‘Wounds of the Heart’: Psychiatric Trauma and Denial in Hiroshima

In 1962, a young Jewish-American psychiatrist named Robert J. Lifton went to Hiroshima to conduct research on the impact of the atomic bomb.¹ In his first week there he met a Japanese colleague by the name of Kubo Yoshitoshi. Lifton hoped to learn from Kubo about his research into the psychological trauma of hibakusha (A-bomb survivors). The meeting was not a success, however. In a letter to a friend, Lifton remarked, ‘I found our talk curiously unsatisfying, and it was hard to tell exactly what he was after in his studies’.² Although Kubo’s research was not unimportant, it is easy to understand Lifton’s frustration. In the previous seventeen years only a handful of researchers, either Japanese or American, had tackled the psychological consequences of the bomb. In his effort to change this situation, Lifton conducted groundbreaking research. Together with work on Holocaust survivors and Vietnam veterans, with which he was also involved, his Hiroshima research eventually led to the creation of the category of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its entry into the American Psychiatric Association (PSA)’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III). This development had profound effects far beyond the narrow field of psychiatry.³ Kubo’s work, by comparison, and that of other Japanese researchers, remained virtually unknown and did not lead to any advances in trauma research. Taking the Kubo-Lifton meeting as a point of departure, this article surveys the reactions of the psychiatrists in Hiroshima and in the US to the A-bomb’s psychological impact, and examines how Cold-War politics, American denial, and the difficulty of studying so-called A-bomb disease limited recognition of the trauma suffered by those who were exposed to the bomb.

After the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hibakusha faced a dismal lack of care, and the multiple psychological effects of their experience in August 1945 were poorly understood. The contemporary experience of many Holocaust survivors was quite different. From the mid 1950s onward, a substantial body of medical, legal, and historical work developed around Holocaust trauma, which in turn led to adequate care and compensation for survivors.⁴ Acknowledgement of their suffering, however, did not come easily. Victims of Nazi persecution had to fight a German campaign of denial and obstruction. Much of the subsequent research was therefore produced by sympathetic investigators and campaigners from the US, Israel, and elsewhere, who set out in the late 1950s and 1960s to help survivors obtain care and compensation.⁵ No such campaign was conducted on behalf of A-bomb survivors. Only a handful of Japanese doctors were working on the issue, and no compensation or care for mental injuries existed until the 2010s.⁶ What then accounts for these very different histories?

The Holocaust and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were events of a different order, producing vastly different reactions and postwar histories. It should not come as a surprise that the histories of psychiatry in the two cases are also different. As the present author has demonstrated elsewhere, however, the Holocaust and the A-bomb were seen up to 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.⁷ Furthermore, following Lifton (and especially after the establishment of PTSD), psychiatrists and psychologists have routinely viewed both cases as medically comparable.⁸ Yet the pre-DSM III reaction of contemporary psychiatrists was quite different. Examining the campaigns of denial that both communities faced brings the commonalties and differences into sharper focus, and allows us to understand better the role played in both cases by denial of psychological suffering. The point here is not to argue that Japanese and American doctors should have recognized PTSD in hibakusha, nor to condemn their blindness in contrast to our ‘enlightened’ present. Indeed, as Svenja Goltermann has noted, much of the use of PTSD in trauma studies ignores the fact that the category is a historical construct and was unavailable, or in the...