki as cities of immigrants, emphasizing the circular nature of twentieth-century migration. Nikkei, or people of Japanese ancestry, and Korean-born migrants came to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a variety of reasons: to care for family, ensure children's cultural knowledge, and build better lives in the face of discrimination in the United States. Koreans, under Japanese colonization at the time, endured forced migration to supply the empire with a labor and military force. Wake highlights the themes of food, clothes, and language to demonstrate how Nikkei and Koreans migrants selectively acculturated and used their layered sense of belonging to adapt to life in Japan. By framing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as cities of immigrants, specifically immigrants from the United States, Wake dispels the myth that the US dropped the bombs on a Japanese enemy. The “weapon in fact exploded upon a diversity of cultures created by the cities of immigrants” (p. 36).In chapter 2, Wake presents a cultural history of the nuclear holocaust by focusing on survivors’ experiences through memories of bodies, clothes, medicines, care, water, and food. She emphasizes how the bomb indiscriminately destroyed gender roles as men questioned their ability to protect and rescue others while women were expected to mobilize local resources and folk medicine in their new roles as the main caretakers of their families. Chapters 3 and 4 focuses on silence in the US hibakusha community. While extant literature on the memory of the bomb focuses on the subsequent political activism and cultural representation, chapter 3 examines silence by survivors and non-survivors as a method for collective healing. Chapter 4 focuses on US hibakusha's life in America and how survivors used silence as a tool to collectively eradicate the image of Asian Americans as foreigners and (re-)build their sense of belonging to the United States from 1945 to 1965. However, Wake poignantly notes that collective silence delayed US survivors’ opportunity for collective action. Chapters 5 and 6 introduce readers to a diverse array of organizations and group activism that sought legal and legislative recognition and compensation for US hibakushas during the height of Asian American activism in the United States from the mid-1960s to the 1980s.Since the majority of Wake's analyses rely on her impressive array of oral histories, readers may leave wondering about broader national discussions or government debates in Japan and the United States regarding the US hibakushas. Some US-born citizens of Japanese ancestry identified racial discrimination in America and the belief that they could build a better life in Japan as the reasons for their return to Japan. How do the US hibakushas’ disillusionment with the United States reconcile with contemporary local Japanese perceptions of it as a land of opportunity? Lastly, American survivors’ activism in the 1960s and 1970s failed to pass legislation that would provide financial assistance to victims of the bomb. Wake highlights division within US-based activist groups but does not delve into debates among US congressional representatives about broader national consequences of legally providing care and compensation to US survivors.Overall, American Survivors is accessibly written and well researched. Wake's study provides a long-overdue examination of a neglected population of World War II. Her study breaks away from the American-centric biases in scholarship on World War II, American foreign policy, and the nuclear bomb. It demonstrates the agency and activism of US and Korean hibakushas and their supporters.
Jenny Pham (Thu,) studied this question.