constructing a counter- narrative through...
TRANSCRIPT
CONSTRUCTING A COUNTER-
NARRATIVE THROUGH FICTION JAPANESE INTERNMENT CAMPS AND ATOMIC BOMBS
Jessica De Moyer Stamnummer: 01101263
Promotor: Prof. dr. Joost Krijnen
Masterproef voorgelegd voor het behalen van de graad master in de richting Taal- en Letterkunde:
Engels
Academiejaar: 2016 – 2017
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my promotor Prod. Dr. Joost Krijnen, who has provided me with
nothing less than support and guidance.
I also am indebted to my boyfriend whose dear encouragements stimulated me to
carry on in times of doubts.
And lastly, I want to express my sincere gratitude to my mother and sister who are
the cornerstones of my life.
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Table of Contents I. Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... 5
II. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 6
III. The Evacuation Order: the Mass Internment of the Japanese Americans ............................ 14
A. Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor was Divine ....................................................................... 14
1. Synopsis ............................................................................................................................ 14
2. Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 16
B. John Okada, No-No Boy ....................................................................................................... 30
1. Synopsis ............................................................................................................................ 30
2. Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 31
IV. The Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki .................................................................. 43
A. Dorothy Stroup, In the Autumn Wind .................................................................................. 45
1. Synopsis ............................................................................................................................ 45
2. Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 46
B. Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows .......................................................................................... 58
1. Synopsis ............................................................................................................................ 59
C. Discussion ............................................................................................................................. 60
V. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 68
VI. Works Cited .......................................................................................................................... 70
(25,785 words)
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I. Abstract This dissertation is concerned with the analysis of novels that deal with the Japanese American
internment camps and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The main focus of the
literary discussions will be on the depiction of the characters’ trauma and their memories of the
atrocities. The goal of the dissertation is to point out that the examined novels can be used to
construct a counter-narrative to supplement the general public’s knowledge on the Japanese
American conflict and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By doing so, the dominant
“saving lives narrative” will be questioned and hopefully encourage readers to search for voices
who represent the other sides of the conflicts.
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II. Introduction In November 2016 Carl Higbie, a top Trump advisor suggested during a TV appearance that the
internment camps where Japanese Americans were wrongfully incarcerated during World War II
might function as a “precedent” for President Trump’s plans to create a Muslim registry. In response
the actor George Takei shared an open letter on his public Facebook page to educate and reach out
to the U.S. citizens wherein he states that “we must never repeat the mistakes of the past. To hold
to this, our civic leaders must not only stand up to fearmongering, they must also understand our
history so that it does not ever repeat”. However, recent news articles suggest that it does not seem
that Trump is storing away his plans to set up a database for immigrants from Muslim countries yet.
In addition to this alarming issue there is the nuclear concern. In a recent interview with the Reuters
news agency, Trump has remarked that he wants to expand America’s nuclear arsenal which would
allow his country to stay at the “top of the pack” and to ensure its nuclear supremacy (Holland). The
current attitude of the American government is questionable -at the very least- and echoes the
country’s ambivalent role during the Second World War. Americans commonly portray the Second
World War as the “good war”. According to the American view, it was the most important war of
the twentieth century since it brought profound social, governmental and cultural changes in the
United States and had a prominent influence on the formation of the Americans’ self-image and the
establishment of their country as a superpower, a force the rest of the world has to reckon with. In
his article Jacques R. Pauwels points out that “In contrast to some of America’s admittedly bad
wars, such as the near-genocidal Indian Wars and the vicious conflict in Vietnam, World War II is
widely celebrated as a ‘crusade’ in which the US fought unreservedly on the side of democracy,
freedom, and justice against dictatorship” (223). After closer consideration, however, this dominant
depiction of World War II postulated by the Americans cannot be left unchallenged. Such a
simplified description of America’s role in this war does not take into account the problematic
conduct of the American regime during the Second World War, including the general American
apathy towards the plight of the Jews, the infamous bombings of German cities such as Dresden and
the controversial actions taken against the Japanese. The focus of this dissertation will be solely on
the precarious situation of the Japanese and the Japanese American population. Supporters of
America’s favorable portrayal argue that all military and governmental undertakings were done to
hasten the conclusion of the war. Nevertheless, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians and the unwarranted internment of
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120,000 Japanese-Americans on U.S. soil (of which two thirds were American citizens) were
committed outside the conventional framework of war and against international humanitarian law.
The journalist William Greider remarks in One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global
Capitalism that “the social meaning of these experiences was usually deflected, however, and
repackaged by the optimistic American culture as stories of triumph. … Thus, Americans generally
managed to evade any national sense of guilt or defeat” (qtd. in Friedberg 357). The “repackaging”
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into triumphant tales, for instance, gradually evolved into “the creation
of an official narrative of the use of the atomic bombs” (Mishler 6) which was offered to the public
by former president Harry Truman and his Secretary of War Henry Stimson in 1947. Again and
again citizens were exposed to the so called “saving lives narrative” (Mishler 9) in which the
necessity of the atomic bombings were justified to save lives and after a while this narrative was
perceived as factual history. Recently, however, American scholars started to engage more and more
with the censored side of these conflicts. There have been debates among scholars and specialists
who lack conviction about the validity of this official myth in which the definitive report published
by the United States Strategic Bombing Commission played a key role because of its assertion that
the atomic bombs were not the cause of Japan’s surrender. Moreover, The official report stated that
the Japanese government had been attempting to terminate the war for three months when the
nuclear bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945:
It cannot be said, however, that the atomic bomb convinced the leaders who effected the peace
of the necessity of surrender. The decision to seek ways and means to terminate the war,
influenced in part by knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken in May 1945
by the Supreme War Guidance Council. (22)
However, such debates did not reach the general public and thus ensured the perpetuation of the
existing national narrative of the atomic bombs. Instead of being depicted as perpetrators for
unleashing such destructive forces on innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and forcefully
imprisoning Americans with Japanese roots (even when most of them were born in America and
had never visited Japan), U.S. soldiers are still remembered as the saviors of World War II. What
struck me as utterly bizarre was how it was possible that America was considered as the nation of
saviors. While Americans eventually liberated the European Jews in concentration camps from the
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evil Nazis who were responsible for the mass killings, they were at the same time responsible for
the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans themselves and were plotting a mass murder by
means of the most lethal weapon ever known to mankind. Even after having doubts about the
“saving lives narrative” the scholarly community has not been able to offer a more nuanced counter-
narrative of a similar scope that could reach the general public. Contrary to the situation in the U.S.
there are numerous counter-narratives to be found in Japan. The area in which this is most apparent
is that of fiction. In Artistic Representation of Human Experiences of the Atomic Bombings Eiko
Otake claims “Every piece of atomic bomb literature contributes toward constructing a history of
the atomic bombings that would effectively protest the stories constructed by the winner of the war.
Without such efforts, the bombings will be remembered only as death tolls, only as a showcase of
science and power” (34). Here Otake communicates the need for representations of human
experiences rather than rationalizations presented in the dominant official narrative. In her
groundbreaking work Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma Kalí Tal similarly pleads
for a more humane depiction of the Vietnam war and advices us “to listen to the words of the
Vietnam veterans, rather than to the politicians. We must confront the reality of the war in Southeast
Asia, and take responsibility for the crimes which our nation committed in the Vietnam War, rather
than succumbing to the rationalizations provided by politicians, who describe the war as a ‘noble
cause’” (64). Analogously, America must also face the atrocities they inflicted on the Japanese in
their own country as well as in Japan. The time has come to listen to those who suffered at the hands
of the American government during the Second World War and stop hiding behind the “good war”
rhetoric. The experiences of the victims have predominantly been related to us through fictional
literature. The Japanese-American writer John Okada who was incarcerated in the internment camps
even suggests that “Only in fiction can the hopes and fears and joys and sorrows of people be
adequately recorded” (Okada 257). However, except for John Hersey whose book Hiroshima had
quite an impact in 1946, American authors have been reluctant to address the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki straightforwardly in their novels. This can be attributed partly to the fear
of appropriating other people’s stories, but I believe the ubiquity of the American narrative also
plays a major role in the scarcity of American Hiroshima and Nagasaki trauma fictions. According
to Mishler:
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The official narrative is put forth in various books, magazines, films, and other forms of media.
Few question what they believe or their memory because they have no reason to do so. (...) it is
the memory people will stick with because it is comfortable, it is what they know, it in some
respects makes them feel safe and gives order to their world. What we are left with is an issue
that is still hotly debated today both in and out of academic circles. The United States and its
people are still dealing with the legacy of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki some sixty
two years after the fact. (19)
If we combine the insights of Otake, Tal, Okada and Mishler we come to the understanding that
compassionate fictional literature is required to oppose the dominant narratives constructed by the
winner of the war. Furthermore, if this kind of literature reaches the general audience it can make
them question their existing memory of the atomic bombings because they would then have an extra
narrative that would complete the whole picture in all its aspects.
In this dissertation I will attempt to examine how the four novels I have selected criticize America’s
national myth of triumph by analyzing two books that deal with the atomic bombings, namely
Dorothy Stroup’s In the Autumn wind and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and two other books
that narrate the story of internment camp prisoners, namely John Okada’s No-no Boy and Julie
Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine. I believe these books can construct an adequate counter-
narrative and in doing so they can challenge the supremacy of the one-sided national narrative and
offer a more accurate, nuanced view of the past and help us scrutinize current conflicts today.
Moreover, there are additional motivations for proposing fiction as the medium through which a
counter-narrative can be formulated. Firstly, with the years advancing we must take into
consideration that the last remaining atomic bomb survivors who can share their accounts of the
events with us are all of Japanese descent and “are dying or becoming incapable by old age” (Otake
35). When the time comes that no one is left to give us an eyewitness testimony it is our duty as
fellow humans to make sure that hundreds of thousands of lives do not fall into oblivion and like S.
Lilian Kremer expresses in Witness Through the Imagination: Jewish-American Holocaust
Literature: “the murdered must be mourned and remembered” (13). Secondly, it must also be noted
that I will deal with literary representations of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the relocation camps.
Although each one of these literary works is very profoundly researched and are largely based on
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witness accounts it is important to emphasize that quoting literature is not the same as quoting facts
but that “they are valuable for something other than factual accuracy, which is precisely the human
factor” (Otake viii). Furthermore, Dominic LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma warns us
that testimonies might be reshaped by “distortion, disguise, and other permutations relating to the
process of imaginative transformation and narrative as well as perhaps repression, denial,
dissociation and foreclosure” (88-9) or even external forces such as censorship imposed by
governments. Nonetheless, these testimonies remain highly valuable. Lastly, fictional narratives can
help us envision a world wherein the potential consequences of contemporary issues such as the
nuclear threat and the creation of a Muslim database can be described explicitly. They can serve as
a cautionary tale that can give us advice on “what not to do the next time” (Tal 64). It is, for example,
possible to imagine what happens when the superpowers refuse to disarm. In a press conference on
16 February 2017 even Donald Trump admitted that “anybody that ever read the most basic book
can say it: Nuclear holocaust would be like no other” (The White House).
The theoretical framework I intend to use for the literary analysis of the above-mentioned trauma
narratives draws heavily on pioneering works of Cathy Caruth, Dominic LaCapra and Michael
Rothberg in trauma and memory studies. However, since I am aware of the western bias of some
aspects of the traditional trauma theory I will also make use of Robert Jay Lifton’s theory of the
survivor which I consider relevant to the understanding of Japanese suffering.
First, In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History Caruth asserts that the traumatized
are possessed by an image or event that they are not able to fully grasp because it “cannot be placed
within the schemes of prior knowledge.” (153). For example, in Otsuka’s novel When the Emperor
was Divine we sometimes witness the boy protagonist being possessed by the image of his father
aggressively being taken away by the FBI in the middle of the night. Furthermore, Caruth is
convinced that trauma can help break down the barriers between distinct historical experiences and
form a bridge between them. Elsewhere in her study she notes that “history, like trauma, is never
simply one’s own, (...) history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24).
Yet, In the third chapter of The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural
Criticism Stef Craps propounds that founding texts of trauma studies including Caruth’s own work
fail to live up to their promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. He claims that they fail in at
least three aspects: “they marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority
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cultures; they tend to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery
that have developed out of the history of Western modernity; and they often favour or even prescribe
a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness
to trauma.” He continues by stating that all this results in the continuance of the “very beliefs,
practices, and structures that maintain existing injustices and inequalities.” (46). As an example of
a problematic cross-cultural encounter Craps briefly examines Caruth’s analysis of Hiroshima mon
amour, a movie by Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras which relates the story of a love affair
between a Japanese man and a French woman who is visiting Hiroshima to shoot a movie about
peace. The affair enables the woman to speak out about the traumatic experiences she went through
at the end of World War II in the French city of Nevers for the first time. She is finally able to relate
her story due to her presence in Hiroshima, another place devastated by wartime trauma, and because
of the Japanese man who lost his family in the atomic bombing and thus also suffered a tragic loss.
Caruth firmly believes the movie offers a possibility of a connection between two cultures. Craps,
on the other hand, indicates that the story of the Japanese man and thus Hiroshima in general is left
untold and according to him “Hiroshima is reduced to a stage on which the drama of a European
woman’s struggle to come to terms with her personal trauma can be played out.” (47) This clearly
demonstrates the urgency of trauma theory to be purged of its Eurocentric roots and to engage with
cross-cultural experiences more ethically.
Secondly, Dominic LaCapra’s notion of empathic unsettlement is also significant. In Writing
History, Writing Trauma LaCapra suggests an additional dimension should be added to complement
empirical research. He proposes the idea of “empathic unsettlement” which demands a virtual
experience instead of a vicarious one in which “one puts oneself in the other’s position while
recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place.” (78) All four
novels I have chosen contain several characters’ traumatic experiences and invite the reader to walk
in their shoes without identifying with them. In other words, a sense of empathy rather than
sympathy is being required.
Next, in examining memory I will make use of Michael Rothberg’s idea of multidirectional memory.
In the introduction of his book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
Decolonization Rothberg underlines that memory is multidirectional: it is “subject to ongoing
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negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (3). In his book he claims that the Holocaust
consciousness in the Western World offers “a platform to articulate a vision of American racism
past and present” (3). In other words, the memory of a particular traumatic event such as the
Holocaust can encourage the articulation of other traumatic pasts. In Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, for
example, the main protagonist Hiroko sees a poster of a 9/11 victim that immediately triggers a
memory of the numerous missing person signs in the aftermath of Nagasaki. Furthermore, I will
suggest that the memory of Nagasaki enables Hiroko to imagine the dangerous outcomes of a
looming nuclear threat between other nations.. In short, I believe the remembrance of Hiroshima,
Nagasaki and/or the Japanese-American internment camps, in turn, similarly stimulate the
expression of other pasts.
Lastly, for the analysis of the trauma of atomic bomb survivors, I will use Robert Jay Lifton’s
survivor theory instead of the dominant trauma theory of Cathy Caruth since I already established
above that Caruth’s theory has a Western bias. The reason why I prefer Lifton’s conceptual
framework as proposed in his book Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima is because he conducted
interviews with hibakusha to study the psychological impact of the bomb on 90,000 survivors. His
psychoanalytical insights on the trauma of atomic bomb survivors is therefore most relevant to
analyze the characters of the novels who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the discussion of the two novels that are concerned with the painful traumas of atomic bomb
survivors it is important to bear in mind that most characters who survived grew up in Japan and
their suffering differs in some aspects. In The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese
Dorothy Stroup wrote a review of Unforgettable Fire, a book in which 104 pictures and drawings
by atomic bomb survivors were collected. She remarked that, in the comments accompanying the
pictures, she discovered the pictures had the following three particularly strong memories in
common:
1. The survivors very often remembered “the exact location, the condition, the appearance and
the voices pleading for help” (75)
2. “The recurrent memory of strange phenomena” (76)
3. “The horror survivors felt at seeing so many people, including their own relatives, turned
into non-human beings” (76)
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In applying these theoretical concepts on the novels I selected we can form insights about the
sufferings of the Japanese and start to construct a counter-narrative which will be able to protest the
official myth imposed by the American government. I believe further research on this topic should
be conducted because with countries threatening to launch into nuclear war with one another it is
now more relevant than ever. I agree with Rosalyn Deutsche’s when she expressed in her book
Hiroshima after Iraq that there is a “continuity between atomic bombing and the current situation
of war” (21). She further ponders over what this continuity means. According to her the answer is
at least threefold:
First, she states that “we are in the process of perpetuating the American way of war” (24) which
Mark Selden names the “systematic slaughter of civilians from the air” (qtd. in Deutsche 24). Air
bombings are a paradigmatic change of the traditional military strategy.
Secondly, she continues her argument by pointing out that “the U.S. has been in the process of
exempting itself from the obligation to obey the law of armed conflict or international humanitarian
law” (25).
Finally, she emphasizes that “we are in the process of perpetuating what Hanna Segal called a
‘nuclear-mentality culture’. a way of life that, precipitated by Hiroshima, is based on fears of
annihilation and increasingly psychotic modes of defense” (25).
All this links Hiroshima with Iraq and currently this case can also be made for Syria. I think this
continuity between Hiroshima and current war conflicts can partly be attributed to the perpetuation
of the national “saving lives narrative”. The discourse used by President Truman can be found
echoed in the war-on-terror narrative first constructed by President Bush’s administration which
divides the world into “good and evil” and “us against them” and which is now again being
employed by the current president. As mentioned above, further research should be aimed at
changing these national narratives and -in my opinion- it should have as goal only one thing: change.
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III. The Evacuation Order: the Mass Internment of the Japanese
Americans According to Leslie Hatamiya, a few months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066 which ordered the evacuation of nearly
120,000 Japanese Americans, of which the largest group were born and raised in the United States,
to one of the quickly established relocation camps. This evacuation order violated this group’s
human rights and evidently fueled outrage in the Japanese Americans as well as some groups of
White Americans. However, according to Rajini Srikanth “the voices of opposition were numerous
but scattered, and they did not or could not coalesce into a roar of resistance” (107). The lack of
unity in protesting caused this dark page of American history to remain unlit, which resulted in the
disillusionment of the Japanese-Americans who felt betrayed by their home country (Srikanth).
In the following discussion I will examine two novels that explore the trauma and loss of identity
the Japanese Americans are confronted with after their internment camp experience, namely Julie
Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine and John Okada’s No-No Boy. Otsuka and Okada are two
great examples of Japanese American authors who take back control of the internment narrative and
offer us a counter-narrative in which the characters and their suffering broaden our existing view on
the Japanese American conflict. These two books are highly significant because in the past there
was no clear, unified narrative in which Japanese Americans could find their trauma voiced. I will
first start with the discussion of When the Emperor was Divine and then move on to the study of
No-No Boy.
A. Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor was Divine
1. Synopsis
The narrative in When The Emperor Was Divine is divided into five chapters, each telling the story
of a different family member, except for part four, which combines the perspectives of the daughter
and the son. The main characters are solely identified by the role they assume in their relation to
one another. The mother is an Issei (a first generation Japanese immigrant) who, after witnessing
the Evacuation Notice No. 19, starts preparing for her eviction meticulously. Her two children are
Nisei (second generation Japanese immigrants) who like American sports and culture. The mother
is forced to kill the dog as she fears others might mistreat him because her husband was arrested
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after the attack on Pearl Harbour on suspicion of being a Japanese spy. In the end of the chapter, all
Japanese Americans have to report to the Civil Control Station.
The second chapter is narrated through the perspective of the girl, who tells the story of their voyage
to the internment camps by train, leaving behind the Tanforan Horse Track where they had to live
in horse stalls for several months. The soldiers escorting them issue an order to close the blinds after
a rock is thrown through a window in one of the towns they passed. The girl wanders through the
train playing with her brother and making drawings of her father. She experiences the relocation as
if it was an exciting journey. Not much later, they arrive at Topaz Camp in Utah.
In the third chapter, the boy describes daily life in the camp. He remembers the night the FBI
imprisoned his father after which his mother began destroying all items related to Japanese culture
and ordered him and his sister to tell outsiders they were Chinese. The boy wonders what they did
wrong and concludes it must be something severe. In contrast, he keeps listening to baseball games
on the radio and misses small freedoms the most, like Coca-Cola and chocolate. One glimmer of
hope is Elizabeth’s letters, the only friend at home who stays in contact. In wintertime, the soldiers
hand out old World War I uniforms to keep them warm, but that does not stop unrest from growing.
The fourth chapter is told through the perspective of the boy and the girl combined. They have
traveled home after the war ended but their home has been broken into and their goods were stolen.
Their previous neighbours and friends are suspicious of them and even hostile. The children decide
to behave well in order to conform to the standards imposed by their antagonistic surroundings.
When their father returns from prison, he is broken and traumatized. In the time following his return,
he is unable to find a job and grows even more bitter. The boy and girl struggle to understand how
their father has changed so much.
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Ultimately, in the last chapter the voice of the story changes to a first person. It reads like a
sarcastically voiced, angry confession in which the father admits to being a Japanese agent, telling
the interrogators/readers whatever they want to hear in order to be released. While the largest part
of the story allows readers to easily identify with the unnamed characters who could be part of any
family, the last part breaks the cycle of identification and voices the outrage of a wronged Japanese
American who has transformed into an alien enemy.
2. Discussion
Julie Otsuka’s debut novel When the Emperor was Divine has received much praise and has even
been hailed by The Bloomsbury Review as “undoubtedly one of the most effective, memorable
books to deal with the internment crisis”. Despite the novel’s unsentimental portrayal of a Japanese-
American family’s experience of incarceration in America during World War II, it does paint a clear
picture of their situation and manages to impact its readers on a personal level through identification.
The story of alienation of a family can can directly allude to present times in which questioning of
loyalty and mistrust of “the other” are once again echoed in contemporary America. This time, the
subject of suspicion is the Muslim community, instead of the Japanese. In this chapter I will argue
that When the Emperor was Divine can be read as a cautionary tale against “camp thinking”, a term
postulated by Paul Gilroy in his book Between Camps. This concept of “camp thinking” is
concerned with dividing groups of people into highly polarized and discriminatory camps. These
divisions can manifest themselves into literal camps (e.g. internment camps and concentration
camps) as well as metaphorical ones and can have catastrophic consequences for the whole society.
In Postcolonial Witnessing Stef Craps warns us that “camp-thinking fosters totalizing and
essentialist conceptions of identity that, in turn, lead to exclusionary politics” (106). Unfortunately,
“camp-thinking” frequently has been part of the national politics in numerous countries, especially
in the context of war. In the United States these camps took literal forms when the government
unjustly imprisoned Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War, causing harmful
effects on this marginalized group’s well-being and their identity-formation, which we find superbly
exemplified in When the Emperor was Divine.
Moreover, Otsuka’s novel also highlights the danger of intentionally isolating a certain population
group that has done nothing wrong. Wrongfully treating a group as hostile inmates can spark their
outrage and eventually result into the creation of a state enemy. In what follows I will analyze
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Otsuka’s novel by discussing the unstable (pre-)war position of Japanese American citizens in
American society, which became even more uncertain after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour. After
the events in Hawaii, the “camp-thinking” mentality of the dominant group of Americans reached
its climax and manifested itself in the rapid establishment of the relocation camps. The whole novel
illustrates the precarious conditions of a Japanese-American family who fell victim to the “camp-
thinking” and exclusionary politics of the United States. The discussion will primarily focus on the
protagonists’ experiences of trauma and how this influences the understanding of their identity.
Lastly, I will examine the controversial last chapter of the book, written from the perspective of the
father, that seems to suggest that such a discriminatory treatment of a particular group can lead to
the emergence of a national nemesis.
Hanging in the balance: the precarious situation of the Japanese-American
First of all, history tells us that the social situation of the Japanese-Americans for the greatest part
of their time in America had been uncertain, which can be found explained by Joni Louise Johnson
Williams in his dissertation Fifty Years of our Whole Voice. However, the family that is central to
When the Emperor was Divine seems to belong to the middle class and are thus financially
comfortable. Throughout the story there are several instances in which we can find tokens of their
wealth: white silk gloves (4), taking the streetcar downtown instead of walking (6), they are in
possession of an Oriental rug (7), a wind-up Victrola (7), a piano (16), fancy shoes (33), they are
able to stay at a hotel for a week (40) and eat dinner in a fancy dining room beneath enormous
chandeliers (40). Nonetheless, according to Sandra C. Taylor, the family’s wealthy situation
described in the beginning of the novel is rather exceptional. At first sight, the Japanese American
family appears to have succeeded in claiming a successful place in American society, but Taylor
claims that while it was indeed true that “a larger portion of Issei than of the general U.S. population
owned farms and businesses” (42), Japanese Americans belonged to “self-insulated communities
whose achievements were outside the realm of white America” (42). This signals that “camp-
thinking” had already tainted the dominant American mentality and polarized the society into the
“normal” Americans and the racialized “other” Americans, which in this case are the Japanese-
Americans. Even prior to Japan’s declaration of war against the United States, the Japanese-
American population was already subject to discrimination and racism, which evidently had an
impact on “the possibilities of success in a broader sense” (Andersson 3). Furthermore, the hostility
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towards Japanese-Americans was not something that emerged overnight, but it had been an ongoing
process for several decades. In 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt, then the country’s first lady, wrote an
article for Collier’s Magazine in which she explained the background of the Japanese-Americans’
precarious conditions in the USA during the Second World War. At the outset, Asian immigrants
were gladly welcomed and needed for work, but in time they started to be perceived as a threat to
white Americans who claimed these immigrants took their jobs, which led to the Exclusion Act in
1917. In the article, Roosevelt stated that the consequences of the Exclusion Act threatened the equal
rights of the Asian immigrants:
No people of the Oriental race could become citizens of the United States (...) They were
marked as different from other races and they were not treated on an equal basis. This
happened because in one part of our country they were feared as competitors, and the rest of
our country knew them so little and cared so little about them that they did not even think
about the principle that we in this country believe in - that of equal rights for all human
beings. (qtd. in Burton et al. 19-20)
Unfortunately, the antagonistic attitudes towards Japanese-Americans escalated due to the attack on
Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, which Otsuka accurately portrays in When the Emperor was
Divine. In the third chapter, in which the perspective of the son is narrated, we read that right after
Pearl Harbour the father was immediately arrested for questioning: “They had come for him just
after midnight. Three men in suits and ties and black fedoras with FBI badges under their coats”
(73-4). Nowhere in the novel a clear explanation is given of the reasons for the father’s arrest. There
is also never a moment in the novel in which collaboration between the father and Japan is made
apparent, which suggests that the father is probably apprehended on the grounds of racist
presumptions. In addition, not only was the father’s loyalty questioned after Pearl Harbour, but the
loyalty of the rest of the family was also doubted. It seems that the multiple years the mother and
the father have lived in the United States before Pearl Harbour were rendered irrelevant and
“regardless of their history, the family members’ dreams are shattered, not due to idleness, but
because of their former nationality and their connections to it” (Andersson 7).
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Next to the family’s previous links to Japan, another incentive for discrimination against Japanese-
Americans were their physical appearances that distinguished them from other Americans. Their
skin colour and facial features resembled that of the Japanese soldiers that attacked Pearl Harbour,
making them targets for the Americans’ anger. Even though many Japanese-Americans had
obtained American citizenship, including the family in Otsuka’s story, they were still held co-
responsible for the attack by other Americans. The classmates of the children in the novel, for
instance, were advised by the postman, Mr. DeNardo, to not write to anyone in the relocation camps
because someone who did “was guilty of helping the enemy” (121) and that those who were interned
“bombed Pearl Harbour! They deserved what they got” (121). The language of the above mentioned
quotations, where the words “they” and “those” are employed, imply a strong dichotomy between
the Japanese-Americans and other Americans, although the two different groups both hold
American citizenship. Furthermore, the use of the word “deserve” indicates that the animosity and
the subsequent actions undertaken against the Japanese-Americans were considered justified
because of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour. The hostility against the Japanese-Americans clearly
illustrates that “camp-thinking” in American society has been present for decades and peaked after
Pearl Harbour with Executive Order 9066 which enabled the government to intern approximately
120,000 Japanese-Americans.
Trauma and Identity Formation in When the Emperor was Divine: a Cautionary Tale against
“Camp-thinking”
As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, the novel is a cautionary tale that illustrates the
dangers of “camp-thinking”. This idea of “camp-thinking” has as its objective to polarize people
into opposing groups that each reduce their identity into essentialist conceptions, which will
eventually result in the emergence of exclusionary politics. The story of the family central to the
story explores the traumatic experiences each family member has undergone and what impact their
trauma had on the formation of their identities. In the first four chapters we notice Otsuka’s desire
for the reader to empathize with the main characters of the novel. I argue that she wants the reader
to experience what Dominic LaCapra coined “empathic unsettlement”: virtually putting “oneself in
the victim’s position while respecting the difference between self and other” (History in Transit
125). According to Rajini Srikanth, Otsuka hopes that her readers see the characters “as people first,
not as Japanese Americans” (121) and try to imagine themselves in the uncertain situation in which
20
the characters of the novel are involved such as “the situation of having to shut down your home,
destroy your belongings, sell your property for next to nothing, and dismantle your life, all in
preparation for being led away to be imprisoned and isolated from the rest of the country” (121).
Otsuka attempts to induce empathic unsettlement in the readers by not giving her characters names,
but instead by referring to them only with the common labels of woman/mother, girl/daughter,
boy/son, husband/father. By doing so, she connects the readers with the protagonists’ suffering
because she “enables them to envision the family, (...), not as different in their Japaneseness but as
similar to any other family they know.” (Srikanth 122) In addition, her way of narrating aids her in
producing a feeling of empathic unsettlement in her readers since her writing style is characterized
by suggestion and implications, “hinting at what is felt but unable to be verbalized” (Srikanth 121).
The effect of this suggestive style is giving the emotions of the story’s family a universal quality to
which everybody can relate and many agree that this style “is most appropriate for the effect she
seeks to create of universalizing the emotions of the characters, of making them appear to be like
everyone else, not alien, not different” (121). In this manner, the novel is not a representation of the
complex emotional dimensions of the characters (with exception of the father), but it is more a
detailed description of their traumatic experiences. (textual evidence)
Furthermore, the way in which pain and rage are communicated -i.e. descriptive, rather than
emotional- “allows for the easy consumption of her internment narrative” (Srikanth 123). Moreover,
the universality of the characters and their emotions in the first four chapters makes it possible for
the novel to be applied to other historical events with which it shares similarities. The unstable
conditions in which the Japanese American characters are situated before and after the war, for
example, painfully resembles the antagonistic prejudices many members of the Muslim community
are subjected to in American society and these nameless characters serve as representative figures.
This claim is supported by Samuel G. Freedman who wrote an online article for the New York
Times titled One Family’s Story of Persecution Resonates in the Post-9/11 in which he wrote that
the novel offered “an unplanned analogy to a period of investigation, interrogation, suspicion and
deportation of Arabs and Muslims in the United States” (n. p.).
In the following literary discussion, I will first scrutinize the traumatic experiences each character
has suffered through and then I will investigate the ways in which trauma influenced the formation
of their identity.
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Trauma
In When the Emperor was Divine trauma manifests itself individually as well as collectively. On
the one hand, Caruth’s individual trauma theory identifies trauma as an event that “brings us to the
limits of our understanding” which unsettles us and “forces us to rethink our notions of experience”
(4). She thus claims that trauma “cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge” (153),
which in other words means that trauma has the capacity to completely overturn a person’s view on
the world. Every main character in the book experiences events that are beyond comprehension for
each one of them. On the other hand, since the characters of the story were targeted on the basis of
racial prejudices, Jeffrey C. Alexander’s cultural trauma theory also helps us understand the impact
of the collective trauma on the characters’ mental well-being. According to Alexander “cultural
trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event
that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and
changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (1). In this part I will briefly
focus on individual trauma which can be most clearly observed in the figure of the son and of the
father. However, I will be primarily concerned with cultural trauma, which I believe can help us
understand the effects of the internment experience on the Japanese-Americans most accurately.
Individual trauma
As mentioned above, it is in the figure of the son and especially the father we notice individual
trauma best. Since both characters do not fully comprehend the situations in which they find
themselves, they are often plagued by certain images and dreams. Caruth suggests that there is
frequently “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the
form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event”
(4) and she even goes as far as to claim that “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an
image or event” (5).
For the boy, the image of his father aggressively being taken away by FBI agents in the middle of
the night bothers him most because his father was taken so abruptly that he did not even have time
to change into decent clothes and to look back at his son:
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Whenever the boy thought of his father on his last Sunday at home he did not remember the blue
suit. He remembered the white flannel robe. The slippers. His father’s hatless silhouette framed in
the back window of the car. The head stiff and unmoving. Staring straight ahead. (...) Not looking
back. Not even once. Just to see if he was there. (91)
Initially, the boy describes his father as a “small and handsome man” who was “extremely polite”
and “knew the answers to everything” (62). However, after the father’s arrest the intelligent, well-
mannered man suddenly became someone who does not leave a handsome and polite impression by
leaving in his white robe and not even looking back at his own son. This traumatic event triggered
the transformation of the father figure into the image of “the little yellow man” (49):
The wind was hot and dry and the rain rarely fell and wherever the boy looked he saw him:
Daddy, Papa, Father, Oto-san. For it was true, they all looked alike. Black hair. Slanted eyes.
High cheekbones. Thick glasses. Thin lips. Bad teeth. Unknowable. Inscrutable. (49)
According to Josephine Park the favourable depiction of his father “dissolved into a set of perilous
traits” (142), that of the racialized Japanese enemy. This often tricks him into thinking he sees his
father in the internment camp. There was, for instance, a moment in which he mistakes another man
for his father. Upon seeing the man’s face he calls out to him by saying “Papa”, but he only receives
the Japanese reply: “Nan desu ka?”, meaning “What is it?” (50). Here, the unknowable, racialized
image of his father cannot even speak English.
In addition, the father also gravely suffers from individual trauma. He is haunted by a recurring
nightmare: “It was five minutes past curfew and he was trapped outside, in the world, on the wrong
side of the fence. ‘I’ve got to get back,’ he’d wake up shouting” (137). This dream suggests that he
feels as if he belongs in prison and the outer world is merely “the wrong side of the fence”, clearly
indicating that he is personally traumatized, which is also supported by his strange behaviour:
As the days grew longer our father began spending more and more time alone in his room.
(...) Now whenever we passed by his door we saw him sitting on the edge of his bed with his
hands in his lap, staring out through the window as though he were waiting for something to
happen. Sometimes he’d get dressed and put on his coat but he could not make himself walk
out of the front door. (137)
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Here we observe that the father is clearly traumatized by his incarceration. Since the father was the
main breadwinner before the war, it appears highly unlikely that the family will get back the lives
they led prior to Pearl Harbour and the internment experience. Andersson claims that “the family
members’ desire of returning to ‘normal life’ is concluded in a depressing reunion with their
distorted father” (26).
Cultural trauma
Undoubtedly, the internment of the Japanese-Americans negatively influenced their group as well
as individual identity. Even in the moments leading up to their relocation, the family in When the
Emperor was Divine was already confronted with situations in which they were forced to re-evaluate
their identity as American citizens. For example, one day after Pearl Harbour the girl came home
from school and wondered why people were staring at her the whole day, hence she asked her mother
the the following question: “Is there anything wrong with my face?” (15). The fact that the girl
noticed a change in behavior from Americans towards her suggests a shift in the perception of the
Japanese-Americans in the country because of Pearl Harbour. However, she is not yet able to
comprehend the reasons behind this change of attitude. Also, earlier that day her mother had covered
all the mirrors in the house, which confuses her even more and causes her to believe that her
appearance in general displeases others. In this example we discover that it must have been
immensely puzzling for a child to grasp why Japanese looks alone were able to offend and anger
Americans citizens.
Moreover, in the camp the boy shows his inability to fully understand the motivations behind their
internment. Since he and his family are locked up and isolated from the outer world, he reasons that
they must have done something wrong that gave cause for their confinement. However, he cannot
come up with anything and “when he tried to remember what that horrible, terrible thing might be,
it would not come to him” (57). Note the use of the words “horrible” and “terrible” that indicate that
he believes the reasons for their internment, whatever they may be, must be seriously bad. It also
points out that he realizes the gravity of the situation, but at the same time by summing up minor
misconduct as possible underlying motivations for their internment, the boy demonstrates that he
lacks the “knowledge of the real grounds for their situation” (Andersson 8).
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We must also take into account that the suffering of the Japanese-Americans did not stop after their
captivity. Even after the war finished, they were constantly subjected to discrimination and racism.
Andrew Gordon underlines that “‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ became the watchwords of the war, and
reverberations echoed well into the postwar era in the form of a stereotypical view of the Japanese
as untrustworthy.” Despite the continual hostility they are confronted with, we read in the third
chapter that after their arrival home the woman and her two children do their very best to assimilate
once again into American society. However, this assimilation quickly turns into forced submission
and it affects the family’s actions extremely:
If we did something wrong we made sure to say excuse me (excuse me for looking at you,
excuse me for sitting here, excuse me for coming back). If we did something terribly wrong
we immediately said we were sorry (I’m sorry I touched your arm, I didn’t mean to, it was
an accident, I didn’t see it resting there so quietly, so beautifully, so perfectly. (...). I never
wanted to touch you, I have always wanted to touch you, I will never touch you again, I
promise, I swear …). (122-3)
The above example wherein the Japanese-American kids take the blame for everything obviously
illustrates the submission of the children to their peers.
The mother too is victim of discrimination. When she tries to apply for a job, she often gets rejected
before she has the chance to prove her qualifications. Instead she is told again and again that “The
position’s just been filled” or that “We wouldn’t want to upset the other employees” (128) and when
she finally does get a job offered to her it is one where she is required to stay all day “in a small
dark room in the back where no one could see her” (128). She eventually turned down the job and
started cleaning houses for some rich families, but the amount of money she earned could not bring
back their middle-class lifestyle from before their internment. Nonetheless, all three of them were
willing to put up with the burdensome situation because they never wanted to “be mistaken for the
enemy again!” (114)
In addition, we could say that their precarious situation forced them into silence, hindering them to
complain about and express their pain of the injustice done to them. When the children, for instance,
walked home from school they could often observe through the windows of their neighbours objects
that used to belong to their household: “Wasn’t that our mother’s Electrolux Mrs. Leahy was
25
pushing back and forth across her living room floor? Didn’t the Gilroys’ mohair sofa look awfully
familiar? Hadn’t we seen that rolltop desk in Mr. Thigpen’s library somewhere before?” (123)
However, even after knowing that their neighbours committed crimes towards them (i.e. theft of
their belongings), they never uttered a single complaint.
On a larger scale the silence of the Japanese-American community could be attributed to the
comparison of their internment camp experience with the concentration camps in which the Jews
during the Holocaust were imprisoned. Emiko Omori, director of Rabbit in the Moon, a
documentary movie about her and her family’s own incarceration experiences elucidates: “When
we left the camps and found out what had happened in Germany, we felt we couldn’t really speak
about our own suffering. It was not that what we had suffered wasn’t bad, but that it wasn’t bad
enough” (qtd. in Srikanth 104). Lilian Friedberg suggests in her article “Dare to Compare:
Americanizing the Holocaust” that perpetrator culture often hides behind a screen memory and thus
“invariably turns its gaze to the horrors registered in the archives and accounts of the ‘other guys’”.
(354) In this manner, American society did not acknowledge the suffering they inflicted on the
Japanese- Americans in the same degree as they gave the recognition to the Holocaust and it is
therefore, “not surprising that the task of stimulating empathy for the internees was slow and labor
intensive and took many years to accomplish. (Srikanth 106)
In sum, the collective trauma of internment clearly left its marks on the Japanese-American family
in the novel and by extension on the Japanese-American community as a whole. Consequently, the
entire internment experience and its aftermath influenced the formation of their group identity,
which I will now explore in the following part.
Identity
As I remarked in the earlier part, the group identity of Japanese-Americans was gravely affected by
their relocation experience and after the war they tried to harmonize as much as possible with the
other Americans. This attempt to assimilate made it even more apparent that they were not
considered to be “American” enough, resulting in a large group of Japanese-Americans facing a
crisis of identity due to embarrassment and feelings of shame over their Japanese origins. In the case
of Otsuka’s fictional family their ties to the Japanese culture has never been predominant. Naturally,
they had a few artefacts in their house that refer to their Japanese heritage, but on the day
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immediately following the night of her husband’s arrest, the woman destroyed all these objects out
of fear that others would think her family aligned themselves with Japan:
She burned the family photographs and the three silk kimonos she had brought over with her
nineteen years ago from Japan. She burned the records of Japanese opera. She ripped up the
flag of the red rising sun. She smashed the sea set and the Imari dishes and the framed portrait
of the boy’s uncle, who had been a general in the Emperor’s army. (75)
The destruction of the Japanese items signals their willingness to downplay their Japanese heritage
and their eagerness to associate themselves with America rather than Japan. Also, the woman’s
immediate obedience to the evacuation order and the practicality with which she handled these
imposed circumstances indicate her ongoing trust in the American government.
Furthermore, in the relocation camp the boy too displays his loyalty for the United States. When he
was playing a game with fellow Japanese-American peers in which they pretended to be at war with
Japan they shouted: “Kill the Japs!” (54) This outcry sharply underlines the boy’s identification with
the U.S. and that he considers the Japanese to be the enemy. Additionally, he also has a recurring
dream about a picture of the Emperor that he is not allowed to see and is hidden behind several
doors. Whenever the boy tries to open the doors to look at the picture, there is always something
that went wrong: “The doorknob fell off. Or the door got stuck. Or his shoelace came untied and he
had to bend over and tie it” (73). The Emperor is clearly a symbol that refers to his Japanese roots,
but his incapability to reach the picture predicts that this part of his identity will eventually become
more and more inaccessible to him.
However, even though the boy often identifies himself more as an American, there are also instances
in the internment camp in which we perceive him taking part in little acts of resistance. For example,
upon arrival at the camp, his mother immediately instructs him to not utter the name of Emperor
Hirohito out loud because it can get him into trouble. Nonetheless, whenever the boy passed a guard
tower “he pulled his cap down low over his head and tried not to say the word. But sometimes it
slipped out anyway. Hirohito, Hirohito, Hirohito. He said it quietly. Quickly. He whispered it” (52).
Here we can already observe that he is starting to doubt his self-identification with America and the
clear-cut dimensions of his identity are blurring.
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The understanding of the family’s identity is complicated even more after their internment has
ended. When the family arrived home after their release, they realize that they were betrayed by the
American society. They noticed that their house had been lived in by many people whom they did
not know although they never received a check from Milt Parker, the man who had promised to rent
out their house while they were away:
This man was a lawyer. (...) ‘I’ll take care of everything,’ Mr. Parker had said. But where
was he now? And where was our money? And why had our mother been so quick to open
the door to a stranger? Because strangers had knocked on our door before. And what had
happened? Nothing good. Nothing good. They had taken our father away. ‘Fool,’ our mother
said now, “I was a fool.” (110)
In addition, when they walked on the streets and encountered some previous friends or
acquaintances they “turned away and pretended not to see us” (115) and at school the children’s
fellow students would not sit with them or invite them to join their games. Consequently, the family
increasingly feels that they do not belong to their former community anymore, which makes it
impossible for them to fully identify with either the American or the Japanese society. Andersson
emphasizes that “this predicament results in a status of being in-between, neither American, nor
Japanese” (23), implying that the family’s existing conceptions of their identity are all shattered.
Even after their confinement, they are still continuously isolated from the dominant society. They
also did not receive sufficient acknowledgement of their pain from the American government, who
instead chose to highlight the suffering of the Jews and to downgrade the Japanese-Americans’
sorrow.
In the next section, I will discuss how the transformation of a smart, loving husband and father to a
vengeful, hating man as seen as in When the Emperor was Divine is caused by the alienation of the
father by the FBI. In the novel we witness the father turned into an enemy of the state, filled with
suppressed rage against those who unjustly imprisoned him.
The Construction of the Enemy
After Japan launched their attack on Pearl Harbour, all American citizens who had even the slightest
connection with Japan raised suspicion. As a consequence, the war with Japan reduced the whole
society into this simple dichotomy: you were either a friend or a foe. The Japanese-Americans were
28
then identified as an enemy and according to Josephine Park in Alien Enemies in Julie Otsuka’s
When the Emperor Was Divine their Japaneseness was not merely recognized, but also “singled out,
exhaustively studied, and severely penalized” (138). More and more Japanese-Americans
encountered discrimination on the basis of their Japanese heritage and were labelled as an enemy, a
situation vividly described by Otsuka in the novel. Unfairly isolating a particular group of a society,
however, can lead to disastrous outcomes and concretize a self-fulfilling prophecy: the creation of
an enemy who emerged from the oppressed group (reference). Elsewhere in the article, Park even
goes so far as to catalogue the internment experience described in Otsuka’s novel as “a laboratory
for making the enemy” (136) and she continues that “the novel culminates in an enemy confession:
the father (...) admits to every fantastic suspicion levelled against the domestic Japanese population”
(136).
Not only the father, but also the children eventually equate themselves with the image of the enemy.
In the fourth chapter we get an insight into the perspectives of both children, of which the subject is
the collective “we”. Back at home after the end of the war, they spot an opposition between the
reception of their return and that of the “fathers and brothers and husbands” (118) who arrived back
home. These brave soldiers returning from the war received “victory parades in their honor” and for
whom “crowds roared and wept and welcomed the good men home” (119). In stark contrast with
the metamorphoses of their neighbours and acquaintances into good soldiers is the negative change
of the children’s identity into the enemy: “We looked at ourselves in the mirror and did not like
what we saw: black hair, yellow skin, slanted eyes. The cruel face of the enemy” (120). Their
conception of themselves reveal that they cannot separate themselves from their wartime identities,
i.e. the nemesis.
Nevertheless, the greatest transformation apparent in the novel is that of the father. The first four
chapters portray the woman and the children’s longing for their beloved husband and father, but
when the father finally speaks in the last chapter we only hear the voice of the enemy.
The final part of the book initiates with the father’s confession of the crimes he supposedly
committed. The list of his wrongdoings is extensive and ranges from devious tricks to crimes of
war, which illustrates that he is confessing to every crime that comes to his mind:
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I poisoned your reservoirs. I sprinkled your food with insecticide. I sent my peas and potatoes
to market full of arsenic. I planted sticks of dynamite alongside your railroads. I set your oil
wells on fire. I scattered mines across the entrance to your harbors. I spied on your airfields.
I spied on your naval yards. I spied on your neighbors. I spied on you. (140)
Park claims that “the father's voice is twisted by a perverse desire to claim the wild array of crimes
for which he has been incarcerated”(149).
In addition, the father places himself in opposition to a “you”, which represents the ‘ideal’ American
father: “you get up at six, you like bacon and eggs, you love baseball, you take your coffee with
cream, your favorite color is blue” (141). Later on he sums up some qualities that an all-American
dad should posses such as being “tall and handsome”, having “big eyes. Long nose. Broad shoulders.
Perfect teeth. Nice smile. Firm handshake” and he must also be a “solid family man” who “mows
his lawn every Saturday and goes to church on Sundays” and “pays his bills on time” (141). The
only minor flaws the ultimate American man has are having a “short attention span”, not always
remembering “to take out the garbage” and sometimes talking “with his mouth full” (142).
Similarly, he also stereotypes Asian men as being all the same and by doing so plays on the fear of
the dominant society. He hence declares: “I’m the one you don’t see at all—we all look alike. I’m
the one you see everywhere—we’re taking over the neighborhood” (143) The reduction of Japanese-
American and “white” American identities to these stereotypes are ridiculous and Park emphasizes
that “the caricature of the all-American father is as unlikely as the composite portrait of the enemy;
both are American fantasies, and both hew to the strict binary of war” (149). Unlike his family he
refuses the submissiveness imposed on the Japanese Americans. The silence his family members
practiced is broken by the outburst of his outrage, which is unambiguously aimed at “white”
America.
The chapter clearly points out the man’s understanding of the real underlying reason of the
internment order: racism. Contradictorily, at the end of his confession he apologizes: “I’m sorry.
There. That’s it. I’ve said it. Now can I go?” (144) The question at the final end, however, suggests
that he only offers his apology sarcastically in order to be released indicating that the man’s true
identity has indeed become “inscrutable”. (49)
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In the last pages of the novel Otsuka shatters the readers’ easy identification with the family and
breaks the cycle of universalism in the previous chapters. Instead she wants to accentuate the
characters’ Japanese particularity and “demands that the readers attend to these people not as
universalized tropes of dispossessed and displaced beings but very particularly as individuals of
Japanese origin who have been unfairly targeted at a certain historical moment” (Srikanth 124). The
consequences of isolating a particular part of the society can be catastrophic and we must bear in
mind that out of this racialized group’s traumatic experience an enraged enemy can emerge who
will lash out to those who have wronged him.
B. John Okada, No-No Boy
1. Synopsis
The story of John Okada’s first and only published novel No-No Boy (1957) opens with the 25 year
old Japanese American protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, stepping off a bus in Seattle, returning home
from four years of incarceration, of which he spent the last in prison for refusing to join the U.S.
army in their fight against Japan. He is, therefore, referred to as a “no-no boy”, a status that
endangers and defines his position in society. When he meets an old Japanese American friend
named Eto who did serve in the American army, Ichiro is first greeted warmly, but this changes to
antagonism when Eto learns that he is a no-no boy. Ichiro resumes his way home, a tiny house
behind a grocery store where he has to live with his parents and his little brother Taro.
When he arrives, his mother professes her pride of his refusal to serve in the U.S. military. However,
Ichiro strongly feels he should have fought for the United States, his birth country. He aims his
anger towards his mother who thinks that Japan won the war and will send ships to America to take
them back. Ichiro does not feel as if he belongs to either world, which causes distress. Above that,
his brother Taro resents him for his choice. Ichiro constantly reflects on his reasons for not joining
the U.S. military, which makes him feel more frustrated. He discovers that his father does not share
his mother’s beliefs when he shows letters from relatives in Japan who are begging for supplies.
The next morning, Ichiro visits Freddie, a friend and fellow no-no boy. Freddie has adopted a defiant
stance towards society, living a reckless life filled with alcohol and fighting. Ichiro, trying to find
his own place in society, refuses to comply with Freddie’s negativity. He learns that Kenji, a friend
who fought for the Americans, lost a leg in the war and received a royal compensation.
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Unfortunately, Kenji’s leg suffers from gangrene and could kill him. Nevertheless, Ichiro claims he
would still switch places with him because he thinks Kenji has been accepted as a full American.
After Kenji saves Ichiro from an ambush set up by Taro at a party, he takes him to a Japanese friend
called Emi, whose husband is a U.S. soldier stationed in Germany. Ichiro reminds Emi of him and
they share the bed, after which she urges him to not blame himself. At home, Ichiro’s father
confronts his mother with the letter her sister sent pleading for help, which makes her realise Japan
lost the war. Knowing this, she breaks down and stops eating. This is in stark contrast to the happy
family situation Kenji enjoys at home, even though this is overshadowed by his injury.
One night, Kenji takes Ichiro along to a hospital in Portland where he is admitted. Ichiro stays at a
hotel for weeks and starts looking for a job in the new neighbourhood. He refuses an offer from a
benevolent employer, as he feels that a real American should be able to fill it. When Kenji tells him
that he is dying, he urges Ichiro to move back home. When he arrives back in his hometown he hears
that Kenji has died. Even more grief strikes him when he finds his mother who drowned herself, all
while his father had fallen into a drunken sleep. His mother’s Buddhist funeral embarrases Ichiro as
he is trying to be more American. He leaves to meet Freddie who directs him to the Christian
Reclamation Center, a charitable community where he declines a job from another well-willing
employer who sympathizes with him. He is left with an impression of hope after talking to Gary, an
old friend and a fellow no-no boy who turns out to be working at the center and who states how his
life has changed thanks to this new, fulfilling job. Not long after, Emi tells Ichiro about her divorce,
while his father is recovering from his loss as he prepares aid for their family in Japan. Ichiro
becomes closer with Freddie until he dies in a car crash after a brawl with Bull, a Japanese American
who despises the no-no boys. Ichiro apologizes to him and is shown to be determined that he will
be able to build a life for himself in his American homeland.
2. Discussion
No-No Boy is John Okada’s first and only published novel. When the book was first published in
1957, it was not successful at all and “gone practically unnoticed” (Inada iii). When John Okada
died, he and his book fell in complete oblivion. This all changed, however, when it was rediscovered
by a group of Asian American authors who found its main theme of identity conflict and the realism
used to describe the protagonist’s struggles compelling. After the group of Asian American authors
“found” it, “the book gained an immediate and receptive audience and went quickly out of print”
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(Inada iv). Scholars all agree that novels such as Okada’s novel depict the Asian American
communities as they really were during that period, “from a Chinese, Japanese, or Filipino American
point of view and not from a Chinese or Chinese-according-to-white perspective” (Berner 43). In
the case of No-No Boy Okada offers us a look into the Japanese American society from an authentic
perspective of a true insider.
In the analysis of No-No Boy I first need to recount the historical context in which the story took
place since it is based on “actual historical situations and events, giving accurate images of the time
and communities they take place in” (Berner 43). Then, I will expound on the cultural trauma the
characters of the book underwent and how the generational conflict between Issei (first generation
Japanese immigrants) and their children developed out of this cultural trauma and the impact it had
on their identities. Lastly, I will attempt to explore how empathy can offer a bridge between the
character’s different (individual) trauma experiences.
First of all, the first influx of Japanese immigrants commenced at the end of the 19th century. Most
of the immigrants then planned to stay only temporarily, just long enough to work in the U.S. and
save some money and then end up going back to Japan. Nevertheless, after the start of the new
century the situation gradually changed. America needed more and more workers to fulfill positions
in the service sector and “thus began the formation of a Japanese urban economy” (Berner 45). As
I explained in the previous chapter, the economic success of the Japanese did not equal the economic
prosperity dominant white society and despite their diligent behaviour, they were generally
discriminated against by most Americans. This caused most Japanese to keep to themselves in their
own communities along the West Coast. It is then not surprising that most Issei immigrants missed
Japan and attempted to save enough money for their return to their home country by working hard.
However, this proved to be a difficult task because on the one hand, it was extremely hard to earn a
sufficient amount of money to afford to go back and on the other hand, by then they already had
children who were born and educated in America and who would need to start anew in an unfamiliar
country. In other words, the children’s affection for Japan did not match their parents’. All this was
even more complicated after Japan attacked the U.S. in Pearl Harbour and the evacuation order that
authorized the mass internment of the Japanese Americans, including those who were born on U.S.
soil. As discussed in the previous chapter, the internment camps definitely left traumatic marks on
the internees individually as well as collectively and did not go away after their liberation. In
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addition, in the camps the Japanese American community was starting to polarize into two opposing
groups: those who chose to pledge allegiance to America and those who kept true to their Japanese
heritage. Berner elucidates that “the subject drove families and friends apart, and had an especially
hard impact on the relationship between many immigrant parents, who were still technically and
emotionally Japanese in many cases, and their American-born and –raised children” (47). The
tension in the camps between the two opposing groups aggravated even more in 1943, when the
War Department designed a questionnaire to discover who was to be trusted and who not. Men who
belonged to the first kind were drafted in the American army, but those who were cast in the latter
group were shipped off or immediately confined in a real prison and branded as traitors. The most
significant elements of the questionnaire were questions 27 and 28:
No. 27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States, on combat duty
wherever ordered?
No. 28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully
defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear
any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any foreign government,
power or organization? (qtd. in Ling 360)
These questions are ambiguously formed, but were only allowed to be answered with a “yes” or a
“no”. A nuanced reply was not accepted. For the authorities you were either American or Japanese
and for them there did not exist a state of inbetweenness. Under normal circumstances most Japanese
Americans would have probably answered affirmatively twice; however, the currently imposed
circumstances confused some of them. There were people who did not understand how America
could ask for loyalty from people they forcefully imprisoned for years. The men who answered “no”
on both questions are referred to as the “no-no boys”; however, their negative answers were “a sign
of protest rather than disloyalty” (Berner 48). Needless to say this questionnaire traumatized several
young men who were already struggling with defining their bicultural identity.
John Okada’s novel primarily deals with the identity crisis these no-no boys suffered. For them the
path back to the society they once belonged to is twice as challenging since they are not considered
to be either American nor Japanese anymore.
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Identity Crisis
As mentioned earlier, during the incarceration the Japanese American community fell into two
categories: the loyal Americans and the disloyal Japanese. However, in No-No Boy we witness that
adding a third category would perhaps be more correct i.e. the category of the no-no boys.
It is without a doubt that the no-no boys, including the main protagonist Ichiro, are severely
traumatized after the internment camp experience and their subsequent imprisonment for refusing
the draft. Ichiro, for example, experiences an identity crisis because he is not able to incorporate the
trauma he has suffered into his existing identity. Throughout the novel he frequently reflects about
the choices he made during his internment and he seriously regrets responding negatively to
questions 27 and 28 in the questionnaire. What complicates the matter even more are the opposing
reactions to his return from prison. The people who consider themselves completely Japanese, such
as his parents, welcome him with open arms while other Japanese Americans have mixed opinions
about him being back. Moreover, Ichiro also encounters two white Americans who treat him with
kindness and seem to be more understanding of his precarious status as a no-no boy than some
fellow Japanese Americans, which makes it difficult for Ichiro to feel as if he belongs somewhere.
In what follows I will study 4 characters who, in my opinion, undergo an identity crisis as a
consequence of their relocation trauma most explicitly: Mrs. Yamada (Ichiro’s mother), Freddie (a
fellow no-no boy), Bull (a Japanese American who joined the U.S. troops) and Ichiro.
Mrs. Yamada
Mrs. Yamada is Ichiro’s fanatic mother who is only willing to pledge her allegiance to Japan.
Although she has lived on U.S. soil for thirty-five years, she refuses to assimilate in any kind of way
(e.g. she never wanted to learn English) and rejects anyone who does not act in accordance with
Japanese mentality. In the story her loyalty to her Japanese heritage takes extreme forms. For
example, she believes that Japan won the war, so it would not take long before ships were sent their
way to bring them back to her native country. She tells Ichiro that “the boat is coming and we must
be ready” (13).
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Furthermore, on the first evening of Ichiro’s return she brings him along to visit the Kumasaka
family with a malicious intent. At first, Ichiro thinks they are just visiting a friendly Japanese family
whom he knew before the war. However, he soon finds out that Bobbie Kumasaka, the Kumasakas’
son had died abroad as a soldier in the U.S. army. He then realizes that his mother had brought him
to this family to show off her son who is still alive because he refused to serve America and is thus
a “true” Japanese at heart. Simultaneously, she also wants to prove to the Kumasakas that if they
“had not failed in their son’s education, in educating him the ‘Japanese’ way, he, as well, would still
be alive” (Berner 53). During this visit Mrs. Yamada is depicted as emotionless woman without any
sense of empathy for Mrs. Kumasaka, a mother who lost her son:
There was no awareness of the other mother with a living son who had come to say her you
are with shame and grief because you were not Japanese and thereby killed your son but
mine is big and strong and full of life because I did not weaken and would not let my son
destroy himself uselessly and treacherously. (30)
It is clearly indicated here that Mrs. Yamada is very dogmatic about her ideas of being truly
Japanese. She blames Mrs. Kumasaka for the death of Bobbie since she was -in Mrs. Yamada’s
opinion- not Japanese enough, which led to Bobbie’s enlistment in the American army. The excerpt
also shows that the only identity Mrs. Yamada wants to be connected with is her Japanese identity,
despite living in the U.S. for several decades.
The resoluteness in her belief of Japan’s victory, however, crumbles down when she is no longer
able to deny the truth of Japan’s defeat. One day, her husband forces her to listen to a letter sent to
her from her sister in Japan wherein her sister begs her for “a little sugar, perhaps, or the meat which
you have in cans or the white powder which can be made into milk with water” (108). At first, she
doubts the legitimacy of the letter and believes her sister was violently forced to write a secret in it
to deceive her, and she utters: “Oh, they are so clever. How they must have tortured her to make her
reveal it. Poor, poor sister” (110). In the following days, however, Mrs. Yamada displays some
worrisome attitude such as refusing to eat, “sitting almost as if dead in her open-eyed mobility” and
lining the cans, repackaging them and then “the whole thing over and over again” (174). Although
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she never admitted it aloud, her conviction of Japan as the hero nation was destroyed and thereby
her self-conceptions shattered. Since she could not identify Japan as the winner of the war anymore
and thus needed to admit defeat, her mental health degenerated and hit its lowest point when she
committed suicide in the bathtub:
She was half out of the tub and half in, her hair of dirty gray and white floating up to the
surface of the water like a tangled mass of seaweed and obscuring her neck and face. On one
side, the hair had pulled away and lodged against the overflow drain, damming up the outlet
and causing the flooding, just as her mind, long shut off from reality, had sought and found
its erratic release. (185)
Unfortunately, for Mrs. Yamada the experience of identity crisis had fatal consequences for her.
Ultimately, she could not cope with the shift of Japanese identity from winner to loser of the war.
Freddie
Freddie is just like Ichiro a no-no boy. He also recently arrived back in Seattle and is now living a
reckless life by dangerously drinking much, fighting, gambling and womanizing. He asserts that he
has “been havin’ a good time” and he “didn’t rot two years without wantin’ to catch up” (46) Freddie
adapts a completely distinct attitude in his newly acquired freedom in comparison with Ichiro,
which, according to William Yeh is motivated by the desire “to lash out against the society which
jailed him” (126). Initially, Ichiro was anxious to see his good friend Freddie again and was hoping
to find some reassurance and solace, but he regrettably discovers that his friend “could be of no help
to anyone else because he too was alone against the world which he had denounced” (51). Freddie’s
transformed personality is again an illustration of an identity crisis, which causes Ichiro to feel
“deeply sorry for his friend who, in his hatred of the complex jungle of unreasoning that had twisted
a life-giving yes into an empty no, blindly sought relief in total, hateful rejection of self and family
and society” (241-2). Freddie’s dangerous way of life suggests that he is struggling with his identity
of a no-no boy because even after the war, no-no boys are shunned. Tragically, Freddie’s hedonistic
lifestyle eventually led to his death when he drove recklessly away after getting involved in a fight
with Bull at Club Oriental.
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Bull
Bull is in fact just a minor character, who is an acquaintance of Kenji. Unlike Ichiro and Freddie,
Bull did not resist the draft and fought proudly for the United States during the war. He detests the
no-no boys and vehemently reflects this in his attitude towards them. Upon first meeting Ichiro, for
instance, Bull looked at Ichiro “with a meanness which was made darker by the heavy cheekbones
and the rough stubble which defied a razor” (74). In addition, Bull never misses an opportunity to
humiliate or pick a fight with a no-no boy. When he starts a fight with Freddie and Ichiro he shouts:
“You goddamn Japs think you’re pretty smart, huh? I wasn’t fightin’ my friggin’ war for shits like
you” (247). In this exclamation we evidently observe that Bull disassociates himself with “goddamn
Japs” and that he did not participate in the war for them, which clearly underlines that he considers
himself to be entirely American. At the end of the novel, however, we find out that Bull’s self-
conceptions might not be totally unyielding when Freddie fatally crashes his car against a wall after
having fought with Bull. At first, Bull hysterically utters that Freddie has “seen it comin’ a good
long while. I ain’t sorry. You hear? I ain’t sorry. Damn right I ain’t. I hope he goes to hell. I hope
he…” (250). But then Bull is not able to finish his sentence and instead starts screaming and crying,
“not like a man in grief or a soldier in pain, but like a baby in loud, gasping, beseeching howls” and
with eyes that “begged for the solace that was not to be had”(250). According to Yeh this moment
explicitly portrays the breakdown of Bull’s domineering bully identity into a “wounded baby” and
he further continues that the revision of Bull’s self-concept proves that “few people, if any, remain
within their categories” (127).
Ichiro
Evidently, the main protagonist as well is pained by an identity crisis. As an illustration I will quote
a part of perhaps one of the most known monologues in Japanese American literature that represents
feelings with which a lot of second generation Japanese Americans have to deal. The internal
monologue takes place after Ichiro sees his fanatic mother again. He blames her and the way she
raised him for his time in prison because due to his attachment to her and his Japanese heritage,
Ichiro was not able to reply affirmatively when the country of his birth, the U.S, asked where his
loyalty lies. The monologue clearly emphasizes his confusion and his doubt concerning his identity:
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I was that boy in the peach and you were the old woman and we were Japanese with Japanese
feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese thoughts because it was all right then to be Japanese
and feel and think all the things that Japanese do even if we lived in America. Then there
came a time when I was only half Japanese because one is not born in America and taught
in America and one does not speak and swear and drink and smoke and play and fight and
see and hear in America among Americans in American streets and houses without becoming
American and loving it. But I did not love enough, for you were still half my mother and I
was thereby still half Japanese and when the war came and they told me to fight for America,
I was not strong enough to fight you and I was not strong enough to fight the bitterness which
made the half of me which was you bigger than the half of me which was America and really
the whole of me that I could not see or feel. Now that I know the truth when it is too late and
the half of me which was you is no longer there, I am only half of me and the half that
remains is American by law because the government was wise and strong enough to know
why it was that I could not fight for America and did not strip me of my birthright. But it is
not enough to be American only in the eyes of the law and it is not enough to be only half
an American and know that it is an empty half. I am not your son and I am not Japanese and
I am not American. (15-16)
Here we clearly witness how Ichiro as a child felt Japanese, which then changed when he was
growing up into feeling half Japanese and half American. But after replying negatively to the loyalty
question and consequently being imprisoned for doing so, he is left feeling confused and empty.
Berner asserts that “His twofold ‘no’ also represents a ‘no’ to being Japanese and a ‘no’ to being
American. He cannot be the former since this would mean denying his coming of age in the United
States and many of the things he loves about the country of which he is citizen and where he was at
home before the internment, hence he does not really feel Japanese” (50). He is also not able to feel
American due to the country’s rejection of the smallest Japanese connection one might have.
Additionally, Ichiro also experiences profound guilt for having resisted the draft and feels thus
unworthy to identify himself with “real” Americans. At this point in the story, Ichiro’s identity is
completely demolished and leaves a big gap in him.
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It is via encounters with empathetic people who help him work through his crisis that he manages
to gain back his lost identity. One of these people is Emi. She encourages Ichiro to be forgiving of
America’s sins:
In any other country they would have shot you for what you did. But this country is different.
They made a mistake when they doubted you. They made a mistake when they made you do
what you did and they admit it by letting your run around loose. Try, if you can, to be equally
big and forgive them and be grateful to them and prove to them that you can be an American
worthy of the frailties of the country as well as its strengths. (96)
Emi advises Ichiro to relativize America’s perspective and shows him that the U.S. as well as he
himself made mistakes for which they both need to repent. In doing so, Lin argues that Emi “is more
than adequate and convincing in her argument to pull Ichiro out of the hole of self-loathing and put
him on the road to rejuvenation” (92). We can read the rest of the story as Ichiro’s quest to re-
establish his lost identity.
Empathy
In this part I will employ Dominc LaCapra’s concept of empathy to prove that this empathetic
mindset can function as a bridge between certain Japanese American characters who are each
affected by the internment trauma in a profoundly different way. The goal here is to link opposing
perspectives with one another to form a bridge of understanding. For example, I will aim to bring
together the viewpoint of a no-no boy with that of a Japanese American soldier, aiming to connect
different traumas while still preserving a respectable distance between them so that they still have
sufficient space wherein they can be understood in their own terms and for their own sake. In other
words, empathy at the same time implies differentiation and solidarity.
In fact, the author of the novel John Okada already partakes in the action of empathy by writing No-
No Boy. Given the fact that Okada himself served as a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force during the
Second World War, his willingness to write about a no-no boy reveal the underlying, compassionate
impetus for the creation of the novel. Additionally, it confirms that Okada is not scared to engage
with “the other and equally important side of the story, no matter how untimely and undesirable it
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may be”(Li 84). The novel itself also portrays a few characters who show signs of empathy. I will
now scrutinize four characters that -in my opinion- embody these ideas best.
Kenji
In opposition to Ichiro, Kenji is a yes-yes boy who volunteered to enlist in the army. After the war
he returns home wounded and with gangrene in his leg that is still spreading further. The American
government acknowledged his sacrifice and rewarded him with several social benefits and car that
is exclusively designed for his condition. Unlike most other war veterans, Kenji immediately treats
Ichiro with kindness and respect even despite their completely opposite positions during the war. In
doing so, Kenji shows solidarity with Ichiro, who is otherwise rejected by most Japanese Americans
that served in the army. When Ichiro first admits to Kenji that he was a no-no boy, for example,
“Ichiro could tell instantly that it did not matter to Kenji” (62). Another instance in which it is
evident that Kenji participates in empathy is the time Ichiro asked him whose problem is bigger,
Ichiro’s or Kenji’s. Kenji insightfully replies in the following manner: “Mine is bigger than yours
in a way and, then again, yours is bigger than mine” (65). Here he makes clear that he has the
capacity to understand that each problem is different and must be understood on their own terms.
Ichiro’s friendship with Kenji will prove to be very significant in Ichiro’s self-acceptance and
growth. Kenji, as one of the few characters, “seems to realize that the differences between them are,
after all, not significant if even non-existent” (Berner 55).
Mr. Kumasaka
Also minor characters are able to exemplify empathy such as Mr. Kumasaka. As mentioned earlier,
Mr. Kumasaka and his family were friends of his own family. However, his son Bobbie, in
opposition to Ichiro, agreed to serve in the U.S. troops and eventually died in a foreign country.
Despite the differences in thinking between Mr. Kumasaka and Ichiro’s mother he assures Ichiro
that he is always welcome at his house: “I want you to feel free to come and visit us whenever you
wish. We can talk even if your mother’s convictions are different” (30). Even after the ill-intentioned
visit of Ichiro’s mother, which invoked outrage in Ichiro, he urges Ichiro to “try to understand her”
(30).
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Mr. Carrick
Another minor character Ichiro encounters is Mr. Carrick. He is a good-hearted man who offers
Ichiro an engineering job in Portland. He defies the dominant American viewpoint concerning the
mass relocation of the Japanese Americans by admitting the following:
The government made a big mistake when they shoved you people around. There was no
reason for it. A big black mark in the annals of American history. I mean that. I've always
been a big-mouthed, loud-talking, back-slapping American but, when that happened, I lost a
little of my wind. I don't feel as proud as I used to, but, if the mistake has been made, maybe
we've learned something from it. Let's hope so. We can still be the best damn nation in the
world. I'm sorry things worked out the way they did. (150)
Obviously, Mr. Carrick does not care that Ichiro is a no-no boy. His apology “made to the Japanese
who had been wronged” (150) sincerely acknowledges America’s fault in interning nearly 120,000
Japanese Americans. He also realizes that out of mistakes lessons can be learned to prevent similar
events to ever happen again in the future. Moreover, he intends to comfort Ichiro by assuring him
that the situation in which Ichiro find himself is not his fault and once more he apologizes to him:
“sorry for you and for the causes behind the reasons which made you do what you did. It wasn’t
your fault, really. You know that, don’t you?” (152) Note that Mr. Carrick again shows his
awareness of how unfairly the American approach was to the Japanese Americans.
Emi
Perhaps the most empathetic character in the novel is Emi, a close friend of Kenji’s. Displaying
empathy appears to be effortless for her. She is able to comprehend “almost every position taken in
the Japanese(-)American conflict” (Berner 57). For example, Emi “understands why her father
repatriated to Japan and did not want to stay in the United States” and “what caused Mike, her
brother-in-law, to be a leader in the troublemaking, strikes, and riots in the internment camps and
afterwards to go to Japan” (Berner 57). But at the same time she also grasps that Ralp, her husband,
keeps on going on military missions abroad to prove his “Americanness” and to restore the family
reputation his brother Mike had damaged. Furthermore, Emi entirely empathizes with Kenji’s and
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Ichiro’s deviant political attitudes. Berner underlines that Emi is resolutely convinced that “mistakes
which were made on either side can be forgotten or corrected” (57).
Moreover, Emi challenges Ichiro to look at the bigger picture, instead of only searching for answers
in his own personal situation. She forces him to evaluate the whole situation on a higher social level
and explains to him that the adversity Ichiro like all other Japanese Americans is confronted with is
because America’s racial hostility towards the Japanese: "'It's because we're American and because
we're Japanese and sometimes the two don't mix. It's all right to be German and American or Italian
and American or Russian and American but, as things turned out, it wasn't all right to be Japanese
and American. You had to be one or the other’" (91). Emi’s solidarity with each perspective clearly
indicates she embodies the ideas behind empathy.
On the Way to a Solution
Throughout his personal journey Ichiro comes to the understanding that dismissing his Japanese
roots for a total American assimilation will not resolve his problems within society. He has accepted
that his Japanese heritage is an undeniable part of him. He additionally realizes that “the general and
global understanding between people of different races and countries” (Berner 61) can gradually
lead to a more solidary world in which everyone’s differences are respected. Ichiro finds hope in
empathic persons such as Kenji, Mr. Kumasaka, Mr. Carrick and Emi, who showed him that you
must come to terms with your own identity and with your own problems and who extended kindness
to him despite their vast dissimilarities. At the end of the novel we perceive that a glimpse of hope
has awaken in Ichiro and the story concludes with him “thinking, searching, thinking and probing,
and, in the darkness of the alley of the community that was a tiny bit of America, he chased that
faint and elusive insinuation of promise as it continued to take shape in mind and in heart” (251).
This optimistic ending suggests that in a country like the U.S. in which racism and injustice
incontrovertibly exist, possibilities of forgiveness and starting anew are offered to those who lost
their way.
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IV. The Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
After discussing the traumatic internment camp experience of the protagonists in When the Emperor
was Divine and No-No Boy I will now concentrate on stories that involve individuals that were faced
with the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. government in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the
introduction I already mentioned that the United States managed to transform the atrocities in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki into triumphant tales. Consequently, the public was offered an official
“saving lives narrative” (Mishler 9) in which America’s motivation for using such a massive nuclear
force against Japan was formulated as a necessity to end the war as soon as possible and by doing
so rescuing as many American lives as possible. However, scholars such as John Whittier Treat
have pointed out that the dropping of the atomic bombs “was done for other than military reasons”
(7). Instead he describes the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “acts of
official, state-sponsored terrorism propelled by the twin momenta of government bureaucracy and
scientific curiosity” of which the effects were “not intended solely for the Japanese, but for the
world” (7). Treat’s assertion is confirmed in president Truman’s statement of the atomic bomb being
“the greatest achievement of organized science” (qtd. in Treat 11). Unfortunately, through constant
exposure to such rationalizations the general public accepted the ‘saving lives narrative’ as
historically true.
Luckily, an increasing number of scholars and writers dared to challenge this dominant narrative
and shed light on the cruel effects caused by the atomic explosions. Instead of rationalizations of
the use of Little Boy and Fat Man, they are concerned with representations of human experiences.
Therefore, I argue, to challenge the dominant “saving lives narrative” there is a need for the creation
of a counter-narrative in which the voices of survivors are given a platform to articulate their
traumatic experiences. In literature the public is encouraged to question the dominant historical
narratives about Hiroshima and Nagasaki by actively engaging with the viewpoints of the victims
and the survivors themselves can regain control of the telling of their trauma. In addition, Kalí Tal
even suggests that “if survivors retain control over the interpretation of their trauma, they can
sometimes force a shift in the social and political structure. If the dominant culture manages to
appropriate the trauma and can codify it in its own terms, the status quo will remain unchanged”
(7).
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Like Tal I also believe counter-narratives in which the sufferings of the survivors are central have
the power to inspire a change of the dominant structures in society and can offer future generations
a more complete understanding of the consequences of the nuclear threat. In what follows I will
analyze two novels that are concerned with experiences of fictitious victims who survived the
nuclear destruction of their city. Although the writers were not personally affected by the nuclear
bombs, they have examined the survivors’ testimonies and suffering thoroughly. Due to their
profound research their works of fiction provide us with sufficiently accurate metaphors of what a
world in which weapons of mass destruction are unleashed would look like and thereby turning the
reader into a witness-through-imagination. Numerous scholars might argue that the atrocities that
took place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki defy understanding, but S. Lillian Kremer claims that “we
may come closer to comprehension through the efforts of artists whose works incorporate and
transcend representational reality” (8). In Dorothy Stroup’s In the Autumn Wind we will be
confronted with a protagonist who lived through the blast in Hiroshima while in Burnt Shadows
written by Kamila Shamsie we will encounter a main character who survived the attack on Nagasaki.
In the literary discussion of the books I will argue that they provide us with better insights into the
trauma experiences of the hibakusha and in doing so challenge the supremacy of the one-sided
national narrative that only offer us facts and numbers. By reading atomic bomb literature we find
ourselves in a position of solidarity with the victims.
In previous chapters I chose to make use of Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory to discuss individual
trauma, but for the analysis of the atomic bomb survivors’ personal traumas I prefer the conceptual
framework of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton as proposed in his book Death in Life: Survivors of
Hiroshima. For his study he conducted interviews with hibakusha to study the psychological impact
of the bomb on 90,000 survivors. He concluded that there are five different processes survivors of
the nuclear explosions can go through: death imprint, death guilt, psychic numbing, nurturance and
contagion, and formulation. Since not all processes are profoundly explored by Stroup nor Shamsie,
I will only further clarify those stages that are most prominent in the novels, namely death imprint,
death guilt and contagion anxiety.
Additionally, closely intertwined with Lifton’s survivor theory are two other peculiarities that stand
out when scrutinizing traumatic experiences of hibakusha. The first characteristic had been pointed
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out by a sociologist interviewed by Lifton. He underlines that the feeling of dehumanization is a
central characteristic in the agony of a great number of hibakusha and can also be linked with each
of Lifton’s five processes. All survivors believe they have been touched by something inhuman that
in turn has stripped away their humanity. According to the sociologist the survivors in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and especially victims who have visible marks on their bodies such as keloids feel as
if they have an “altered body (especially facial) form to the point of dehumanization” (284).
Moreover, the second striking remarkability has to do with certain characteristics apparent in many
of these hibakushas’ memories. In The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese Dorothy
Stroup wrote a review of Unforgettable Fire, a collection that contains 104 pictures and drawings
by atomic bomb survivors. In the comments that accompanied the pictures she noticed that the
images shared the following three specifically strong memories:
1. The survivors very often remembered “the exact location, the condition, the appearance and
the voices pleading for help” (75)
2. “The recurrent memory of strange phenomena” (76)
3. “The horror survivors felt at seeing so many people, including their own relatives, turned
into non-human beings” (76)
In both novels the main protagonists are haunted by these kinds of recollections which may indicate
that the memories of the hibakusha tend to be tainted by a strange type of grotesque impressions in
which everyone affected is reduced to something inhuman. Furthermore, after being exposed to such
uncanny imagery, it is difficult for the survivor to integrate the images into an understandable
framework. This dehumanization of the hibakusha and the peculiar memories they have of their
experiences are remarkable in both novels and will thus be a significant facet in the following
literary analyses.
A. Dorothy Stroup, In the Autumn Wind
1. Synopsis
Chiyo Hara is a housewife in Hiroshima in 1945, struggling to make ends meet during the last years
of the second World War. Her husband Shintaro is held captive as a prisoner of war in a POW camp
in Manchuria, Siberia. She is forced to stretch the limits of the food rations and work to support the
war machine in an effort to take care of her three children and herself. Unfortunately, when the
atomic bomb drops in the summer of 1945, her son Kenichi vaporizes in the initial blast and she
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herself is scarred in her face for life. Just like Chiyo, the rest of her family survive the initial
devastation miraculously.
The rest of the novel depicts the struggle of survival of the hibakusha. . Despite the hostile
environment, she and her children manage to start a successful doll-making company, selling their
products to American GI’s. Meanwhile, after the war her husband goes missing for over eight years
and rumours arise he has joined the Red Army as a communist, which makes the family assume the
worst and pray for his safe return.When her husband Shintaro finally does return during the 1950’s,
he dies from the consequences of tuberculosis not much later. Due to her loss, she starts acting more
independently in her business and her personal life. It becomes more and more apparent that Chiyo
does not longer value the prewar Japanese customs nor structures of society, which causes her to
clash with the rest of the family. Everything falls apart when she decides to marry her business
associate Hideo Nakayama who belonged to a lower social rank family than hers, which triggered
her brother Isao to disown her.
Eventually, after years of estrangement she and her second husband finally manage to obtain the
approval of Isao when he fall terminally ill.Despite experiencing the dropping of Little Boy at a
close distance, Chiyo outlives most of her circle of friends and her second husband. She eventually
dies of old age after attending a memorial service of Hiroshima In the last moments of the novel we
read that Chiyo has died and is finally reunited with her vanished son Kenichi.
2. Discussion
Individual trauma
A deeper understanding of the individual trauma of atomic bomb survivors can help us envision the
human cost of violent governmental actions such as the employment of nuclear weapons. In Stroup’s
novel we are given the opportunity to empathize with the characters’s suffering, which counters the
rationalizations provided by the politicians in the dominant discourse of triumph. I will now
primarily engage with the main protagonist Chiyo Hara’s suffering by using Lifton’s survivor theory
to analyze her individual trauma. In the story we can observe that Chiyo is primarily faced with
Lifton’s processes of death imprint, death guilt and contagion anxiety, which I will now elucidate
further.
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First of all, the process of the death imprint is essential to the experience of all survivors as it “occurs
whatever one’s pre-existing psychological traits” (Lifton 764). In this stage survivors are faced with
death imprint, a notion that refers to lasting feelings of anxiety when an individual finds
himself/herself n a life-threatening situation wherein death was imminent. .Another significant
characteristic of the death imprint is the grotesqueness of the hibakusha impressions. Survivors were
confronted with grotesque images of death which also invoked a psychological feeling that “death
was not only everywhere, but was bizarre, unnatural, indecent, absurd” (Lifton 765). In Stroup’s
novel the imagery of death and inhumanity is immediately conveyed in the Chiyo’s impression of
the initial blast:
A brilliant, blinding light surrounded her, jabbing itself into her body with the force of a
thousand electric suns, all echoing a huge, ghostly roar. A wind ripped the bowels of the earth.
The wall collapsed. Dark silence enveloped her. The earth stopped breathing. (64)
Here we observe that Chiyo felt the blinding light pierce through her with an incredible “force of a
thousand electric suns” which produced a “ghostly roar”. The adjective “ghostly” implies that the
source of the light possesses inhuman attributes. The terminology used in Chiyo’s first impression
of the explosion points to her belief that what she experienced was unearthly. Furthermore, she
perceives the “bowels of the earth” to be ripped and witnesses that the earth “stopped breathing”.
Here the earth is described as having human organs and having the ability to breathe. However, she
believes “a wind ripped the bowels of the earth”, which suggests Chiyo experiences the impact of
the attack as the unnatural death of the earth.
According to Lifton, the trauma of the hibakusha is “related to a lifelong inability to absorb that
initial moment which I spoke of earlier as their sudden and absolute shift from normal existence to
overwhelming encounter with death” (770). This type of uncanny imagery leaves the survivors
feeling overwhelmed and causes them to see all subsequent experiences through its lens. In this
way, the death imprint resonates with Cathy Caruth’s idea that “to be traumatized is precisely to be
possessed by an image or event” (153).
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Moreover, when Chiyo sees Mrs. Yamamoto and Yasu, who are her next-door neighbors, she again
experiences a sense of grotesqueness because she does not recognize them at first:
Two people peered at her through the door opening, one with white hair almost standing on end,
the other with a torn student tunic, splotched with blood. Both were sooty and dirty. “Your
face,” one of them said. It was Yasu’s voice. She felt her cheek, squishy and wet, then took her
hand away, covered with blood. No feeling there. Only her arm hurt. (...) The other person stood
mute like a ghost. It was Mrs. Yamamoto, whose hair had been black the day before. (65)
Lifton explains that this sense of grotesqueness is due to “a sense of monstrous alteration of
the body substance” (765). Accordingly, this extract demonstrates that Chiyo’s face and Mrs.
Yamamoto’s black hair have suddenly transformed into unfamiliar substances. This bodily
alteration contributes to the further dehumanization of the survivors.
The grotesque images of death continue to form when Chiyo wanders around and encounters dead
victims:
In front of Hiroshima station, a line of people waited for the bus, fingernails clutching each
other’s shoulders. When she came closer, Chiyo saw that they were corpses leaning against each
other, burned to a crisp where they stood. Beyond were two gutted streetcars, bodies inside still
clinging to the straps. (69)
She also notices that the river “was clogged with people swimming among the bodies. A man on a
raft leaned over to pick up a small boy, pulling him by the hands, but the child’s skin came off like
gloves, and he slithered back into the river” (69). When Chiyo comes across other injured persons
we again get a similar description of a grotesque scene:
They were wounded themselves, blackened faces and clothing hanging from their arms and
shoulders. One person walked close by and Chiyo saw that it was not clothing hanging down,
but skin. They kept walking, mindlessly, staring straight ahead, like ghosts. (66)
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In Chiyo’s uncanny impressions of the wounded the skin of survivors are equated with pieces of
clothing and victims are depicted as skinless, ghostlike figures. Once again, their humanity is
questioned as they transformed in “dehumanized pieces of charcoal” (290).
In addition, there are several cases in the book that prove surviving the nuclear attack is not a
guarantee that you will remain untouched from the bomb’s aftereffects. For example, characters
such as Grandmother, Yasu, Mr. Takano and Kyoko died in days, months or even years after the
nuclear bomb was dropped. Lifton tackles this subject matter by linking the experiences of atomic
bomb survivors with “Blach Death” survivors. He proposes that the experiences of the hibakusha
are similar to the victims of “the ‘Black Death’ or ‘Great Dying,’ the plagues which swept Europe
during the fourteenth century” (765). However, there is one crucially important difference: those
who recovered from the plague are freed from the immersion of death. In other words, plague
recovery signifies a “release from the encounter with death” (765), which was in stark contrast to
the nuclear bomb survivor’s recovery that “turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong sense of
vulnerability to the same grotesque death” (765). Consequently, the victim internalizes this
uncanniness and the numerous pictures of death surrounding him, “and feels it to be inseparable
from his own body and mind” (765In short, in this stage the survivors are confronted with the
grotesqueness of the death imprint. The bizarre impressions of the hibakusha characters in the novel
further succeeded to color their future experiences.
Secondly, the process of death guilt is also portrayed several times in the novel. When her daughter
Yoko’s best friend Kyoko died from chronic leukemia as a later result of the nuclear attack, Chiyo
could not fathom why a the young Kyoko had to die instead of the older survivors:
“Why all of them instead of us middle-aged ladies?” Chiyo and Mrs. Ikeda and Mrs. Yamamoto,
each of them wandering everywhere in the city that day, touching burning bodies, burning their
feet and faces. “Why not us?” (...) Kyoko and Yukiji Ikeda and Kenichi Hara and Sachiko
Yamamoto had hardly begun their lives. And Kyoko had been far out in the country when the
bomb fell. And Takano-sensei hadn’t even arrived in the city until midafternoon. And now they
were dead like all the others. (300)
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This stage can be paraphrased by the following question: “Why did I survive and others not?”
Survivors are haunted by the memory of their own “helplessness or inability to act or feel in a way
they would ordinarily have thought appropriate” (Sawada et al. 7). Chiyo, for instance cannot help
but feel indebted to the dead and feel responsible for the deaths of other victims such as Kyoko,
Yukiji, Kenichi, Sachiko and Takano-senseiLater in the novel Chiyo again feels as if she was the
one who was supposed to die instead of her brother Isao who is suffering from stomach cancer:
Isao had walked in and out of the city every day during that dreadful time. Except for the illness
he’d had early on, he hadn’t shown any weakness at all. Chiyo was the one who was supposed
to die, always feeling anemic and getting exhausted (...) And now he was the one. Holding his
stiff stomach together by sheer force of will. And she and Mrs. Ikeda and Mrs. Yamamoto were
all still alive. They have outlived the healthy ones and the strong ones and the young ones. (420)
Chiyo cannot comprehend why her strong brother who was not near the initial blast was affected by
the bomb’s radiation effects. She wonders what the reason is that she, Mrs. Ikeda and Mrs.
Yamamoto who were close to the hypocenter of the explosion were all spared. According to Lifton
survival, by definition, implies an order in which one person dies at an earlier time than another.
This sequence comes together with the survivor’s unconscious sense of an organic social balance
which makes him feel that his survival was purchased at the cost of another’s.
Lastly, the Chiyo’s psychological trauma of the hibakusha is also characterized by contagion
anxiety. When Chiyo’s daughter Yoko admits to the family that she wants to marry Yasu, the son
of Mrs. Yamamoto, the family replies with their concerns of “damaged genes and retarded children”
(321). Chiyo then further elucidates this statement:
We are descended from samurai on both sides and this marriage could affect our descendants for
generations to come. It is all right that your uncle and I are hibakusha because we will not have
any more children. But for you ― don’t you see? Yasu could die at any time, and leave you alone.
Or with children. You might have them even if you try to prevent it, and they might be retarded
and you would have to bring them up alone. (322)
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Lifton states that the survivors are often “looked upon as ‘contagious’”, but at the same time “they
themselves fear the ‘contagion’ of the dead” (819). Along with the fear of contagion often goes an
isolation forced upon the hibakusha by the non-hibakusha. Many cultures, including the Japanese,
tend to socially cast out those tainted by death.
Even Chiyo who is a hibakusha herself does not find Yasu an appropriate husband for her daughter
despite being accompanied by him during the first hours after the explosion. She is too preoccupied
with the family lineage. In short the concept of contagion anxiety can be summarized as “related to
actual physical dangers survivors pose for others” (Lifton 821).
Inhumanity
Besides the grotesque imagery with which the hibakusha characters in the novel were confronted,
there are other instances that cause them to feel less human or even inhuman. A clear example of
this is when the American soldier Bob shares with Chiyo his suspicion of why her kokeshi dolls are
selling at such a fast rate. He reveals that the dolls sold in the American bases are stamped with the
message ‘made by survivors of the atomic bomb’ and he then compliments her on being able to give
many hibakusha a source of income. Upon hearing this Chiyo’s mood turns dark and she angrily
replies: “Not all of them are hibakusha, there are nonsurvivors, too. Just people who want to make
dolls and who need work” (260). Bob then continues the conversation by stating that the American
soldiers buy them because they want to help the survivors, which completely stuns Chiyo: “Her
beloved kokeshi dolls serving as some kind of charity? It was the next step above begging. Blood
was rushing to her face, and she felt hot. Charity from America, the country that had dropped the
bomb. Better to give the whole thing up and work for City Hall” (260).
In this excerpt we witness that all inhabitants of Hiroshima are being reduced to being survivors of
the atomic bomb by the American soldiers who completely ignore that there are people in Hiroshima
that did not experience the blast. Even Chiyo, who actually is a survivor despises being diminished
to the label of hibakusha so much she briefly considers “to give the whole thing up”. Isao then
clarifies to Bob that the idea behind the production of the dolls is “to make something beautiful that
people will buy because it is beautiful. (...) We want the person who buys to think only of the
excellence and craftsmanship, not sympathy” (261).
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Chiyo hates the fact that the existence of her and her neighbors being reduced to the atomic bomb,
especially by outsiders.
Furthermore, In the novel, the treatment of the atomic bomb survivors as guinea pigs is also briefly
mentioned on several instances. Chiyo was, for example, occasionally “having red-and-white-
corpuscle checks, going up to the Casualty Commission for tests, being a guinea pig” (420). Also
her brother Isao was highly skeptical about the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and bluntly
criticizes its intentions: “‘They’re not giving treatment, you know,’ Isao said when he stopped by
after his trip to Maizuru. ‘You’re just a guinea pig for their experiments. If you’re not dead, why
aren’t you? That’s what they want to know.’” (242).
As illustrated above survivors of the atomic bomb were of great significance to the American
government for the study of the genetic and medical aftereffects of radiation. This scientific interest
in the hibakusha led to Chiyo feeling as if she was nothing more than a guinea pig. Analogously, In
Steven Okazaki’s documentary White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction Of Hiroshima And
Nagasaki one survivor painfully remembers the hibakusha served as nothing more than subjects for
research for American doctors: “It pains me to think we were guinea pigs. The American doctors
picked us up at school and put us in jeeps. We went into a room and stripped naked. lf you had
purple spots or diarrhea they examined you, but they didn't treat us”.
The sentiment among the hibakusha characters of being reduced to the bomb and being treated as a
guinea pig in combination with grotesque imagery with which they were faced, contributed to their
feelings of further dehumanization.
Chiyo’s peculiar memories
I mentioned earlier in the introduction that Dorothy Stroup wrote a review of Unforgettable Fire, a
collection of pictures and drawings by atomic bomb survivors. She notes that many images depict
three particularly strong sorts of memories:
1. The survivors very often remembered “the exact location, the condition, the appearance and
the voices pleading for help” (75)
2. “The recurrent memory of strange phenomena” (76)
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3. “The horror survivors felt at seeing so many people, including their own relatives, turned
into non-human beings” (76)
Throughout the story we witness Chiyo having all three types of memories
First, Chiyo is frequently able to recollect the precise place, the conditions and/or the voices pleading
for help. In the book there are several moments in which she is being reminded of the voices calling
out for help. For instance:“All night long Chiyo heard the voices of wounded students from the
Girls’ Commercial School. Once voice, soothing and gentle, sounded like a teacher’s. Sometimes
they sang softly together. (75)” This example indicates that Chiyo is able to remember the voices
specifically belonging to the students from the Girls’ Commercial School and their teacher. This
precision in memory is characteristic for hibakusha such as Chiyo. Furthermore, Chiyo admits that
she still remembers how Yukiji was shouting for help, but she was not able to save him due to the
flames growing larger:“I still see Yukiji and hear his voice in my dreams. I heard him calling after
us when we were running away”(124)
The second type of memory Chiyo is still haunted by is the repetitive recollection of ‘strange
phenomena’:
The terrible vision came again. She had trained herself never to look at the top of a building in
the sun, never to think of that day or time they found Takano-sensei searching through the rubble.
But now it was too late. Kenichi shimmered before her in full force, breaking into a thousand
pieces, scattering over the ground, shreds of scorched uniform and the contents of his lunch box
spread out, burned black and uneaten, his identification tag glittering, its light piercing her
eyeballs, blasting her head apart, ending with exhaustion and nausea. (161)
Although Chiyo never saw her son evaporate, she is still possessed by the strange memory of him
shattering into thousands of pieces. In the following example, we again see Chiyo being remembered
of the strange image of Kenichi bursting into little pieces. This time, however, Kenichi’s eyelashes
look like butterflies that cause little fires over the whole landscape:
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That night Chiyo awoke again from the nightmare of Kenichi on the roof disintegrating in the
sun, the light piercing through him, then his eyelashes floating like butterflies, exploding on the
ground and creating tiny bonfires all over the earth” (103).
In sum, throughout her life after the annihilation of Hiroshima she is recurrently haunted by a
peculiar nightmare in which she find her firstborn son Kenichi being “exploded again and again”
(415).
The third type of memory that keeps bothering Chiyo concerns the anguish she felt when seeing
victims, including her own friends and relatives, reduced to non-human beings.
“Anyway I couldn’t carry him. He was too heavy and taller than I am. And there wasn’t any place
to take him. So I cremated him. Lots of half-burned wood around. I just collected it and lit a fire
under him. Everything burned quite rapidly, really. Except his bowels. It was his stomach, you
know. His stomach wouldn’t seem to burn. It took forever for his stomach — “ She looked up
and stopped, seeing, through the twilight room, the horror on Chiyo’s face. (125)
Chiyo, in fact, did not witness Mrs. Ikeda burning her husband with her own eyes, but Mrs. Ikeda’s
vivid description will be engraved in Chiyo’s mind for a long time.
In sum, due to Chiyo’s inability to integrate these atrocious memories into an existing scheme of
knowledge the horror she feels when vividly seeing victims turned into bizarre figures will torment
her for years to come.
In search of understanding
As part of the process of ‘working through’, the survivor needs to obtain a sense of the new reality
and incorporate it in his existing framework of knowledge. It is, therefore, significant that the victim
learns how to formulate his suffering since “to be completely deprived of formulation at any time,
even at the moment of the death encounter, is psychically intolerable” (Lifton 834). In this way,
constructing cultural traumas can aid the hibakusha in their process of working through. If they or
the wider Japanese public can take back complete control of the symbolic exchanges of the atomic
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bombs from America, a compassionate counter-narrative can be constructed that can criticize the
unilateral “saving lives narrative”.
Cultural trauma
So far, I have demonstrated that the atomic bomb in Hiroshima destroyed Chiyo’s perception of
life’s coherence on an individual level. Additionally, she longs for the reaffirmation of her humanity
and the acknowledgement of her pain. In other words, she and other hibakusha victims in the novel
seek “a sense of world-order in which their suffering has been recognized, in which reparative
actions by those responsible for it can be identified” (Lifton 833). Apart from scrutinizing the
individual trauma of hibakusha it is of equal significance to explore the cultural trauma suffered by
not only the survivors, but also by the Japanese people as a whole. However, we must be careful to
not fall victim to ‘the naturalist fallacy’ as defined by sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander. This notion
warns us that we cannot analogically transfer “the psychoanalytic model of individual trauma to the
study of collective memory” (357). I will, therefore, opt for Alexander’s social theory of cultural
trauma. According to this theory “trauma is not the result of a group experiencing pain. It is the
result of this acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity”
(Alexander, “Trauma” 15). In the case of the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this means
that the Japanese population gradually ‘chose’ to represent the use of the atomic bombs as a
“fundamental threat to their sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to
go” (Alexander, “Trauma” 15).
In In the Autumn Wind we observe a gradual shift in the Japanese's identification with the nuclear
blast in Hiroshima. Initially, people were not so much concerned with cultural representations of the
atomic bomb and its devastating effects. Those who lived through the explosion were too
preoccupied with surviving and finding their loved ones and the rest of Hiroshima was already
focusing on cleaning up and rebuilding the city. Chiyo discovers one of the earliest, organized
cultural representations of the blast in the magazine Pikadon:
Some artists had published a new illustrated magazine called Pikadon, meaning a bright, shining
flash of an explosion, the nickname people gave to the atomic bomb. Chiyo, charmed by the
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illustrations, poems and stories, had begun looking for a copy when the magazines were suddenly
seized by the Occupation authorities. Further publication was prohibited. (251)
When Chiyo finally found aesthetic expressions of Little Boy in Pikadon, the American occupying
authorities imposed a prohibition on further publication of the magazine, which indicates that it was
still the U.S. that was in charge of the symbolic representations of the bomb. This sparked feelings
of outrage in some of the Hiroshima citizens such as Chiyo's brother Isao who calls out America's
lack of responsibility and hypocrisy: "Why can't those Americans allow the simple truth? (...) In a
few years, they'll have everybody thinking they didn't drop the bomb at all", he continues: "But all
this bragging about the American way and its freedom of the press. A bit hollow, wouldn't you say?"
(251)
However, almost simultaneously the city of Hiroshima build a cenotaph to commemorate the
victims of the blast and are planning to add an inscription that articulates the evilness of nuclear
weapons of mass destruction. Isao claims that "Professor Saiga has written an inscription for the
cenotaph they’re building in the Peace Park. It says, ‘Rest in peace, for we shall not repeat this evil’”
(251). This inscription points out the social responsibility the Japanese have taken upon themselves:
they have to make sure that this evil shall not be repeated again.
Furthermore, in later years, more and more exhibitions are organized in which hibakusha could
communicate their suffering via aesthetics to the larger public. Chiyo, for example, attends the
Atomic Dome Cafe exhibition and "was amazed by the variety of submissions. She stood in front
of a work that had been entered in the ‘sculpture’ class. The artist had collected pieces of charred
wood and roof tile melted by the blast into strange unearthly shapes and covered with bubbles like
molten lava” (271). As the story advances, it becomes increasingly clear that the Japanese are
regaining control of the symbolic representation of the horrors inflicted on them. Especially
Hiroshima itself has taken the responsibility to inform the rest of the world of the dangers and the
horrendous effects of atomic weapons through different mediums:
And in the midst of the growing affluence around them, in the midst of the test-ban treaties and
the breaking of them and the unending acquisition by other nations of the weapons of annihilation,
the hibakusha kept on trying to explain the danger and the horror of it. There were conferences,
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peace missions, research projects, books, articles, poetry, and music. And every year on August
6, the mayor stood up and gave warning to the world that nuclear weapons led not to winning or
losing, but to suicide. (374)
We can deduct from the novel that Japan increasingly gained back control from the United States
of the symbolic representation surrounding the atomic attacks. Before the Lucky Dragon incident in
1954 in which a Japanese tuna boat got contaminated by radiation after a nuclear explosion test
conducted by the United States, it was still largely the U.S. that directed the cultural responses to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Additionally, it is clear that the concept of cultural trauma also involves
a rising sense of social responsibility among the Japanese. Alexander suggests that via the
construction of cultural traumas “social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire
civilizations not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering but may also
take on board some significant responsibility for it” (“Trauma” 6). As the years advanced, more and
more anti-nuclear movements started to define "Hiroshima" as the symbol of nuclear victimhood,
"as the origin of the nation victimized by nuclear weapons" (Saito 369). Therefore, the annual
memorial services are of great importance. Every year “the mayor began to speak, as every mayor
always did, about the futility of war in the face of annihilation and his hopes that people everywhere
would dedicate themselves, with new urgency, to peace” (414).
In conclusion, we can state that In the Autumn Wind is a great literary representation of the nature
of the pain the hibakusha suffered on a psychological level and how they articulate their pain to
warn the larger collectivity for the atrocities of nuclear weaponry. In what follows, I will offer a
literary analysis of the novel Burnt Shadows. The primary focus will again be on the individual
trauma of the main protagonist, but now I will also concentrate on how the memory of the tragedies
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki can function as a warning of what can happen again if the use of nuclear
weapons will continue. For this purpose I will rely again on Lifton’s theory of the survivor to
examine the individual trauma and on Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory to
prove the recollections of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can enable us to envision the atrocious
consequences of a nuclear future.
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B. Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows
On August 9, three days after witnessing the devastating effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
the United States unleashed a second one on the city of Nagasaki, again murdering tens of thousands
civilians in the process. In the novel Burnt Shadows Kamila Shamsie gives us an insight in Hiroko
Tanaka’s life after she survived the nuclear attack on Nagasaki. The book is ambitious as it narrates
a story that unfolds over a period of more than 5 decades, starting with the last moments of World
War II until the aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, its events are set in various places across the globe,
each place marking the beginning of a new chapter of the book and a new stage in the lives of the
characters. The strength of the novel lies in its ability to interconnect East to West and to draw a
parallel across a dividing line that is often considered to be insurmountable. Shamsie admirably
succeeds in binding elements of history and cultures together that both seem distant and unrelated.
According to Duce “Shamsie’s primary purpose in the novel seems to be the drawing of parallels
between previous and current conflicts and how the past constitutes the present” (65). Another link
Shamsie manages to establish is between the actions carried out by “legitimate” governments and
the effects of these actions on the characters’ personal lives. In other words, “Shamsie’s novel brings
the consequences of these “legitimate” actions to the level of the personal and provides a study on
how global forces move people between countries and towards and away from each other” (Duce
65). It is therefore not surprising that I will focus my literary analysis of Burnt Shadows on the
individual trauma the main protagonist Hiroko suffered as a consequence of the American
government’s decision to drop a second atom bomb. Again I will use Robert Jay Lifton’s survivor
theory to examine Hiroko’s individual trauma as a survivor of the nuclear blast. Furthermore, by
making use of Michael Rothberg’s notion “multidirectional memory” in the analysis I will also
demonstrate how the memory of Nagasaki’s destruction has the potential to connect a hibakusha
with a 9/11 victim and helps Hiroko understand the potential dangers of nuclearization, which
consequently causes her to move away from Pakistan when it continues to invest in nuclear
weapons. Once more this novel can be considered as a counter-narrative that criticizes the dominant
American “saving lives narrative” by placing Hiroko’s family “in the middle of the frame to give
inconceivable events a sense of scale and perspective” (Duce 66). Shamsie provides her readers with
a personal prism through which they can witness the dangerous effects of political conflicts
precipitated by “legitimate” governments.
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1. Synopsis
Hiroko Tanaka lives in Nagasaki as the world nears the end of the second World War. Her secret
relationship with displaced German Konrad Weiss keeps her spirits high as they plan to get married
after the war. When the second atomic bomb devastates the city, however, it kills Konrad and scars
Hiroko for life in a physical as well as psychological way.
On the run from unbearable memories and the stigma of being a Hibakusha, Hiroko makes her way
to India in 1947, where she is reservedly welcomed in the home of Konrad’s sister Ilse who changed
her name to Elizabeth in order to escape prejudice for being of German descent. At this time she
had been living with her husband James Burton, a British official, and their servant Sajjad Ashraf
who later starts teaching Hiroko the Urdu language. After Sajjad is temporarily thrown out due to a
misunderstanding about Hiroko’s scars, he and Hiroko confess their feelings for each other. She
converts to Islam and they get married during the violent years leading up to the Pakistani and Indian
Partition, which incites James to help them flee the country on a honeymoon to Istanbul right after
Elizabeth has left to move to the United States.
Several decades later, Elizabeth and James’s son Harry, who had been studying in Britain and who
is now a U.S citizen, travels to Pakistan on a mission for the CIA. Harry contacts Hiroko and Sajjad
who live near the area where he is stationed with their teenaged son Raza. Raza’s supposed
connection to the CIA alienates him further from his Pakistani community which is already
prejudiced towards him for his background and that of his mother. Almost everyone in his
neighbourhood fears that Raza and his mother are contaminated by the atomic bomb. This alienation
draws him to the world of Muslim extremism after which he goes missing. When his father dies
while looking for him, he blames Harry, who in turn leaves the family in order to cope with these
recent events.
More time passes and in the wake of the September 11 attacks Elizabeth (now Ilse again) and
Hiroko, who are living out their old days in America together, are visited by Harry’s daughter Kim.
Her absent father Harry is at that time working at a security firm in Afghanistan together with Raza.
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Raza asks Harry to help a friend in the United States to flee the country because he’s being chased
by the FBI. Harry refuses and when he is killed on the field not much later Raza is blamed for the
incident, forcing him to escape to America in search of Kim. While he is trying to clear his name,
Kim helps Raza’s friend out of the country into Canada. However, she has second thoughts and
alerts the police at the time of a meeting between them which ultimately results in Raza’s arrest.
Kim returns to New York and consults Hiroko, who insists that she has to help Raza since it's her
fault he has been arrested. Kim tries to do so via telephone, but learns that the US government had
been looking for Raza all along. The novel ends with Raza's fate and the families' future in the
balance.
C. Discussion
Individual trauma
Also in this novel insights in the individual trauma of a hibakusha can help us imagine the painful
consequences they are faced with. In the book Hiroko Tanaka undoubtedly is confronted with
Lifton’s stages of death imprint and contagion anxiety, which I will now both clarify further.
Firstly, Hiroko is marked by a death imprint. According to Lifton there are two significant
characteristics of the death imprint: it causes lasting feelings of anxiety when an individual finds
himself in a dangerous situation in which death was looming and the grotesqueness of the survivors’
impressions. Both these features are prominent in Hiroko’s traumatic experience of the nuclear
attack and its immediate aftermath. Shamsie describes Hiroko’s impression of the destruction of
Nagasaki, for instance, as a ''diamond cutting open the earth, falling through to hell'' (27).
Another grotesque image that is forever imprinted in Hiroko’s mind is the moment she saw her
father again after the explosion. Her father was transformed into an uncanny figure, completely
unrecognizable to Hiroko:
Hiroko looks down, sees a reptile crawling up the path towards her house. She understands now.
The earth has already opened up, disgorged hell. Her neighbour’s daughter is running towards
the reptile with a bamboo spear in hand – her grip incorrect. The reptile raises its head and the
girl drops the spear, calls out Hiroko’s father’s name. Why does she expect him to help? Hiroko
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wonders, as the girl keeps chanting, ‘Tanaka-san, Tanaka-san,’ hands gripping the sides of her
face as she stares at the reptile. (27)
As you can observe in the excerpt above Hiroko did not recognize her father when she first saw him
again after the blast. Instead she saw a “reptile crawling up the path towards her house”, not realizing
it is her father in his final moments. Due to her father’s transformation into a grotesque creature
Hiroko does not realize in time that she is staring at her father who is desperately trying to crawl
home. Later in the story Hiroko recounts to Ilse the sinister impression she had of her father when
she saw him for the first time after the explosion: “My father, Ilse, I saw him in the last seconds of
his life, and I thought he was something unhuman. He was covered in scales. No skin, no hair, no
clothes, just scales. No one, no one in the world should ever have to see their father covered in
scales” (99).
Additionally, in Hiroko’s case you can even claim that she is literally imprinted with death since the
detonation of the bomb has burned thee bird-shaped silhouettes across her back. In this manner, she
herself just like her father experienced a sense of “monstrous alteration of the body substance”
(Lifton 765). When she first notices the burns on her back she does not comprehend whether she is
touching silk or flesh:
She glides her hand over her shoulder, touches flesh where there should
be silk. Moves her hand further down her back, touches what is neither
flesh nor silk but both. She wonders if this has something to do with the
burning she felt as she fell. Now there is no feeling. She taps the place
that is neither flesh nor silk. There is no feeling at all. (26)
The first time Sajjad touched her burns he described it as a “monstrous alteration” of bodily
substance too: “He touched the grotesque darkness below her shoulder blade – tentatively, fearfully
– as though it were a relic of hell, clamping his teeth together against the outrage of the lumps his
fingers encountered” (91). For him the burnt silhouettes on her back felt like a “relic of hell”.
Unfortunately, the shapes of three birds are forever imprinted on Hiroko’s back. She thus “forever
carries a visual and sensory reminder to herself and others of the atom bomb inscribed on her body”
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(Duce 67). While she is not ashamed of the burns on her back, she does not like being reduced to a
hibakusha either. The birds on her back immediately make the link between Hiroko and the atomic
bomb apparent, which she perceives as reducing her humanity to the bomb:
“I don’t want to go back to Nagasaki. Or Japan. I don’t want to hide
these burns on my back, but I don’t want people to judge me by them either. Hibakusha
I hate that word. It reduces you to the bomb”(100).
Secondly, Hiroko’s trauma is also characterized by contagion anxiety. She is terrified of
contaminating the children she would attempt to bear with death, despite Sajjad’s gentle objections:
“after her miscarriage in 1948 Hiroko learnt fear in imagining what her radiation-exposed body
would do to any children she tried to bear, and nothing Sajjad could say would change her mind
about it” (133). Despite her fears of being contagious Hiroko finds herself pregnant of a son at the
age of 41. Luckily, her son Raza grows up to be a healthy, intelligent teenager, which proved her
fears of contagion to be incorrect. However, Raza too is shunned by his community because of his
and his mother’s connection to the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, even though he himself has never
set a foot in that city. The first time he faced discrimination based on his background happened after
he jokingly proposes to Fatima, a girl for whom he has romantic feelings. To his surprise, she replies
in a serious manner:
“Raza, my parents will never let me marry you,(...) It’s not about age. It’s your mother. Everyone
knows about your mother.”
“What about her?”
“Nagasaki. The bomb. No one will give their daughter to you in marriage unless they’re
desperate, Raza. You could be deformed. How do we know you’re not?”
Raza sat forward, gripping the phone tightly.
“Deformed? I’m not. Salma, your father is my doctor. I’m not deformed.”
“Maybe not in any way we can see. But there’s no guarantee. You might have
something you can pass on to your children. I’ve seen the pictures. Of babies born in Naga-
saki after the bomb.”
“I’ve never even been to Nagasaki. I was born twenty years after the bomb. Please.
You don’t want to talk to me any more, OK, say that. But don’t say this. Don’t say you think
I’m deformed.”
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“You need to know. This is how people think about you. Go to America, darling.” (189)
In this extract we read that contagion anxiety often is accompanied with discrimination towards the
hibakusha. Many cultures tend to isolate those who even have the slightest link with the atomic
bomb.
Multidirectional memory
Since we now have a deeper understanding of Hiroko’s traumatic experiences, I think it is also
productive to dwell on how Hiroko’s memory of Nagasaki makes it easier for her to envision the
disastrous consequences of a nuclear war and to see through the political discourse of countries that
use the “saving lives narrative” as a means to justify nuclearization. In addition, Hiroko’s
recollection of Nagasaki “has contributed to the articulation of other histories” (Rothberg 6). I
therefore think Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory is an appropriate tool to
explore the “dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of
remembrance” (11). Multidirectional memory stands in opposition to the model of competitive
memory. Central to the idea of competitive memory is the belief that the memory of a certain historic
event is in “a zero-sum game of competition with the memory of other histories” (9). However, we
see that Hiroko at times has been guilty of resorting to the conception of competitive memory. In
the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Hiroko and Ilse are visited by Ilse’s granddaughter Kim. When
Hiroko asks Kim what’s happening in the world today, Kim points out that the last fire relating to
the 9/11 attacks has almost burnt out. Hiroko, in turn, harshly relativizes the consequences of 9/11:
“What’s going on out in the world?”
“The last fire has almost burnt out.” Kim pointed in the direction of the looming emptiness outside
before coming to sit down on the sofa.
“That’s not the world, it’s just the neighbourhood,” Hiroko said sharply.
Kim’s eyebrows rose.
“Right,” she said, voice heavy with irony. “Just a neighbourhood fire.”
Hiroko raised a hand in apology.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.” (250)
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Here we notice Hiroko minimizing the importance of 9/11’s aftermath. For her news related to 9/11
cannot be classified under world news, but instead pertains to news about the neighbourhood. When
Kim ironically calls the fire “just a neighbourhood fire”, Hiroko immediately regrets what she
uttered. Ilse instantly defends Hiroko by saying: “Don’t tell her about fires burning out as though
that’s the world’s most significant event. She thinks Pakistan and India are about to launch
themselves into nuclear war” (251). By dismissing the consequences of 9/11 as less important than
the nuclear threat, Hiroko engages with the competitive memory model. She thus considers her
memory of Nagasaki’s annihilation and everything else to do with nuclear warfare as superior to
other types of terrorism. Adriana Kiczkowski argues that Hiroko’s reference of horror “is attached
to the nuclear bomb” and she continues that Hiroko “perceives any other type of event linked to
terror as being of lesser import than what could happen if, in fact, a nuclear war broke out, even a
lower intensity one” (131). This memory competition and emphasizing the singularity of a historic
event will not help us achieve anything. Instead we need multidirectional memory that encourages
us to think beyond any borders or divisions in order to form a bridge between different cultures,
places and times. Fortunately, Hiroko quickly learns that multidirectional memory is a more
productive model. When she encounters a poster of a young man who has been missing since 9/11,
it triggers a memory of Nagasaki and subsequently invokes feelings of solidarity with the man:
She slowed and looked at the faded poster pasted on to the heavily graffitied wall of a loft
building. It consisted of a picture of a young man and the words: MISSING SINCE 9/11. IF YOU
HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT LUIS RIVERA PLEASE CALL . . .
Hiroko thought of the train station at Nagasaki, the day Yoshi had taken her to Tokyo. The walls
plastered with signs asking for news of missing people. She stepped closer to take in the smile of
Luis Rivera, its unfettered optimism. In moments such as these it seemed entirely wrong to feel
oneself living in a different history to the people of this city. (274)
The poster of Luis Rivera triggered the recollection of the train station at Nagasaki since the walls
of the Nagasaki station were also covered with missing person signs. After the memory of the
Nagasaki station, Hiroko cannot help but feel solidarity and empathy with the victims of the 9/11
terrorist attacks. This excerpt exemplifies the positive implications of the multidirectional memory
model. The interconnectedness between the memory of the posters in Nagasaki and the poster of
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Luis Rivera in America has induced a new form of solidarity between a hibakusha and a 9/11 victim,
which proves the following claim by Rothberg to be true: “when the productive, intercultural
dynamic of multidirectional memory is explicitly claimed (...) it has the potential to create new
forms of solidarity and new visions of justice” (5).
In the story Hiroko tries her best to form bridges between different worlds. She believes that she
“was the one to show both Sajjad and the Burtons that there was no need to imagine such walls
between their worlds” and further admits that “Konrad had been right to say barriers were made of
metal that could turn fluid when touched simultaneously by people on either side” (82).
In addition, the memory of Nagasaki helps Hiroko to imagine the potential dangers nuclear war can
provoke. Consequently, her fear of the nuclear threat stimulated her to move to New York, a place
where she finally feels at ease again:
It would be overstating things to say this felt like peace; but at least it felt like space in which to
exhale. For the first time in over a month there seemed a movement away from, rather than
towards, nuclear war and Hiroko felt a swoop of affection towards everything in the world – from
New York and its inhabitants to a dictator half a world away. (290)
To Hiroko the legacy of the atomic bombings became increasingly noticeable in Pakistan, the
country she called home for decades, because Pakistan and India are continuously threatening each
other with starting a nuclear war. In this manner Rosalyn Deutsche was right to suggest in
Hiroshima after Iraq that “there is a continuity between the atomic bombing and the current situation
of war” (21). As nuclear tensions between the two nations arises, Hiroko is repeatedly reminded of
the devastating outcomes that a potential nuclear war can precipitate.
Furthermore, Hiroko’s recollection of the bombing of Nagasaki makes sure that she will always be
concerned about the nuclear threat. She regularly voices her worries to others, including Harry:
“You must still have friends in the CIA.” The question tumbled out of her mouth.
“Everyone’s doing their best to make sure both sides back down, Hiroko,” he said, understanding
precisely why she had asked the question.
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It was an answer she trusted more than any assurance that there wouldn’t be nuclear war.
Additionally, since Hiroko has become an advocate of multidirectional memory, she strongly
opposes those who are guilty of employing the notion of competitive memory. When Kim suggests
that it is normal for Hiroko to place a heavier emphasis on the destruction of Nagasaki than other
events because Hiroko has survived the atomic bombing (thus engaging with competitive memory),
Hiroko is enraged:
‘But you see, then I’d read the history books. Truman, Churchill, Stalin, the Emperor. My stories
seemed so small, so tiny a fragment in the big picture. Even Nagasaki – seventy-five thousand
dead; it’s just a fraction of the seventy-two million who died in the war. A tiny fraction. Just over
.001 per cent. Why all this fuss about .001 per cent?’
‘You lived it,’ Kim said. ‘Your father died in it. Your fiancé died in it. There’s no shame in
putting all the weight in the world on that.’
It was the wrong answer.
Hiroko turned to her, face bright with anger.
‘Is that why? That’s why Nagasaki was such a monstrous crime? Because it happened to me?’
(293-4)
Although Hiroko has suffered the bombing of Nagasaki herself, she refuses to consider the nuclear
attack as unique and more monstrous than other war crimes just because it happened to her. Instead
she looks at the bigger picture, “to the seventy-two million who died in the war”. In rejecting the
competitive memory model Hiroko criticizes the dominant American discourse of the “saving lives
narrative” in which the United States justified the use of the atomic bombs by claiming that in
dropping the atomic bombs more lives are saved than when the war would have continued.
Nowadays, we can see the “saving lives narrative” being echoed in the war-on-terror narrative first
constructed by President Bush’s administration, which is now taken over by the general American
public. In the following extract, for instance, we witness Hiroko and Kim in a fight after Kim has
reported Abdullah to the police on the basis of a five-minute conversation. Kim, in turn, defends
herself by stating she trusted her training:
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“I trusted my training. Don’t you understand? If you suspect a threat you can’t just ignore it
because you wish – and I really really wish this – you lived in a world where all suspicion of
Muslims is just prejudice, nothing more.”
“And there it is,” said Hiroko, finally turning to look at her.
“No, there it is not. How can you? Over three years we’ve been constant in each other’s lives,
and you think I’m a bigot? I’m sorry, but it wasn’t Buddhists flying those planes, there is no video
footage of Jews celebrating the deaths of three thousand Americans, it wasn’t a Catholic who
shot my father. You think it makes me a bigot to recognise this?” (361)
In this example we found that Kim has reported Abdullah because she thought of him as a threat to
her and the United States. However, Hiroko disagrees and does not understand how she is able to
determine this threat in the course of five minutes. According to Hiroko, Kim sacrificed the life of
an Afghan for the purpose of national safety for America:
“When Konrad first heard of the concentration camps he said you have to deny people their
humanity in order to decimate them. You don’t.”
(...)
“You just have to put them in a little corner of the big picture. In the big picture of the Second
World War, what was seventy-five thousand more Japanese dead? Acceptable, that’s what it was.
In the big picture of threats to America, what is one Afghan? Expendable. Maybe he’s guilty,
maybe not. Why risk it? Kim, you are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now,
because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments
drop a second nuclear bomb.’ (362)
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V. Conclusion
In this dissertation I conducted a literary analysis of four novels that each challenges America’s
national myth of triumph. The first two novels When the Emperor was Divine and No-No Boy were
two great examples of Japanese American writers who attempt to regain control of the internment
camp narrative. Julie Otsuka and John Okada offered us a counter-narrative in which the suffering
of the imprisoned Japanese Americans was the main focus, which has consequently supplemented
our existing view on the Japanese American conflict. In addition, In the Autumn Wind and Burnt
Shadows were primarily concerned with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
respectively. Via these last two novels we as readers were given the opportunity to place ourselves
in the position of a hibakusha and thus share their suffering in solidarity.
From the literary discussions of the internment camp novels, what became apparent is the specific
nature of the trauma experienced by the Japanese American prisoners and the confusing effects their
trauma had on their conception of identity. During and after the Second World War Japanese
American citizens found themselves in a precarious situation, feeling neither Japanese nor
American. Moreover, the analyses of the atomic bomb stories showed us how to understand the
trauma of the hibakusha and the importance of making sure such an atrocious crime never happens
again.
I firmly believe analyzing literature about the Japanese American internment camps and the atomic
bombings can enlarge our assumptions about these conflicts and provide us with a more complete
understanding of the human cost of such actions undertaken by a government. Consequently, fiction
about the Japanese American relocation camps and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
can be used as a platform of resistance by challenging the dominant “saving lives narrative”.
Whereas politicians, historians and reporters emphasize the “factual truth”, I believe just like Kamila
Shamsie that fiction is more truthful than non-fiction because of its potential to communicate
characters’ inner states and connect with people on a personal level. In More Honest than the Facts,
an article Shamsie wrote for The Guardian she explains:
Fiction writers go where news reporters and historians dare not tread: into characters’ heads, into
the dreams they lose at the moment of waking, into the memories forgotten, the fears never
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articulated even to themselves. We do all this, even while making stuff up or distorting and
embellishing “what really happened” for the sake of a dramatic arc; and, in so doing, we claim
our ability to convey emotional truths, more revelatory about a time and place than any series of
facts. (30)
I am convinced that fictional narratives are able to construct a counter-narrative that can be spread
among the Western population, correcting the one-sided accounts of the American regime. When
this counter-narrative reaches the general public people will discover there are more sides to the
conflicts than they were given by the government, which will hopefully, in turn, encourage America
to finally take up its responsibility. I therefore also stimulate others to engage with counter-
narratives concerning other problematic actions of the United States in the future.
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VI. Works Cited
Primary sources:
Okada, John. No-No Boy. University of Washington Press, 2014.
Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor was Divine. Anchor. 2003.
Shamsie, Kamila. Burnt Shadows. Bloomsbury. 2009.
Stroup, Dorothy. In the Autumn Wind. Scribner, 1987.
Secondary sources:
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Chapman, Jane L, et al. Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.
Chun, Fu. “Nagasaki and Cosmopolitanism in Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows.” Dissertation,
Kobe University, 2013.
Deutsche, Rosalyn. Hiroshima after Iraq. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Duce, C.L. “IN LOVE AND WAR: THE POLITICS OF ROMANCE IN FOUR 21ST-
CENTURY PAKISTANI NOVELS.” Dissertation, University of Alberta, 2006.
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Hatamiya, Leslie. Righting a Wrong. Japanese Americans and the Passage of the Civil Liberties
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Jackson, Richard. (Re)constructing Cultures of Violence and Peace. Rodopi, 2004.
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Perlman, Michael. Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima. State University of New
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Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of
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Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt. Cambridge University Press, 1996
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Williams, J.L.J. “Fifty Years of our Whole Voice: An Examination of the History and Culture
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