Arte, Censorship and Nuclear Warfare

G A B R i e l l e D e C A m o u S

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The traumas of nuclear warfare, de 1945 to the end of the Cold
Guerra, are not merely calamities of the past. They still have contemporary
consequences, contaminating the health, lives and memories of the
many nuclearized cultures in Japan, Oceania and other places. El
author argues that looking at past and present artworks representing the
nuclear age helps us to understand nuclear nations’ biopower and its
lasting effects.

If something positive can come out of the dreadful nuclear
accident at Fukushima’s power plant in 2011, it is the revival
of interest in nuclear matters seen in its aftermath. The arts
participate in this revival. En 2016, Por ejemplo, los unidos
Nations headquarters in New York City exhibited Chernobyl:
Tragedy, Lessons, Hope. Such an exhibition is instrumental in
increasing awareness of the civilian catastrophe, yet it elicits
the question of why military nuclear traumas so rarely be-
come the topic of exhibitions, or at least outside of Japan.
These traumas still have consequences today, and artists
have produced significant artworks that convey particularly
well the inhumanity of nuclear weapons, especially in places
where the traumas occurred. This article discusses some of
the pivotal works and the reasons for their lack of visibility
through three “past” traumas: A-bombs, Cold War tests, y
the effects of uranium mining—which exist alongside and in
addition to any civilian or military use of the atom.

HiRoSHimA: THe “CiTy of CoRpSeS”

Having had two cities almost entirely destroyed by nuclear
armas, Japan hosts a profusion of thoughtful artworks,
some produced by direct witnesses of the 1945 bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the visual arts, works by Makima
Kenzo, Yamamoto Keisuke, Takamasu Keisō and the Marukis
(Iri and Toshi) with their Hiroshima Panels series, directly
represented the catastrophes’ aftermath [1]. Literature played

Gabrielle Decamous (researcher), Kyushu University, Faculty of Languages and
Cultures, 744 Motooka Nishi-ku, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japón.
Correo electrónico: g.decamous@gmail.com.

Ver https://direct.mit.edu/leon/issue/54/5 for supplemental files associated
with this issue.

a particularly central role: Genbaku bungaku (A-bomb litera-
tura) is a genre regrouping works on the bombings, mostly
produced by artists who were also hibakusha (bomb survi-
vors), which spreads over several generations, since some
were only children in 1945. The genre is also inclusive, de
songs and poetry to photography, literature, cinema and
paintings (such as those by the Marukis).

Ōta Yōko’s Shikabane no machi (City of Corpses, 1948) es
representative of the genre, and Ōta is usually referred to as
“the” A-bomb writer. In the novel, she describes the blast she
witnessed, the destruction and the suffering of the burned
and agonized victims. In one instance, she details the piles of
corpses she and her family had to walk through to reach the
hospital, where they hoped their injuries would be treated.
The corpses were bloated, stinking and rotting in the summer
heat and swarmed by flies and maggots.

She also describes some of the survivors, and takes care to

describe women in particular:

The women were an ugly sight. A girl was walking about
naked, with nothing on her feet. A young girl had not one
strand of hair. An old woman had both shoulders dislo-
cated, and her arms hung limply. . . . People were no longer
vomiting up everything, as had been the case yesterday;
but there were people whose whole bodies were covered
with broil-like burns—skin hanging off, bleeding, exuding
an oil-like secretion. They had all slept naked on the sand,
so sand and blades of grass and bits of straw and the like
were pasted onto the putrid-looking flesh of their burns [2].

After reading some of the A-bomb novels, the reader re-
alizes something quite evident: the impact on the civilians
y, de este modo, on women’s and children’s bodies. It is precisely
this aspect that is so often forgotten. Matsuo Sachiko, a hi­
bakusha from Nagasaki who regularly testifies in official pro-
ceedings, illustrated this impact on civilians, recounting the
terrible sight of ash-burned, bloated and decaying bodies she
witnessed at the age of 11, before explaining that something
left an even stronger experience with her: behind her house,
a pregnant woman’s body was decaying. Her skull could

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be seen and then the baby’s skull. No one did anything to
cover them up, but that was because there was nothing
to cover them up with [3]. Matsuo Sachiko was 85 years old
at the time of her 2018 speech, and one question is pressing
in Japan: How will the testimonies continue to be spoken and
heard after all of the hibakusha have died?

Because of the dreadfulness of the suffering, the lack of
circulation of decades of hibakusha testimonies outside of
Japan is surprising. In the 1980s, A-bomb literature’s many
works were canonized in Japan through the publication by
Holp Editions of a collection of more than a dozen thick
volumes regrouping hundreds of novels, songs, poetry, y
theoretical works. But out of these, only a handful of novels
or poetic works were translated into English (mostly in the
1990s). Of the visual testimonies of Yamahata Yōsuke, OMS
took pictures of Nagasaki one day after the bomb, and of the
many other photographers who portrayed the victims after
the war, only the mildest have circulated.

One central reason for this invisibility is Japan’s alliance
with Nazi Germany and its actions as a feared colonial em-
pire. Susan Sontag also analyzed the problem of national-
ismo (and the idea that evil always lives elsewhere) cuando ella
analyzed in 2001 how photographs of lynchings of African
Americans began to be discussed even as discussion of sev-
eral other national calamities was avoided. The pictures first
allowed for the acknowledgment of the monstrosity of chattel
slavery and continuing violence against African Americans
in the United States—an unarguably pressing necessity even
hoy. Todavía, while this represents “a benchmark of civic virtue,"
Sontag explains, “acknowledgement of the American use of
disproportionate firepower in war (in violation of one of the
cardinal laws of war) is very much not a national project.”
Y todavía, as she stated: “The children of Hiroshima and Naga-
saki were no less innocent than the young African-American
hombres (and a few women) who were butchered and hanged
from trees in small-town America” [4].

Another reason for the lack of circulation is censorship. En
Japón, for about 10 años, beginning on 21 Septiembre 1945,
General Douglas MacArthur and the General Headquarters
of the Supreme Commander enforced a Press Code, censor-
ing and regulating publications on the bombings in the media
and the arts. One of Ōta’s chapters was censored, and she
later recounted her encounter with the censorship officers in
a cynical fashion in Sanjō (Montaintop, 1955). Other A-bomb
escritores, such as Hara Tamiki and Nagai Takashi, attempted to
publish directly in English to circumvent censorship in Japan,
while Shōda Shinoe distributed her poetry book illegally.

By the time censorship was lifted in Japan, the Cold War
had begun, and thus the focus of attention had shifted to
the Pacific, but censorship continued. En los Estados Unidos,
the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 took effect, and in France, el
“Très Secret Défense” also shrouded in secrecy the country’s
Cold War military nuclear activities. Mientras tanto, antinuclear
artworks by none other than Robert Rauschenberg, Salvador
Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Yves Klein, Nancy Spero and William S.
Burroughs were produced in the U.S. and Europe. In spite of
estos, the lasting effect of censorship is such that even today,
the Oceanian victims are still invisible.

pACifiC Gloom

Contemporary Pacific literature does not mince words when
revealing the actual human and ecological impacts in Ocea-
nia. Marshallese poet and visual artist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s
verses in Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter (2017)
are beautiful and sharp, and depict miscarriages, leukemia
and lingering radioactivity that added to the historical trau-
mas: the lies from the militaries, a forced exodus, the rain
of radioactive ashes contaminating the displaced population
and the contamination of islands that remain uninhabitable.
In “History Project,” which is based on archival material she
read when she was 15, Jetñil-Kijiner writes about the “jellyfish
babies,” so named because they have no head, no bones and
skin “red as tomatoes” when born:

I read firsthand accounts

. . .
the miscarriages gone unspoken
the broken translations

I never told my husband
I thought it was my fault
Pensé
there must be something
wrong
inside me [5]

In another poem, “Monster” (2017), performed in front
of the Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima, Jetñil-Kijiner relates
that there were already 574 stillbirths and miscarriages in
1951, compared to 52 before the bombs. And the problem
persists. In “Bursts of Bianca” and “Fishbone Hair,” she de-
scribes her young niece Bianca’s struggle with leukemia,
and her death, including how Bianca learned the English
words for the disease: “Most Marshallese / can say they’ve
mastered the language of cancer” [6]. Unarguably, the Cold
War’s nuclear power still contaminates lives today, a pesar de
the Oceanians were not official enemies of the imperial-
ist powers that contaminated them. Además, Oceani-
ans had and still have a closer relation to nature, en el cual
natural elements are seen as personifications that must be
respected. The Marshallese and Polynesian societies are
also matrilineal, which perhaps makes the contamination
of women and children (who are more sensitive to radioac-
actividad) even more shocking to their members. Jetñil-Kijiner
explains that “Iep Jāltok” in her title refers to a basket whose
opening faces the speaker, as well as to girls and to the Mar-
shallese matrilineal society as a whole.

The French nuclear program in the area fares no better
than the American one. In French Polynesia, Tahitian writer
Rai Chaze in Vai: La rivière au ciel sans nuage (Vai: The River
with Sky without Cloud, 1990) also portrayed leukemia and
contaminated landscapes and food. The metaphor for the
nuclear test is one of rape, perpetuated by “intelligent” men
who then looked away from the permanent pain and con-
sequences:

In the island of the night, the soil trembled. The light of
the intelligent people has risen over the flows like a mush-
habitación. . . .

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Boom! . . . The wall was cracked and the sea sprung out.
The intelligent men danced the ball of fear. From their
apocalyptical costume, they colored the inner thighs of
their pants in yellow. To the violin of the sirens, they quiv-
ered, they shivered and reeled, drunk of panic until that
earth became quiet.

Bloated by pain, the island of the night became quiet,
exhausted. The sea rose, with a salty taste, muffling the
whining of her wounds. . . .

The intelligent men closed their eyes not to see [7].

The metaphor of rape is accentuated by the word “violin,"
which is phonetically similar to “rape” in French (“violer /
nous violons”), and by the word “siren,” which also means
“mermaid.” Here, Chaze’s writing also criticizes what is now
called “rape culture” in patriarchal societies. This culture of
sexual violence spread via colonization, as the Polynesian
writer Chantal Spitz reminds us: “there was no brothel before
. . . there were no prostitutes before” [8].

The nuclear traumas add to the impact of more than a
century of colonization that the poet Henri Hiro protested
in vain in the 1970s, when continental France moved its nu-
clear program from the Algerian desert to the Moruroa and
Fangataufa atolls after the Algerian War of Independence.
Patriarchal and colonial power thus has deep-rooted effects.
Además, the embarrassing problem of nuclear waste reposi-
tories for the materials used during hundreds and hundreds
of atmospheric and underground tests remains and still
spreads contamination now: Constructed decades ago, ellos
are no longer secure. The effects of the Cold War thus con-
tinue to unfold, in addition to the dangers of global warming
and the sinking of several Pacific islands.

In spite of their importance, these issues do not permeate
elsewhere in the world and, more specifically, to the nuclear
nations at the origin of the tests. One particular turning point
in Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems occurs where she writes about the
use of goats and pigs for nuclear tests, the pictures of which
had circulated in the U.S. and provoked outrage over animal
abuso:

En 15

I want radioactive energy megatons of tnt and a fancy
degree
anything and everything I could ever need
to send ripples of death through a people who put goats
before human beings
so their skin
can shrivel
beneath the glare
of hospital room lights
three generations later [9]

The pictures of effects on the Marshall Islanders them-
selves hardly circulated because censorship was, and always
es, the nuclear age’s darkest and most invisible power (incluso
involving some of the power plant accidents). Most declas-
sified images and films are of mushroom clouds. De este modo, el
lack of visibility of Pacific islanders and Japanese hibakusha
should not be attributed solely to the invisibility of radioac-

actividad, or even to language barriers to the circulation of the
testimonies.

Countering past and present censorship is an absolute ne-
cessity. Pacific island artists such as Jetñil-Kijiner, Alexander
Lee and Viri Taimana, Por ejemplo, produce contemporary
visual artworks that challenge this silencing. Yet silencing
remains strong in patriarchal and colonial societies: Self-
censorship is expected of the women concerning stillbirth
and abortions and is at times regulated via juridical and car-
ceral systems. Self-censorship is also expected of the colo-
nized and decolonized nations (something brought to light
in feminist and anticolonial movements of the 1960s but still
being negotiated to this day). Finalmente, these patriarchal and
colonial systems continue even today with the issue of the
extraction of uranium ore.

iS uRANium miNiNG GReeN?

In his famous 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, at the start
of the Manhattan Project, Albert Einstein mentioned a mine
in the then–Belgian Congo as a possible counter to the Nazi
takeover of the Jáchymov mine in Czechoslovakia, cual
was the only inland Western mine at the time. (The United
States began mining inland, in or near Native American
lands in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, Por ejemplo, a lo largo de
with Canada—also taking ores on Indigenous lands—in the
1940s.) After the Second World War, France mined its colo-
nies and former colonies in Madagascar, Congo and Niger
(the Nigerian mines are still being operated). The United
Kingdom mined aboriginal lands in Australia before mov-
ing on to South Africa and Namibia.

From the beginning of the nuclear age, such issues were
depicted in the arts. In Radium (1937), Austrian writer Rudolf
Brunngraber compares the life of a scientist studying radium
hoping to make a living by advancing radium cures to the
greed and wealth of a banker and shareholder of a mining
company in the Belgian Congo, Pierre Cynac. Cynac’s hopes
for a global monopoly of minerals are rejuvenated when
he reads about a U.S. mining company and syndicate that
mines radium in Colorado and Utah, since one of his “Negro
boy[s]” had excavated a stone impressive by its “orange-red
color”: a piece of uranium ore [10].

De este modo, the European colonial system and its “abolished”

slave trade gradually transmuted:

Instead of the old “factories” or trading-stations, run by
agents who were always ready to use the lash, there was a
more orderly colonial Government, and mining companies
and the Bourse du Travail held sway in the land. . . . Though
nominally free labourers, the thousands of black boys who,
under the orders of a few dozen whites, labored in mines
and at the blast-furnaces were substantially slaves, ser
the victims of a system of contract labour upon whom the
“contract” had been arbitrarily enforced [11].

Even though it was written in 1936, Radium is particularly
interesante: En primer lugar, radioactive ores were indeed exploited in
the Belgian Congo (in Shinkolobwe), as mentioned by Ein-
stein in his letter to Roosevelt. En segundo lugar, Radium also briefly
touches upon another real case by depicting the plight of

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Decamous, Arte, Censorship and Nuclear Warfare 539

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the Radium Girls. The Radium Girls were hundreds of fe-
male U.S. factory workers, as young as 16 years old, who were
trained to use their mouths to make a fine point on paint-
brushes to be able to apply radium paint on dial clocks, en
Orange, New Jersey, and Ottawa, Illinois. Their demise was
very quick and remains a classic case of class and gender
exploitation. Notablemente, some corporate scientists even tried
to attribute their disease to syphilis.

A few decades later, the impact of military (seguido por
civilian) nuclear programs on Indigenous lands can be de-
tected via the photographs of Robert Del Tredici and Toyo-
saki Hiromitsu of the Atomic Photographers Guild. Su
photographs and lengthy captions tell the story of cancers
among miners and their families, crippling accidents and
deaths of newborns in the United States, Canada, certain
African nations and elsewhere. Mining in the 1930s (y
even the 1960s and 1970s) was plagued by lack of appropri-
ate safety standards. Workers (including white workers) y
nearby villages were contaminated. These artworks thus vi-
sualize what Marsha Weisiger analyzed decades later in the
effect of uranium mining on a Navajo family, the Clys. Después
a mother had passed away from cancer, a grandmother sick
with cancer was forced to place her grandson in the care
of missionaries (who refused him any connection with his
own culture or knowledge of his biological family) [12]. El
patriarchal and colonial dynamics are here at play. Tracy
Brynne Voyles has also analyzed the mines and the lives of
the Navajo Diné and Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, cuando
she describes the “affect of power relations between colonizer
and colonized [y cómo] it has shaped experiences, bodily
salud, and life expectancy of the Diné long after the problem
should have been rectified.” The uranium mining violated
the land, the people and their culture. It involved “American
insistence [en] recognizing the political leadership only of
hombres . . . [y] to undermine the strong position of women
in the tribe” [13]. Many native tribes are also matrilineal, como
in Oceania.

CoNCluSioN

There is thus a patriarchal and colonial “biopower” over
gente. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Michel Foucault ex-
amined the evolution of capital punishments from bodily
torture, in which the sovereign exercises its power of “letting
live or taking life away,” to carceral systems, psychological ex-
pertise and “painless” executions. In “Necropolitics” (2003),
Achille Mbembe refers to the notion of biopower described

in Foucault’s lecture “Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Col-
lège de France” (1975–1976). In this lecture, Foucault refers to
Nazism and, for Mbembe, both Nazism and colonialism are
systems of biopower, some of which developed in modern
warfare with the use of depleted uranium (DU), Por ejemplo,
designed to “quickly [cripple] the enemy’s capability” [14].
Through DU, as well as chemical weapons and the destruc-
tion of life-support systems, the future soldier is targeted via
women’s wombs. Another of Mbembe’s examples is the de-
struction of a petrochemical complex near Belgrade during
the Kosovo war that led to pregnant women being directed to
abort and others to avoid becoming pregnant for two years.
In the nuclear age, “biopower” goes beyond national borders,
and focuses on regulating the land and bodies of civilians that
are also “innocents” (as opposed to “convicts”). It focuses on
the enemy (for Japan) and the colonized (Oceania), and in a
territory outside of the aggressor’s juridical system.

This nuclear biopower still exists. The consequences of
the use of DU during the Gulf War was portrayed in a 2012
photo essay by Christian Werner (published in Time maga-
zine in 2014) that made visual what Mbembe described in
palabras. Taken in Basra, Fallujah and Baghdad, the pictures
are of children with tumors, leukemia and deformities; de
stillborn babies; and of children’s graves. The insistence of
patriarchal societies on regulating women’s bodies in giving
or not giving birth (to living, dead or dying babies), and in
inscribing their power physically onto the female body, son
also forms of biopower, atomizing the so-called nuclear fam-
ily. Inevitably, this has consequences for men too. “Gulf War
Syndrome” follows “shell shock” and “PTSD” in the lexicon
of “side” effects of modern warfare. Many American prison-
ers of war also died at Hiroshima, and military men as well as
women were exposed during the Cold War tests. Victimhood
is not always easy to define, but what is now evident are the
contemporary consequences of past wars and the weight of
history upon the present.

Colonialism, imperialism, racism and patriarchy are intri-
cately woven and thus ontologically necessary to consider for
the atomic age. Finalmente, for victims to gain visibility, censor-
ship must be abolished, and there must also be a reversal of
focus from the aggressor to the victim to equally acknowl-
edge them. Debates and narratives in the U.S. and Europe too
often focus on the actions of the scientists and militaries of
the atomic age, rather than those of the victims. en esta tarea,
the arts have a role to play, especially given that many nations
are still developing nuclear weapons.

References and Notes

1 Note that for all Japanese names, I use the traditional order (familia

4 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (Nueva York: Picador, 2003)

name preceding given name).

páginas. 93–94.

2 Ōta Yōko, “City of Corpses,” in Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, Rich-
ard H. Minear, ed. and trans. (Princeton, Nueva Jersey: Princeton Univ. Prensa,
1990) pag. 199.

3 Matsuo Sachiko, “Special Symposium: Voice of Hibakusha, Atomic

Bomb Survivor,” Kyushu University (21 Enero 2018).

5 Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, “History Project,” in Iep Jāltok: Poems from a
Marshallese Daughter (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press,
2017) pag. 20.

6

Jetñil-Kijiner [5], “Bursts of Bianca," pag. 40.

540 Decamous, Arte, Censorship and Nuclear Warfare

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7 Rai Chaze, Vai: La rivière au ciel sans nuage [Vai: The River with Sky
without Cloud] (Tahiti: Api Tahiti, 2014) páginas. 38–39 (my translation).
First published in 1990.

Navajo Country (Mineápolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015)
páginas. 23, 34.

14 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, No. 1 (2003)

8 Chantal Spitz in Bruno Barrillot, Marie-Hélène Villierme and Ar-
naud Hudelot, editores., Témoins de la bombe [Witnesses of the Bomb],
(Papeete: Éditions Univers Polynésiens, 2013) pag. 83 (my translation).

pag. 31.

Manuscrito recibido 7 Marzo 2019.

9

Jetñil-Kijiner [5] pag. 22.

10 Rudolf Brunngraber, Radium: Roman eines Elements [Radium: A
Novel], Eden and Cedar Paul, trans. (Nueva York: Random House,
1937) pag. 259.

11 Brunngraber [10] páginas. 248–249.

12 Marsha Weisiger, “Happy Cly and the Unhappy History of Uranium
Mining on the Navajo Reservation,” Environmental History 17, No. 1,
146–159 (2012).

13 Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in

Gabrielle Decamous is an associate professor at Kyu­
shu University in Fukuoka, Japón, and the author of Invisible
Colors: The Arts of the Atomic Age (CON prensa, 2019), cual
explores nuclear­related artworks from Marie Curie to Fuku­
shima. Decamous was also the recipient of a Hilla Rebay Inter­
national Fellowship for her work with curators at museums in
Nueva York, Bilbao and Venice. This research was supported by
JSPS KAKENHI (Grant­in­Aid for Scientific Research) Grant
Number JP17K13371.

C A L L F O R P R O P O S A L S

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