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...