3 - Reconnecting Families

Summary

Chapter 3 continues to tell a cultural history of the nuclear destruction by examining how US survivors reconnected with their families in the United States in the two decades after the war, often through relatives and friends stationed in Japan as part of the American occupation force, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC; a research institute dedicated to the study of radiation effects on humans), or the US Army at war in Korea. I illuminate how these US institutions in Japan not only offered US survivors employment opportunities (frequently as translators), but also became a major obstacle to quietly hiding and healing from the bomb’s effect. The ABCC was particularly problematic in this regard, because scientists treated all survivors as Japanese whose bodies victorious Americans were entitled to examine, when in fact American survivors were trying to reestablish their US citizenship. American medical scientists’ understanding of survivors disrupted US survivors’ self-perception, causing a cleavage that was to persist in the nuclear medicine for years to come.