Laura Alcaine Bonasa
Japan lost the war in August 1945, and in the decades that followed it did something no other defeated empire of the twentieth century managed quite so successfully: it turned itself into the pacifist nation par excellence. This was not a spontaneous transformation born of shame or collective repentance. It was a deliberate political and ideological construction, and at the center of it stands one very specific figure: the hibakusha, the survivor of the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
A silence that lasted four years
Before Japan could turn its survivors into heroes, it first had to make them disappear. With the implementation of the Press Code in September 1945, the U.S. occupation authorities banned the publication of any material related to atomic damage, the effects of radiation, or the testimonies of survivors. As John Dower documents in Embracing Defeat (1999), the occupation was not merely a military presence, but a project of total control over public discourse: audiovisual materials were confiscated, medical research was suppressed, and the voices of those who had survived the greatest nuclear attack in history were silenced. In practice, the hibakusha were made invisible.
Added to this institutional silencing was the social stigma within Japan itself, where survivors were associated with illness and death. When censorship was lifted in 1949, the testimonies that finally emerged were not direct and immediate, but had been shaped by years of suppression and political necessity. The institutional definition of the hibakusha, anchored in medical and bureaucratic rather than political categories, allowed the Japanese state to recognize the survivors’ suffering without assuming direct responsibility: they were recognized as patients, not as victims of a war crime.
From marginalized survivors to national heroes
The most precise theoretical framework for understanding what came next is provided by James J. Orr in The Victim as Hero (2001). Orr argues that the hibakusha were progressively transformed from marginalized survivors into symbolic heroes: figures who, by having endured the worst of modern warfare, acquired a moral authority that transcended ordinary politics. This transformation was not innocent: it allowed Japan to reposition itself in the international order not as an imperial aggressor, but as the primary victim of nuclear violence. The narrative of yuiitsu no hibakukoku (the only country to have suffered atomic bombings) became a cornerstone of Japanese diplomacy, used to justify pacifism, oppose nuclear proliferation, and, crucially, obscure Japan’s own imperial violence in Asia.
This «mythology of victimhood» was not manufactured by a single actor: it was assembled over decades through the convergence of disparate interests. The Japanese left used the hibakusha to oppose rearmament and reinforce the pacifist interpretation of Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution. The conservative sector employed them to avoid confronting the country’s imperialist past. And the United States, which had initially suppressed the testimonies, ultimately benefited from a Japan that defined itself through suffering rather than through anger. The victim-as-hero discourse was, in that sense, politically ambiguous: available to opposing factions for opposing purposes.
A peace written by the country that dropped the bombs
The political axis of this pacifist identity was Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution, drafted under U.S. supervision, which committed Japan to the permanent renunciation of war and prohibited the maintenance of armed forces. This article gave legal form to the moral testimony of the hibakusha: while the survivors offered the human evidence of why war must never be repeated, Article 9 codified that testimony into the structure of the State. But the contradiction was evident: the very constitution that proclaimed pacifism had been written by the occupying power that had dropped the bombs. And the «peace» it enshrined was not guaranteed by Japan’s own renunciation of force, but by the U.S. military umbrella: the 1951 Security Treaty allowed American military bases to remain on Japanese soil. Japan was pacifist, in other words, because the United States had agreed to be militaristic on its behalf.
Legitimizing the hibakusha as social heroes also required sustained cultural work. Cinema played a fundamental role in the early postwar decades, when it was the dominant mass medium in Japan: films such as Children of Hiroshima (1952), by Kaneto Shindō, or Black Rain (1989), by Shōhei Imamura, presented the survivors’ stories with depth and moral weight, humanizing figures who had been stigmatized and silenced. The regional press, especially Hiroshima’s Chūgoku Shimbun, published medical analyses and ethical reflections that gave voice to the survivors and positioned them as citizens with dignity and rights. Literature, poetry, and manga, especially Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, extended this legitimation to new generations and to the international stage. What all these cultural forms achieved, as Orr describes, was the conversion of private trauma into a public symbol.
The construction of Japan as a pacifist nation through the figure of the hibakusha reveals something uncomfortable: national identities are not discovered, they are manufactured. They are assembled from the materials at hand, by actors with competing interests, stabilized through institutional and cultural repetition, and rendered invisible as constructions precisely because of their own success. The hibakusha did not simply represent Japan’s victimhood; they made it legible, morally coherent, and politically useful. And in doing so, they helped Japan evade a full reckoning with its own imperial past: a peace built upon their suffering, real yet selective, which remembered Hiroshima and forgot Nanjing.
Este artículo se incluye dentro de la Cátedra Jean Monnet «European Union’s external relations and Spanish Foreign Policy».
