After World War Two, the entire world was zooming in different directions. Millions of people were still suffering. Millions of other people were celebrating. And millions of people were dead due to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soldiers returned home suffering from physical injuries, and mental ones, injuries that couldn’t be seen but that were felt in more ways than just one.
In Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens, David Selins displays his argument that the United States wanted one thing: to erase the irreversible thing that they had done to Japan, killed and injured millions of its people. Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto thought that one way to do this would be to bring 25 Japanese Women to America to receive plastic surgery on the injuries and burns that they had received due to the Atomic Bomb. These women were shunned and hid by their families due to shame. The idea of having a disfigured woman was seen as a level of class and so those families with injured women kept them hidden from view. Selins says, “we tried to make up for our Atomic Bombs y treating and petting Japanese women whom we disfigured or incapacitated” (pg. 62) It was as though fixing these women would fix the damage that we had done to a country that would take decades to repair.
On a television program, This is Your Life, the girls are featured and Reverened Tanimoto recalls his memories of the event. He is then introduced to one of the pilots who dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima. Robert Lewis, on the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima explains to viewers and Tanimoto his memories of the event, and recalls saying, “My God, what have we done?” a chilling statement to hear after the horrendous events that occurred early that morning. Not just television programs, but newspapers and many other forms of media recording their recovery followed the Maidens.
The Hiroshima Maidens were just a few of the people displaced and destroyed as a result of this Atomic Bomb, and Selins gives us a little peek into what was done to try and recover America’s actions. According to Hiroshima Maidens by Norman Cousins, the women bonded over a “fear of being seen in public” (pg. 2) Cousins also includes that the Japanese media was very responsive although the questions were often “severe” and they often asked “why were we doing this anyways” (pg. 4)
Plastic surgery may have seemed like it was a very minor and simple way to try and fix what we had done, but even though it wasn’t many people that were helped, Cousins included a quote in his article where the girls were squealing at their passport and immigration photos, saying that “It is someone else, they will never let me in again” (pg. 18) Cousins and Selins both attempt and successfully explain that the United States were hopeful that something as little and minor as plastic surgery would help these girls and help our relationship with Japan.
David Serlin, “Reconstructing the Hiroshima Maidens,” Replaceable you: engineering the body in postwar America (2004).
Norman Cousins, “Hiroshima Maidens”
I like your mention of the This is Your Life segment. That for me made it seem as though this whole process of bring the girls over was a “feel good for us” move by America. Your mention of the Cousins article here and in class also offered a very good secondary viewpoint on the whole situation.
I like how you talked about This is Your Life in your post because it helps connect us as historians in the 21st century to the way that the public saw it in the mid-20th century. I believe in was incredibly naive on the part of the United States to think that they could fix what had been done in Japan with plastic surgery and makeup.