Denial of History
What were the social factors that contributed to her solitude during the post-war period? First, Japan was devastated by the war and by her defeat and few people cared about the victim-survivors. Second, SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers), i. e. the U. S. occupation forces, imposed press censorship and the Press Code of September 1945 prohibited "false or destructive criticism of the Allied Powers...and...of the Allied Forces of Occupation...which might invite mistrust or resentment of those troops." This included all the information about the atomic bombing. As a result, most of the reports on the bombing, including those of the medical research, disappeared from the Japanese press, and for a long time the Japanese were not informed about what really happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Third, international factors exacerbated this situation. As P. M. S. Blackett, Britain's Nobel laureate physicist, pointed out, the Bomb was dropped primarily for political rather than for military reasons: it served as a device for the United States to hold the vantage point in the coming cold war with the Soviets. Therefore, all the reports on the bombing, particularly the real picture of the damage. were regarded as detrimental to the United States and were banned until the Soviets' acquisition of their own atomic bomb was disclosed in 1949.
Thus Japanese people were deprived of their own history. The survivors remained in solitude. It was only after Japan regained her independence through the San Francisco Peace Treaty coupled with the Mutual Security Treaty with the United States in 1952 that the Japanese took history back into their own hands—their very experience of the atomic bombing which has a message for the future. It took another kind of victim of the nuclear weapons, however, to awaken the nation's consciousness.
On March 1, 1954, the United States conducted an H-bomb test at the Bikini Atoll in her U. N. Trust Territory of Micronesia in the Pacific. Heavy radioactive fall-out was suffered by not only the native people in the area but also by a Japanese tuna fishing boat, the 5th Lucky Dragon (Fukuryū-maru). A radio operator eventually died of radiation. This incident reminded the Japanese people of the suffering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and they started to form rapidly a broad national peace campaign against nuclear weapons and war.
In August 1955 the First World Conference Against A- and H-Bombs was held in Hiroshima and the next year saw the Second Conference in Nagasaki. Since then the two cities have been known not only as the symbol of the atomic suffering, but also as the moral watch tower to restrain the nuclear powers from loosening their nuclear arsenals. The following poem was composed by Sadako Kurihara, a housewife and also a survivor, and represents a lasting and honest desire of the Japanese people that then permeated the nation: