Ban the Bombast

In May of 1955, a U.S. army plane delivered to the United States 25 young Japanese women who had been disfigured by their proximity to the explosion that levelled Hiroshima a decade earlier.

The American press dubbed them “the Hiroshima maidens.” The hands and arms they had raised to shield their eyes from the flash brighter than a thousand suns were, for most of them, deformed and scarred along with their faces. Those who had keloids, the thick scar tissue to which burned Asian skin seems particularly prone, were often sequestered by their families; such girls were not considered marriageable since people feared they could not produce normal children.

Their pitiable condition had caught the attention of an American-trained Methodist minister, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who organized what today would be called a support group for them at his church in Hiroshima. He wrote to his American friend the Reverend Marvin Green, who found influential backers for the idea of bringing the scarred women to New York for plastic surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital.

The project’s chief fundraiser and organizer was Norman Cousins, editor of the now defunct Saturday Review. Cousins argued that it was immoral for the U.S. to set up the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission to measure and record the health status of survivors while withholding medical care.

Radiance, by Vancouver writer Shaena Lambert, draws heavily on two books: The Hiroshima Maidens by Rodney Barker, which recounts these events, and Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in Life, the first study of the psychology of bomb survivors. In Radiance, Cousins becomes Dean Achity, founding editor of the Sunday Review. Lambert describes him as a man used to being treated like royalty.

“He certainly looked aristocratic,” she writes, “with his high polished forehead and intelligent, long-fingered hands (saved from being too feminine by the hairs above each knuckle) … Up close he smelled warmly and pleasantly of cherry pipe tobacco.”

One of Achity’s columnists on the Sunday Review is the manipulative upper-crust divorcée Irene Day, an organizer of the project to select and bring one young woman—Keiko Kitigawa—to New York. It so happens that the narcissistic, publicity-seeking plastic surgeon Dr. Carney (based on Dr. William Hitzig), who is to perform the series of operations on Keiko’s face, is Irene’s lover.

Lambert pushes back her story to 1952 to make it coincide with the first testing of the hydrogen bomb, 300 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Her supporting cast of American activists agitate for a test-ban treaty and their interest in Keiko is chiefly as a poster child for their cause. They need her to give interviews and attend rallies.

Keiko Kitigawa seems to have little difficulty with occidental culture, easily adjusting to American food, beds and bathing habits. (In striking contrast to the historical Hiroshima maidens, who, according to Barker, spoke no English and had to learn “how to sit in chairs rather than Japanese fashion on a floor mat, and how to eat with a knife and fork instead of chopsticks. They learned that Americans would just as soon stand under a shower as soak themselves in a tub.”) Flawless English comes trippingly off Keiko’s tongue. Yet much to the disappointment of the Hiroshima Project committee, Keiko is tongue-tied when she is asked about the events of August 6, 1945. She claims she can’t remember where she was when the bomb exploded, killing her mother and beloved grandfather.

Keiko’s beauty is marred by a scar resembling the shape of South America on one side of her face. Behind her ear is a thick keloid. Nevertheless, she attracts the patient devotion of Tom, a young news photographer and occasional taxi driver who sends her long letters, chocolates and a gold watch. Irene Day recruits her old school friend Daisy Lawrence, a suburban housewife who longs for a child, to play host to the teenage Keiko. Daisy’s eccentric husband, Walter, is a writer of radio serials with a secret communist past that could get him called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, barring his future employment. Walter becomes a sort of father figure to the Japanese girl.

Keiko tries Daisy and Walter’s patience sorely. She takes things that are not hers, tells small lies and, in the end, possibly without knowing what she is doing, performs a stunning act of betrayal that leads to Walter being sentenced by the HUAC.

Irene pressures Daisy to worm Keiko’s story out of her. When Keiko finally tells Daisy about what she had seen and reveals the depths of her survivor’s guilt, Daisy realizes what the telling has cost the girl and she becomes determined to protect Keiko from being exploited by the committee. Gradually, Lambert’s purpose becomes clear: she is less interested in nuclear issues or Hiroshima survivors than in the murky motives of people pushing political causes. Her portraits of the ban-the-bombers are acidic. (This is intriguing, since Lambert herself was active in the anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s, opposing the weaponization of space.) Daisy and Walter—modest, self-aware people who do not try to set the world on fire—become the book’s unexpected heroes. Daisy loses touch with Keiko after she is abruptly yanked from her care, never to know what finally happened to her.

Radiance recreates an optimistic suburban America of casseroles, war vets, automats and do-gooders in the McCarthy era. But it is a roman à clef with too much of the research showing, like a crinoline peeking out from beneath a poodle skirt. The most fully realized characters turn out to be Daisy and Walter, who have no basis in fact. Keiko, on the other hand, is an opaque and not quite believable character. Her behaviour seems drawn from Lifton’s study. He found that bomb survivors were often angry and paranoid, that, like concentration camp survivors, they felt guilty for outliving their families, that they were not always grateful to those who reached out to them. Tom is a nearly exact replica of the watch-giving suitor Harry Harris in Barker’s book, who spent years wooing the seamstress Hiroko Tasada (she underwent 13 operations) and eventually married her.

The fates of the actual Hiroshima maidens were not as mysterious as Keiko’s. They underwent a total of 138 operations in 18 months. Tragically, one girl died on the operating table of anesthesia-induced heart failure. Some regained the use of their hands, one girl got a new eyelid, another could raise her head, which had been pulled downward by the scarring on her neck. Twelve returned to Japan, married and had 19 children among them, all healthy. When Rodney Barker found them nearly 30 years later, he noted that they had “uneven, slightly smeared features” and were heavily made up with Covermark.