A Maiden’s Smile and United Guilt

By 1955, the world had gone through intensive cultural and societal changes from the competing victors of World War II. Although different initiatives had proven beneficial in rebuilding civilization through economic aid, the psychological toll of the war was still ever-present amongst the differing factions of the Postwar Era. The different strategies employed to help recreate the old world into the new have been digested differently by varying scholars, and one such strategy has had significant impact on scholarly interpretation: the “Hiroshima Maidens.” In “Replaceable You: Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens,” David Serlin captures the reasoning behind the motives of medically transforming young, single, women that had suffered physical deformities by the atomic explosion in Hiroshima through plastic surgery. Although his research is promising by shedding light on the project, Amanda Jane Graham’s “Re-Covering the Hiroshima Maidens,” does more in addressing the actual failure of the medical operations to benefit the psychological scars of the “Hiroshima Maidens.” David Serlin focuses on the overwhelming priority for economic and cultural change, while examining less the difficulties of overcoming psychological trauma, which allows an image of success without confronting psychoanalytic problems associated with the survivors of the atomic bomb. Graham focuses much of her attention on the “Maidens” themselves, and makes known the self-serving interest of the United States government and of Norman Cousins. Graham also argues that the “Hiroshima Maidens” were an absolute failure of the United States to deal with Japanese trauma, in general. (Graham p.121) Instead, she accounts that attempting to heal psychological trauma through “forgetting or erasing is ultimately futile,” as it does nothing to help the process of confronting such a trauma. (Graham p.124)

Serlin instead defends the project, viewing it as a tool to help promote optimism in both the Japanese and American processes employed to rebuild and democratize Japan. In a way, Serlin presents the “Hiroshima Maidens” as being manipulated into becoming nationalist propaganda, but the efforts were a necessary evil in moving forward from the devastation of the war. (Serlin p.67) Both scholars create a certain image of whether or not the medical transformation of the “Hiroshima Maidens” was a success for the Japanese reconstruction. Serlin approaches the medical efforts of the “Hiroshima Maidens” through somewhat a historical naivete, presenting Norman Cousins more so as an altruistic personality. Graham, however, denotes Cousins as ambitious and seeking to capitalize on such an opportunity, and believes that he aided the U.S. State Department by complying with censorship orders to keep postwar Westerners at ease. (Graham p.122) Even though Serlin’s research focuses on the physical rehabilitation and urban development as ways to help alleviate pain on the surface, he does little to highlight the psychological effects the war had on the “Hiroshima Maidens,” which does give the program a resemblance of success. I must agree with Graham, whose research creates an effective argument against the initiative, by presenting the “Hiroshima Maidens” for what they were: a representation of how the United States has tried to control cultural and international opinions in a way to defend against collective guilt or negative appearances. References: Gemi-Iordanou, E., & Graham, A. J. (2014). 8. Re-Covering the Hiroshima Maidens. In Medicine, healing and performance (pp. 120–135). essay, Oxbow Books. Jacobs, R. (2010). Figure 3. Shigeko Niimoto’s photographs are labelled ‘horror’ and ‘triumph’ in Time magazine, 10 December 1956, p. 76. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue24/jacobs.htm. Serlin, D. (2004). Two: Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens. In Replaceable you: Engineering the body in postwar America (pp. 57–110). essay, University of Chicago Press.