Cultural Crossroads

Cover of “Eye of the Beholder” from Rod Sterling’s TV series The Twilight Zone. Link to full episode. 

In 1960 an episode of Rod Sterling’s TV series, The Twilight Zone, was broadcasted on national television. The episode titled, ” The Eye of the Beholder” depicted a women, with a presumed severe facial disfigurement, transformed into a beautiful, young blonde. The episode toys with the notion of American beauty. The episode’s release was well timed to the reconstructive surgery of twenty-five victims of the atomic  bombing of Hiroshima. The “Hiroshima Maidens”, as the media called them, traveled from Japan to NYC in order to receive reconstructive plastic surgery for their severe scars and disfigurements.

The Hiroshima Maidens traveled from Hiroshima to NYC to receive free plastic surgery at Mount Sinai hospital. The purpose of the trip was to help the women rebuild their lives. Many of the women had been hidden by their families because their families were ashamed of their scars and disfigurements. The goal of offering reconstructive surgeries to these Japanese women was to help them rehabilitate to society. However, many accused the surgeons of having their own self interest at heart. Furthermore, the Maidens were not always well received when they returned home to Japan. David Serlin illustrates this in his article, Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens. Serlin writes; “some [Japanese] saw the Maidens as victims of Cold War propaganda, who walked down the runway being visible evidence of attempts by American surgeons hide the pressing issue of nuclear weapon testing” (105). There was extreme controversy over the Maidens coming to american, much of which was backed in long withstanding cultural misunderstandings.

Many parallels can be drawn between the symbolism of the Maidens reconstruction and the architectural reconstruction of Hiroshima. Serlin eloquently draws on this parallelism writing, ” If the Marshall Plan served as a paradigm of foreign policy during the early years of the Cold War, the same could also be said of the Hiroshima Maidens before their arrival in the United States” (77). This argument can be used against the surgeons. Stating that the Maidens were not a charity case, but rather a political symbolism at the start of the Cold War era. There was also fears within the United States that the physical spectacle of the Maidens would spur grassroots antinuclear protests (Sterlin pg.74-75). Four members of the Northern California Peace Council confirmed the State Department’s fear. The NCPC used the arrivial of the Maidens in San Francisco to protest the detonation of nuclear weapons in the pacific (Sterlin pg. 78). Sterlin describes the effect of the protesters as turning the arrival into a sour mode. This illustrates Sterlin’s argument that the aid given to the Maidens was based on political best interest.

Compared to Sterlin’s narrative approach of the Japan-US cultural relations, Chizuko Saito explored an ethnographic study of nine Japanese woman who relocated to the US post war. In his article, “Bereavement and Meaning Reconstruction among Japanese Immigrant Widows: Living with Grief in a Place of Marginality and Liminality“, Saito follows the life of nine Japanese women in order to better understand how their cultural context shapes their lives. The nine woman were all born in Japan between 1920 and 1943, then moved to the US following the war. Seven married white men, while two married Japanese-Americans (Saito pg. 41) in the United States. Saito describes a common theme of the women as, “historically, the women in this study were born before WWII in Japan and were affected by the societal confusion of the aftermath of the war” (44). This same argument can be said for the Hiroshima Maidens discussed in Sterlin’s Article. Hiroshima was left in ruins and the debate over how to rebuild the city and it’s people affected the Maidens.

Despite the efforts to help the Hiroshima Maidens, they were not always well received in the United States or in Japan. In the US many people accused them of receiving cosmetic rather than reconstructive surgery. The surgeons worked hard to disprove this myth, but still racial undertones could be seen (Sterlin pg. 96-97). Saito also touches upon this issue; “As Japanese women who were considered aliens in America, who were married to men who were considered aliens in Japan, and who did not share the Japanese American experiences in the United States during World War II, their histories have contained far too many complicated and sensitive issues, culturally and politically, to identify their life experiences with those of either the majority of Americans or Japanese nationals” (52). The struggle to find a national identity and a sense of purpose is a theme in both the articles.

Both Saito and Sterlin evaluate the plight of Japanese women post war. However, they take different approaches in doing so. Saito conducted a case study, while Sterlin told a narrative of the Hiroshima Maidens. One common theme between the two articles was the notion that Japanese women post war, regardless of physical appears, did not have a place in either Japan or in America. The reconstruction of Japanese lives post war mimics the reconstruction of Japanese cities post war. Often the two processes lacked a unified national guidance in a nation struggling to find it’s identity. At the end of World War II and following the war, Japan found itself at the intersection of long cultural traditions and a new desire to modernize and westernize.

Link to Photo: http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0337/8301/products/tombeholder1.jpg?v=1412287438

Sterlin Article:https://canvas.vt.edu/courses/30554/files/1452721/download?wrap=1

Saito Article: http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=dc7f00be-5e3c-4f62-ae55-4ba6847aa418%40sessionmgr4007&vid=0&hid=4202