World War II set the stage for a brand new view on technology and the methods of warfare. As the war waged on the United States developed nuclear technology which caused catastrophic destruction. The U.S. caused waves of destruction across Japan by dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This propelled the power of the U.S. to the top as it left parts of Japan in ruins, taking lives and the livelihoods of people with it. Some of these individuals affected were referred to as the ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ or the ‘Keloid Girls’.
These women were left scarred by the bombings both physically and mentally and had to deal with their families hiding them because of their disfigurements. They had to live their lives with both mental and physical scars that the other citizens of Japan were ashamed of. In an article by David Serlin, he writes that some of these women were taken to the U.S. where they received plastic surgery in order to repair them back to the state that they once were in. He also states that “the emphasis on plastic surgery as a tool of reconstruction should not be surprising” (p. 60), this leads to his further analysis saying that this reconstruction of a human being involved in this tragedy translated to the art form of rebuilding a place that once was. This is a sense is using human mutilation to rebirth as a metaphor for the destruction and reconstruction of places all around the world, but specifically Japan after the bombings.
This image shows some of these ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ and how their appearance was altered due to plastic surgery, to much of a success these women were able to return to a sort of normalcy while reinforcing the metaphors of reconstruction between aesthetics and memory.
‘Hiroshima A-Bomb Survivors Face Brighter Future’. Source: AP Wire 9 May 1955.
This image is intriguing to me. When I was doing searches of the Hiroshima Maidens, the Google Image results did not produce many images that depicted the women before they had gone through the entirety of their facial reconstruction. Of course, I wouldn’t say that there were no pictures of the women before plastic surgery, but the choices were limited. This seemed to me to represent some kind of representation of a lasting dedication to playing off the horrors of the atomic bomb. It seems as though our country hasn’t fully confronted its past in this regard. Of course, I could just be reading a lot into this and there is really nothing to the first images that I found being ones of the post-surgery women.
I like how you used the metaphor showing the relation between the reconstruction of the women and the reconstruction of the city itself. I didn’t see the connection before reading that and I completely agree with it.
I believe the woman with the eyepatch is Mitsuko Kuramoto, the member of the group who wore an eyepatch not to obscure an extraordinary deformity, but simply to protect her damaged eyelid from exposure. She was the subject of rumor when the Hiroshima Maidens came to America as people assumed there was a grotesque injury underneath the eyepatch. As much could be expected though, because these women were most Americans’ first exposure to the radiation-burned victims of the atomic bombs.