In early August, 1945, the United States deployed two nuclear bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all but obliterating the cities and large parts of their populations, with survivors scarred mentally, emotionally, and physically for the rest of their lives. While the debate about the deployment of nuclear weapons is somewhat complex and still very active in the present day, with seventy years of distance between today’s society and the society of World War Two, the debate began sparking just a few years after the war ended, particularly after the Russians – at that time, the Soviet Union – began testing its own atomic warheads. Much of this debate was related to the morality of the bombs’ use in the war, and still it today.
Interestingly, in the mid-1950s, a group called the Hiroshima Maidens, which was a support group for female survivors of the Hiroshima bombing, and part of a project to help all survivors of Hiroshima, were brought to the US for reconstructive plastic surgery. They were guided by a Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto (pictured below), who went onto a US television program to be the main guest, discussing the Reverend’s life before, during, and after the war, even including the co-pilot of the bomber Enola Gay, which dropped the nuclear bomb “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. Indeed, a great deal of media attention was paid to the Hiroshima Maidens and the work the United States was doing to help them recover, and, by extension, the rest of Japan through other means. It is worth noting that the United States had occupied Japan after World War Two, until a few years before the Hiroshima Maidens were brought to the US for their plastic surgeries.
It is also worth noting that with the end of the US occupation of Japan, several treaties were signed, including the first version of the treaty that would start the US-Japanese alliance that prevails to the present day, and that acts such as helping female survivors of Hiroshima return to the society that had outcast them would lend well to strengthening that treaty in the political and social realms. It would also grant the United States a foothold in the argument of the morality of using the atomic bombs in 1945; yes, the US had dropped these devastating warheads, but now that same US is helping the survivors recover and re-enter their society, while using them as a pointed example of what happens to people when atomic weaponry is deployed in warfare, something that the Soviet Union may or may not have taken to heart during the Cold War. Ultimately, the endeavors and hardships of the Hiroshima Maidens, one could argue, were both caused and resolved by the United States: the former an unfortunate, unintended consequence of total warfare, while the latter was intentionally done out of the charity of the United States and their good will towards their new ally of Japan.
