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Japan
Organized Panel Session
Until the 1990s, only a handful of either Japanese or American researchers tackled the psychological consequences of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The failure of the medical establishment in both countries to tackle psychological issues was to a large extent the result of the systematic denial of the long-term psychological effects of the nuclear bomb by the American government and the complicity of the majority of American psychiatrists who worked on the topic with nuclear and civil defense funding. Coupled with Japanese psychiatrists’ failure to research the issue, this resulted in a complete lack of psychiatric care for survivors (hibakusha). Even after the occupation ended, Japanese psychiatrists mounted no campaign to fight for their patients’ rights, and conducted no large-scale research until the 1990s. Japanese psychiatry’s reluctance to examine the trauma of the A-bomb, this paper argues, was the result of both long-standing aversion to war-related injuries and postwar entanglement with American research. Focusing on the work of Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-based psychiatrists on one hand and American researchers on Hiroshima on the other, this paper will examine how Cold War politics and the difficulty of studying the effects of the atomic bombs led to the long-term denial of care for survivors.
Ran Zwigenberg
Pennsylvania State University