OK, it's 8 o'clock, so I guess I should just start. So hello, everybody. My name is Rans Langenberg. I'm an associate professor in Pennsylvania State University in America. I'm talking today from Japan, from Fukuoka, where I'm on sabbatical, and where I just finished writing my book on the prehistory of PTSD in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how the psychological and psychiatric establishments in Japan, in the US, and other countries dealt with the psychological consequences of the atomic bomb and the war in general. My talk today, Denial, Nuclear Trauma, and the Core of Psychiatry in Hiroshima, is based on this book and other research I've done in the last couple of years here in Japan and around the world. I'm going to start with going over the order of things, what I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to talk of today, and then I'm going to launch writing, I guess. So today, we're going to start talking, actually, not with this book, but my first book, and talk about the Hiroshima and the politics of memory, and what kind of social, cultural, historical environment that research was conducted at. Then we're going to have a short section about the trauma research and denial of trauma after the Holocaust in Israel, Germany, and the US. And I'm going to go in a second to explain what's the connection there. And then trauma research denial in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This will be the longest section today. And then we're going to end up with talking about two important figures in research in Japan and the US, psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton and sociologist Ishida Tadashi. And we're going to talk about the politics of PTSD, or actually, politics of pre-PTSD, what led to the acceptance or rejection of PTSD in Japan and the United States. So I'm going to start a little bit of background, both personally, personal background, what led me to this research, and also what led to this book as a whole. So the origins of this research is actually in my first book, Hiroshima, the Origins of Global Memory Culture, which was my PhD dissertation, which connected between the memory of the Holocaust and the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Personally, I am from Israel. I'm coming from a survivor family. My grandparents went through the Holocaust. And when I got to Japan, about 20 years ago, I guess, and to Hiroshima, I immediately saw connections between the tragedy in Hiroshima and tragedy of the Holocaust. Of course, those are two completely different events of different order, have been completely different cultural context, different historical context. But there are many, many connections between them. And my first book actually, what eventually became my first book, first dissertation in the book, examined those connections, or what I call in the book entanglements, how the commemoration and the lessons, what people saw as the lessons of the Holocaust, what we now know as the Holocaust, and the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki impacted each other. And I had two main avenues through which I pursued those connections. I pursued those connections. One through, and it's the bulk of the first book, for examination of a delegation, a Japanese delegation that went to Israel and Poland in 1962, right after the Eichmann trial. And the second one of psychiatry. And I'm going to go to psychiatry in a second. But first, maybe a little bit about what we see now. In the left, you see a picture of the Japanese delegation in Israel. And on the right, you see here a caricature from a time of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, which basically characterized the people who replace Eichmann, or the replacements of Eichmann, Eichmann and Kawarimono, which are the nuclear powers. So the lessons of his caricature, and for the Japanese readers, is the nuclear powers here marching in goose steps. The Soviet Union up on the left, France, England, and the UK, they are the Nazis. They have kakuheiki written on their heads as missiles there. Kakuheiki means nuclear weapons. And in this setting, the new Auschwitz is Hiroshima, of course, and the Japanese are a sacrifice equal to the Jewish victimhood. Japanese victimhood equal to Jewish victimhood. This, of course, is something that most people in Asia and people in the US and other places would not accept readily right now. But at the time, and it's a time of the Eichmann trial missile crisis, there are many, many connections made between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Holocaust, because what the world was seen to deal with, what was the most urgent task of people who worked on those issues, was to prevent a nuclear war, to prevent a confrontation between the power and to prevent a catastrophic end of civilization. And in there, the lessons of Auschwitz and the lesson of Hiroshima was seen as connected and nothing can bring people together. This was also what brought Robert J. Lifton, you see here above in a picture, to Hiroshima in exact same time, 1962. So when you have people going to Israel, going to Poland, trying to make connections, you also have people coming to Hiroshima. Robert Lifton came to Hiroshima in 1962. He's a Jewish-American psychiatrist. His work started during his time in the military, as a military psychiatrist, when he worked on POWs that came back from Korea, and what we now call brainwashing. Fascinating topic we're not going to get into. But in my first book, I traced his steps to a meeting he had with a psychologist named Kubo Yoshitoshi in Hiroshima in 1962, which was a disaster. They didn't understand each other, not because of the language issues. Kubo Yoshitoshi grew up in the US, but because they had completely different ideas about what happened to the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Completely different approaches to what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now, Robert Lifton's work is pretty well known. Robert Lifton was a center of the chapter I wrote, but also many other people worked. And he wrote a lot, he's still active in his 90s now. His work is pretty well known, and what make him very important in the history of psychiatry is that he's one of the main principle people that led to the establishment, discovery, some people may call it an invention of PTSD, creation of PTSD in the DSM-III in 1980. Lifton sat on a committee that wrote the category into the DSM, and his career was very much connected to the history of trauma and the creation of PTSD. Now, my first book had a chapter on this meeting and a career of Kubo Yoshitoshi and Robert Lifton, but it was just one chapter, right? And today I'm gonna end the book that I just wrote, basically expand on the chapter and look at the intellectual ecosystems of Robert Lifton, Kubo Yoshitoshi, and psychiatry and psychology in the US and Japan to see what led to this meeting, what led to the creation of PTSD, what kind of work people did in Japan, what kind of work did in America, and how people talked about what we now call trauma. At the time, many different categories were employed to describe this from shell shock, psychic trauma, and the like, we now call PTSD, before we had a category. And also, how do you deal with this completely different cultural and historical setting of Japan? So what I found, right, is that trauma was not an important category in the way that this profession, psychology, and psychiatry dealt with in Rashid Nagasaki or the Holocaust or the legacy of war, psychological legacy of war as a whole. What I found was that people talk about completely different things. It's not that people did not work on Hiroshima Nagasaki, there were a whole number of people, I'm gonna talk about them today, that worked on this, but PTSD, what we now call PTSD, was not the major category, it didn't even exist at the time, right, but its precursor, trauma, shell shock, and the like, were not important categories in this. Why? And that's the big question of today, the big question of the book, why? Denial, and not denial in terms of cover-up, but denial, like not being able to acknowledge this, and I'm not coming here to condemn doctors in the past for being blind to the obvious, and that's the point, it wasn't obvious to them. Why wasn't obvious to them what's obvious to us? Why is it that they could not see the long-term psychological damage that was done to the victims? And even more important, the connection to trauma, and today I'm gonna try to answer some of those questions. So we begin with talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and about what kind of historical environment people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki acted in. So this mostly drew on my first book, and it looked at the reconstruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the first, the big part of the first part, a big focus, the first part of the book, and what I found when I look at the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a very curious, very curious avoidance of talking about the, talking about the human crisis, about the victims of the bomb in the beginning. What was talked about was about the bomb bringing peace to Japan, bringing peace to the world. And this is something that came out of various things, I'm not gonna get into all the different issues, but the main issue here, the main thing is that this was an idea that was constructed under American censorship, where it was not possible to talk openly about the victimization of Japanese, or to talk in any way critically towards the United States. It also, in a context where people were not keen on looking at what happened during the war, but looking forward, and where Hiroshima was looking for a new place in the world in terms of identity, and a place that it found was as a city of peace. And in this, and the most, again, for us, from our point of view, the most, almost bizarre view of this is to call the bomb a flesh of peace, a transformative power that transformed Hiroshima, which was a military city before, into a place of peace that is teaching peace to the world. So in those, this is from the first circumambulation, you have two Japanese newspapers from the time, local newspapers, one of them said, the one on the right, the time of peace, the bright flesh of peace, the time, it's been a year since the bright flesh of peace, the time of the year of calm again. It's a lyrical, it's a lyrical expression here. And then the second one, which is a little bit more obvious, right? It says, amakudaru heiwa no jyotekuda, the song of peace, a requiem for peace that came for us from above. And what is a requiem of peace? The bomb. And you can see this kind of bright looking, bright colored connection between peace and the bomb all over Hiroshima in the first few years. I brought a couple of examples here, tourist. And the one on the right here is a tourist brochure from the fifties. You see here the atomic bomb dome and a dove that comes out of there. Again, the connection is very important, is very obvious, connecting Athens for peace and, you know, Rose, peace. Everything's pretty positive. Even, or the tourist brochure here, another one from above that talks about how people should come and see the atomic cloud in Hiroshima. We're again in the Japanese teachers union from 51 here on the left. Again, doves coming out of the atomic cloud. Again, looking forward, looking at peace, not talking about what happened. When did people start talking about what happened? So this has a lot to do with the 1954 Bikini Test and the radiation scares that came to Japan after a third time, the Japanese were victims of Hiroshima, victims of radiation. When an American nuclear test in the Pacific and Bikini Islands victimized a group of Japanese fishermen and later led to radioactive rains all over Japan, which led to an explosion, anti-nuclear feeling and the rise of Gensokyo, the anti-nuclear coalition and anti-nuclear movement in Japan. You see a poster of them on the left. Now, what they did was to put the survivors and their stories in the center. And I'm being pretty reductive here, but basically what happened is that they put the survivors on the stand in order to tell their story. And for the first time, the private pain of individuals was put on display, it's not a big cross, but was known to the wider public. Up until then, American censorship prevented this. And then for various other reasons, people did not really come out and talk openly about what happened privately. Publicly, people talk a lot about peace and the bomb and the like, but privately, but until then it was not a private and a public pain did not come together. And you see here, for example, on the right, you have a newspaper article from 1955. It talks about Nakinagara, like while they cry, the women, Genbaku, like the women, and it's established here, it's emphasized it's women here, are said, war is bad, senso wa ieda. So it's very important to note also that people were put on display were women and children. We see here, for example, the babies here in the center or in this poster here on the right, women and children, et cetera, because it was an experience that based on the victimization, right? Emphasis of victimization. What I call in the first book, emotional mobilization, meaning their emotional experience. And again, we don't talk about trauma again, was put on, was used by them, right? They are the one who are coming and talking. I don't want to say that they're being used, but those people come forward and use their emotional experience to mobilize the movement to ban nuclear weapons. Very similar mechanism happened a couple of years afterwards in the Eiffel Tower in Jerusalem, where David Ben-Gurion and Gideon Hausner. Gideon Hausner was the prosecutor in the Al Hama trial. Ben-Gurion was the prime minister of Israel at the time. And they made a conscious decision to put victims on the stand, to tell the world about what happened, to tell the youth of Israel about what happened. And again, here, people willingly came and told their story. And there was, again, this process of emotional mobilization. And in here, in both places, you see both the survivors mobilizing their pain and suffering and anger, and all that will happen in order to tell their story, in order to tell the story and channel it through political, towards political goals, peace in Hiroshima, state of Israel, fighting for a state of Israel, Zionism in Jerusalem. But also the emotional mobilization of the crowds of people listening to this testimony and feeling, like we're always feeling the pain together. But again, for the first 10 years, this was not the case. For the first 10 years, people did not really listen to the stories of survivors. And just exact, and this happened in Hiroshima, and also happened in the Holocaust context in Israel and other places. And it's specifically because the Holocaust, even more so than the bomb, was a source of shame for Jews in Israel, for Jews in America, was something people didn't talk about. Now, we grew up with survivors around us. We grew up with people telling their stories in schools and the like. This was not the case in the 40s and 50s. And nothing really, nothing really demonstrate the inability and the inability of survivors to talk and the relationship of the society to survivors. And a rumor that happened in 1950 in Israel, there was a ship carrying 1,000 mentally ill patients, what was called a ship of fools, to Israel from the DP camp, Displaced Persons Camp, in Germany, going to Israel-Palestine. It's before the time. And there was a lot of anxiety about this, about what we're gonna do with them. Looking down on Holocaust survivors, not acknowledging their suffering, not thinking about the suffering as legitimate or something was pretty common at the time. It was pretty common at the time. People were suspect. If they survived, they probably did something wrong. If they survived, it's something that they did something we should not talk about. If they survived, they survived as mentally damaged people, not quite normal. Now, this is, and now going to more directly to psychiatry, this is not something that a lot of psychiatrists share at the time, that is something that some psychiatrists did not share at the time, specifically people who worked in the DP camps. For example, Leo Sroll, that you see his picture there, who was a military psychiatrist during the war. And he saw in Holocaust survivors, a lot of things that were very similar to the experience of soldiers and veterans. And he urged his colleagues to look at it through the prism of short-term, through the prism of longer-term psychological damage. It was beginning to get acknowledged in the American and British psychiatry, but he was a lone voice. For the most part, psychiatrists in Israel itself did not acknowledge, did not work with, did not recognize the experience of the Holocaust and the trauma of the Holocaust. People like Fischer Schnauzern, who worked in Cyprus and other places, argued for immunization from trauma that comes from the experiences of the survivors, that people that managed to overcome their pain, specifically in a healthy environment of Israel, what they call it, through working for a state of Israel, through patriotism, through communal work, they're able to immunize themselves from trauma. And you compare how much better survivors possibly were doing in Israel than in other countries. And this is, again, because of the connection between the transformative power of Zionism and the move from the dark Holocaust, dark Europe, into bright Israel. I'm being a bit reductive here, but this is the ideological move he's doing. And you can see when you read files of the time, read files of Holocaust survivors, how sometimes you have one or two lines about accounts, people who lost all of their families, people who lost all of their kids, people whose kids were killed in front of their eyes, but you have five or six lines. And then people talk much more about the survivor's childhood and much more about their problems with connecting their problem to find work and other things with, and to adjust to the new society, not what happened during the war, but what happened when they were kids. This, you can see most clearly in the way the German doctors, you have the same problem in Israel, but also German doctors that dealt with survivors as part of the compensation mechanism set up by the German-Israeli government to compensate Holocaust survivors. And here you have what Dagmar Herzog and others examined as a campaign to deny Holocaust survivors, to deny any kind of recognition and compensation by the German medical establishment. Now, the German medical establishment was notoriously hostile to trauma towards, not just towards you, but towards its own soldiers, towards its own soldiers, towards its own soldiers and towards its own victims. And it was even more so when it dealt with survivors. And the problem was the problem of causation. Again, they did not see the connection between what happened during the Holocaust to the problem of survivors that they had now. So in this case, for example, a development, a Mr. H, they said that he is indeed sick, but there's no casual connection or no possibility of connection between the amount of violent persecution undergone by him until 1945. They did not see the connection. Now, this really angered a lot of Jewish doctors, not just Jewish, also German Gentiles and other sympathetic doctors that specifically after the Eichmann trial saw this as a continuation of the same attitudes that Germans displayed during the Holocaust. Saw it as an expression of antisemitism. And the more people saw survivors as people who were worthy of hearing, people were, can tell us something, right? And this again, after following the Eichmann trial and the rise of what we now call testimonies, Holocaust testimonies, the more it was, the harder it was for German doctors to deny, to deny, to deny, to deny recognition. And you can see it both, sorry, go back. See it both in, like for example, Paul Chodoff talks about his patients as the Lammentwaffe or the 36 right men, righteous men, who take upon themselves the suffering in the world. There is a, it's almost like a Christian way of talking about it, but it's about, again, about what they can tell us and how they can save the world. And the connection is again, between saving the world. Okay. Take a humanitarian kind of crusade almost the survivors will take on a, no one really expressed it more clearly than Elie Wieselger in this quote, that called basically Holocaust survivors a Messiah, right? This is again, a very, very Christian language of, and what did the pain of those survivors can tell us? And he said, there's no reason to be ashamed, but we should be proud, right? We should not be ashamed. Why don't we claim the Holocaust as the most glorious chapter in eternal history? This is almost triumphal, right? Triumphal language to talk about a Holocaust, about how Hiroshima is explained by Auschwitz, as Vietnam is explained by Auschwitz. And again, how the Jewish suffering, okay. And again, you see it's very similar to what happened in Hiroshima, is a messianic dimension. Someone who can save the world from new Auschwitz, save the world from war, from genocide and the like. And in this atmosphere, and again, this is a little bit of extreme, but in this atmosphere, it was much harder for German doctors to deny recognition. And I'm gonna go back to this, we're gonna go back to this in a few minutes, right? Now, so we cover, we covered the situation in Hiroshima, we covered very, very briefly, very ductively. We'll go back to them afterwards. The situation after the Holocaust in Germany, I wanna go back to the US and Japan, and now it's going to be the main part of the lecture today. And for this, we have to go back to 1945, before 1945, and talk about what, about the involvement of psychiatry and psychology in the dropping of atomic bomb and in the bombing of Germany and Japan. And this is what really surprised me the most, because I started this project thinking I'm gonna look mostly at psychiatrists that worked with survivors after the war. But what I found is this history is much, much longer. And it really, what I really came to understand is how deeply involved with psychiatry and psychology in the US and other countries within the military establishments and with bombing. Now, the airplane, aerial bombing, was a new technologically advanced, exciting way to wage war. And in a total wars of the 20th century, it was connected to scientific way of conducting war and something that all psychologists and psychiatrists took part at. Now, what aerial bombing was supposed to achieve was psychologically overwhelming the enemy. Bombs at the time were very inaccurate, right? You could not really pinpoint and destroy military targets, not without carpet bombing the whole area. So one of the justification for that, there were many other justification that aerial theorists came up with, that bombing will basically produce shell shock and overwhelm the enemy. I call in the book applied trauma. What they wanted to do was psychologically overwhelm civilian populations in order to create another Germany in 1919, to create a collapse of the state from within. No one really, psychiatrists then did not really make the connection, never really exactly said how you go from trauma to revolution, but this was the aim of bombing. This is how psychiatry psychologists in the military theorized it, they and other thinkers, that the bombing will cause panic, that a panic bombing will cause collapse of morale and will eventually lead to the people rising up against their own governments. This is part of, again, making bio more scientific and also the rise of this idea of morale. And now morale was the main lens through which psychiatry psychologists in a military thought about bombing. Not trauma, not long-term damage, but short-term psychological impact that would lead to the destruction of what they call morale, which is a very ambiguous, not very clearly defined set of assumptions about the human mind and how humans act, right? What is their attitude towards their, and how bombing would impact their attitudes toward their leaders, towards war and the like. Now, in the case of Japan, you had the added issue, not just of like how any civilians will react to bombing, but also how the Japanese specifically would react to bombing. Remember, we talked about a situation where there was a lot of racism towards Japan and not really seen as completely human, not really seen as completely like us. At the time, there was within the military, the military ongoing debate between anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists that worked in the military between people who saw the Japanese as a different race and people who saw them as human, just like us. People who come from the traditional Bosnian anthropology that talk about culture and not race. And this camp, this progressive camp, right? The anti-racist camp is the one that won. And one very important member of this camp was Alexander Leighton, a psychiatrist from, a psychiatrist from Columbia, sorry, Canadian, but he had his PhD in Columbia, who had this start in the internment camps. This is one very peculiar, peculiar kind of history that I found that this whole thing started in internment camps when Leighton set up Bureau of Research, Sociological and Psychological Research in internment camps in order to study the Japanese mind. In there, he also recruited a lot of Japanese Americans. I have a whole chapter about this guy, Scott Matsumoto, who also worked in Hiroshima later on. And then he bring him to Washington, D.C. and to talk about and try to develop mechanism of psychological warfare. What they claim is that through psychological warfare, through non-lethal psychological methods, you can convince the Japanese to surrender. Other people, other bombers, fought Nippon to be a much more effective way of convincing the Japanese to surrender. But what I'm arguing in the book that in the end, both of those camps were not that different because what Nippon was supposed to do and psychological warfare was supposed to do was basically the same. Not, eventually not just kill many Japanese, but also convince them, right? Psychologically changed their minds, right? Using psychological tools, either psychological tools of bombing or psychological tools of leaflets and logic. Now, the bomb was a continuation of this, right? The bomb, I'm not gonna get into debate of why the bomb was dropped, but in the way that the army initially thought about the bomb, and you see here this quote from the United States regime bombing survey, the people went and checked and went to the regime right after the bomb, that did not see the bomb as very, very different, right? From what happened in Hamburg or other places, right? In other places. That what they want was to demystify the bomb, to denial the all from the bomb. That the bomb was just a bigger weapon and we can still continue using it to have the same scientific, the same psychological and other benefits that bombing brought. Now, the USSBS was the United States refugee bombing survey, which employed most psychologists and psychiatrists that went to Hiroshima right after the bomb, was an organization that basically came to Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other bomb cities and tried to evaluate what bombing did and if it succeeded. And it brought to here a couple of questions to ask people and basically see it's like, I quote here, the most grotesque opinion poll, like basically trying to have large scale psychiatrists, not psychiatry, psychological surveys, opinion surveys, but what people thought about the bomb and what was the reaction of the bomb? And they're trying to ascertain exactly how the bomb led to surrender and collapse or morale. And it's actually, it's pretty amazing to think that in November of 45, just three months after the bomb, they were around with little clip notes and asking people around Hiroshima what they felt about the bomb. And, but this was how it all started with people sitting down with survivors, recording their experiences, but not for the purpose of healing, but the purpose of learning how did bombing, how did bombing impacted the Japanese mind for the purpose of learning as much as they can about improving bombing for the Cold War and make it more and more scientific, more and more accurate. What they wanted to quantify, what they wanted to do was to quantify and make scientific what we now call shock and awe. How much time did your bombs lead to harmony, lead to what kind of behavioral changes? And you can see here come a couple of the German examples here, like psychological defenses versus bombing, change of attitude versus bombing, what kind of percentage of people changed their minds and so on and so on. They even came up with, they computerized all the data, they put it into IBM punch cards and they came up with a morale index, right? But when you dig deeper, you see that behind the numbers, they're really horrific stories. And probably like two examples here from the German survey and from the Japanese survey. And you can see how horrendous those stories are and how psychologically damaged those people are. And I'm just gonna go a bit forward and skip most of this slide for the sake of time. But what I want to emphasize before we move on to the Japanese part is that this kind of attitude continued towards the occupation. The idea that the target of American policy either for bombing or for reform of the war was Japanese mind, right? That was the ideas in Japan that like Americans can change Japanese mind, right? And again, this came together with this looking towards the future through changing Japan, through making Japan democratic, peaceful and the like. And a lot of people worked on a bombing also worked for the occupation. But again, I'm gonna skip this part and talk a little bit about, and just talk now a little bit about the work that is done in America where the lessons of Hiroshima are applied by psychiatrists, psychology at work and nuclear and defense establishment. But they don't look at the long-term mental damage. They don't go to Hiroshima, they don't talk with survivors. What they look at is what kind of impact the bomb had on the ground immediately because what they're concerned with is with panic. They think that Americans would panic and be terrorized by nuclear weapon. And even before the bomb would drop, American society will collapse. So what they're trying to achieve and one radical operation psychologist, Irving Janks, what it was immunization from trauma and trying to educate people and prepare them for the terror that a bomb could have. That a bomb would bring. And again, in the beginning before the H-bomb, people still thought about the A-bomb as a terror weapon. But again, I'm going to skip this part and want to talk a little bit, I want to talk about what happened in Japan now. All right. So, we go to Hiroshima after the war and after the war. And in the beginning, there was almost no research done, psychiatric or otherwise by Japanese doctors because of censorship. Because American military establishment did not let Japanese work freely on nuclear issues, which were considered highly classified military issues. Who did this work was the ABCC, the American Bomb Casualty Commission with American research establishment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ABCC here is a military-like camp in Hiroshima. And those people were mostly medical, physical doctors, not psychiatrists and psychologists. And they really didn't like to deal with psychiatry. They looked down on psychiatry, they looked down on psychology. They really investigated first and foremost the biological impact of the bomb radiation that was important for them. And they looked at psychiatry as something that was not very important. There was a push to have psychiatrists on board, but Grant Taylor here, one of the first directors, completely dismissed it and asked the doctors, as you can see here, to write a statement that will cover the responsibility of ABCC. Just, let's not talk about it. But what's important for me here is that what kind of argument he employed here. And it says here exactly the same here as the German doctors, that what happened in 1945 could not be isolated from many other important events of that era. Again, causation. You cannot draw the line from what happened in 45 to what happened now. Again and again, when they do talk about psychiatry, they say the psychological problems of survivors are derived from their situation right now. And when people did raise it up, like for example, Dr. Shimizu Kiyoshi, Shimizu Kiyoshi, they are seen as too sympathetic, not objective. Who is objective? The medical doctors in the ABCC. Who's not objective? Sociologists, psychiatrists, psychologists that criticize them, right? They're too emotional. They're not objective. Dr. Shimizu here, and a quote by Gilbert Beebe here in the letter saying that they cannot tolerate objectivity. And again, this is the main issue here. Who is get to be objective, right? Who gets to be apolitical, right? I see another quote here from George Arling about Robert Lifton, accused Lifton of being overpolitical or being a leftist, right? That he doesn't actually respect. And again, you can read those quotes better than I read it to you, but that they don't respect the survivors that we do. We respect the survivors. We were objective. We respect this and the sacrifice they did. And they just try to tar them with some weakness, physical or mental weakness, right? That expand where they broke down or had nightmares. Again, this is seen as something negative, right? Something negative, something people should not talk about, right? Unkind, and of course, leftist. Now, I didn't see ABCC doctors working and actually other doctors working on psychiatry in Hiroshima in the 50s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, but I did see was a lot of social work. There were social workers assigned by the ABCC for various reasons. And a lot of it got to do by the ABCC, a lot of it got to do with the fact that people had to voluntarily come to the ABCC. So the ABCC, here's Scotty Massimotto that worked for a bombing campaign before, hired all those people in order to learn more about survivors in order to help them understand why people come or don't come to the ABCC and actually to manage community relationships between the survivors and the ABCC. You see here in the first quote, this is basically their main goal. Now, the people they hire, a lot of them were survivors themselves, like Kodama Aki here, had this very 50s view of social work and psychological work. They wanted survivors to take their problems into perspective, to understand that it's their own duty and their own role to overcome, to reflect and to really adjust. It's all about adjustment, society. They shouldn't feel special. So you see here, I'm talking about how a lot of them, they feel special, their privilege. They take advantage. Again, there's a lot of suspicion of survivors. Again, she's a survivor herself, right? That people are uneasy and they dread radiation, but it's unscientific. It's emotional. Again, there's a contrast between emotions and science here. Again, don't take it really, take psychiatry seriously. And again, it's not that Kodama here and other people do not take it seriously. They understand there are problems, but they say that what they need is to go out of ambivalence, to go out of agony and self-reflect and self-recover, to pull themselves out of, I said in English, by their own bootstraps and take responsibility for their life. It's kind of a tough love attitude. And again, another survivor, another social worker here that said that his job is to help them to help themselves, right? The idea is the problem is within the survivor, not the environment, not the bomb, but something the survivor should overcome himself or herself. Now, so this is about social work, both outside the ABC and ABCC and about psychiatry outside ABC and in the ABCC. But what about doctors? What about the world of psychiatry and psychologists in Japan? What did they do? Why they didn't look at this? So, again, I'm being slightly reductive here, but basically, there was a tradition. There's a problem with the way the trauma was seen in the Japanese psychiatric establishment before the war, which is very much connected to the way it was seen by the German establishment during the war. During the war, the psychiatric establishment and all those people that were military, saw it as a Western thing. We people of the empire do not have those breakdowns. We don't have neurotic illnesses. This is a Western disease that came out of Western modernity, right? Our empire has especially high morale, right? You see here, Kamata Shiraba is a psychiatrist in the Japanese army. And if people are still traumatized and still want compensation and treatment, they're actually obsessed about the problem. They're obsessed about the problem. They're actually obsessed about the compensation and the treatment. This is directly from the German playbook. When people are pension neurotics, like Rente Neurotica or Osho Shinkesho in the Japanese case, people obsess about the pension. And that's what will make them sick, not what happened during the war. Again, causation. And you see similar, and the main person that worked at the psychiatry work, Kunon Masao, the main person who worked on survivors in Hiroshima, also had the exact same issues of causation, right? He researched veterans from the first time of Japanese war and Russian-Japanese war. And during the war, he worked mostly with veterans. And just like the way the German doctors looked at, denied the long-term suffering of German soldiers, also he, well, I wouldn't say denied, did not attribute this long-term suffering to psychiatric and psychological reasons, but to head trauma and other physical reasons. A lot of big factor that he talked about, and also the German talks about hunger and the fact that malnutrition and the fact that, and the permanent damage to a nerve system that will lead to the problems that he saw survivors, veterans are suffering now. He did not like to talk about just psychogenetic explanation. He wants something physical. He wants something biological, right? Now, the big problem that he was also alone, there was no long, there was no coalition of doctors like there was in the Holocaust case. There was no people who came together in big numbers. There were a couple of people who talked about what's called the Boura-Boura-Bio or A-bomb fatigue, which is similar to Gulf War syndrome. And it's about a lot of survivors claim they just lack energy and lack any kind of, and they are tired all the time. But again, this also always attribute to radiation impact, also attribute to head trauma, right? Now, he's always very cautious. You see here in this quote here, it's like, it is supposed or recognizable that those like diaphlegic and central regulation disturbance, talk about the nervous system here. It functions after effects of the A-bomb casualties, but it's not yet concluded the facts of direct relation. Again, direct relation causation, always looking for other factors, always very cautious, always not looking at psychology, but looking for mental issues, looking for physical issues. And you see, even with psychologists like Ueshi Toshi, the one we started with, you see very similar suspicion of what happened, like, and trying to look for more scientific, more objective, you know, he actually was very suspicious of survivors because of the trauma they experienced, because of the way they talk, because of the panic like situation. He saw their language fragmentary, their experiences fragmentary, and something we don't see similar, we cannot come up with a commonality, with scientifically enough, scientifically enough data in order to generalize and to come to objective. And again, this did not allow him, right, this over caution, this looking always for the most objective, the most commonly shared criteria, did not allow him to really reach any kind of any kind of conclusion about what happened to the survivors. And again, to connect what happened in 1945 with their problems now. Now, moving to, in the last 10 minutes or so, we have moving towards the end here. What changed? Okay, so what changed here was basically Vietnam, and the anti-nuclear movement, and coming to the scene of people like Robert Lipton, who was very, very politically motivated, and who looked for commonalities between Hiroshima and Holocaust survivors. Robert Lipton was Jewish American, he came from the same milieu of the people who fought for compensation, he had the Holocaust in mind when he came to Hiroshima, and he saw those commonalities, and he saw in survivors, both as a model, as people who fight for peace, and inspiration to his work, and also he saw them as a warning about what could happen, what is the real price of nuclear weapons, right? And he comes out comparing and contrasting Hiroshima and Holocaust survivors, what he called a trace of a survivor. Okay, the trace of a survivor. Survivors do not just experience atomic disaster, but it stays with them, right? Inhibited, incorporating their being, including all of its element of horror, evil, and particularly of death. The main problem is that death, that's why he called his book, Death and Life, death remained with the survivors. It leads to what he calls psychic closure, to come out of guilt, and it comes out of guilt. And this is the beginning of what will become eventually PTSD. This is not just in Holocaust and Hiroshima, also he worked very famously, even more famously on Vietnam vets, and he and a lot of other ducks of Shaitan and others came together eventually, and I'm really telegraphing here, to produce the Bruce PTSD in 1980. Again, rushing through the last five minutes. And you can see here the coming together of Holocaust and Hiroshima research in Detroit, and it was a conference of massive psychic trauma, Detroit 1968, that brought up this research. And this was eventually led to PTSD. Okay, and again, you can read those quotes faster than I read it to you. So, finishing up. So, we have PTSD now, why would it not be recognized? What happened in Hiroshima, right? So, he came to Hiroshima, came back to America, the whole new historical trajectory there. Now, what happened in Hiroshima is that after psychiatrists and psychologists basically stopped working on this in the 60s, and who took over were really committed sociologists. Just like Clifton, they were committed to fight the atomic bomb, just like Clifton. They were very connected survivors, but unlike Clifton, they did not see survivors carrying death with them, but overcoming death. Ishiro Tadashi, you see his book here, about the experience of the bomb game, like thinking, theorizing the experience of the bomb game. Very impacted by America, but you can see here that he was kind of almost hurt, and that Clifton theorized this before him. And he attributed to the experience of Auschwitz, he said, this is what Clifton had that we didn't have, that he'd had. And he also looked to Auschwitz, and specifically to Franco, to a mentor from Victor Franco, a mentor for meaning. And he took from Franco, this serious quote of Spinoza, about how to overcome suffering. Like Konuma, like Kubo, he's looking for objectivity. And he said, you can find objectivity, but he's not objectivity of the scientists, but of survivors, survivor gaining objectivity through reflection. And he has put this, used this quote from Spinoza that Franco used, about a suffering, seems to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. And what Franco does was an extremely objective way to get a sense of your own struggle. And he's talking here to social workers here. It's about how survivors can overcome suffering, and being able to compute a spiritual work of trying to convert their experiences into ideas, all right, into and going through such ideological work. So what's important for him is the ideological dimension of it, and overcoming, not wallowing in suffering, not caring suffering, not being a victim, but being a survivor, overcoming, right? What those people have, however, is not trauma, they overcame trauma, right? And this explain in here, I want to end, why still in 2009, you have, in 2009, 2010, you have court cases where hibakusha that were acknowledged as suffering from mental, from PTSD, and other mental issues, as hibakusha, people who survive, who experienced the bomb, are denying this as a legitimate concern. They don't deny PTSD, but deny that it's enough of an experience to make you a real hibakusha. What they want to acknowledge is that this, what they want, what they want people to know is they're suffering from radiation, not from trauma, not from PTSD, because what all this history actually led to is the rejection of PTSD as a standalone legitimate concern in Japan. There's no real acceptance of this as something that is legitimate still in Japan, which of course is not the case for us. And what you see in the West is when people look at this experience, and I said, there's like denial, there's like, people persistently denied the existence of PTSD. But what I think we see here is not denial, but inability to see, inability to professions, because they're entanglement with the military stuff, because they're entanglement with other scientific research like the ABC and other things, inability to see, ideological and otherwise, inability to see the problems that we now see after we have the category of PTSD. And it also, what I think, what I want to argue is like not to look for PTSD before PTSD, right? People do not talk about it in different times and different cultures using the same terms. And what might lead to more acceptance of what we now call PTSD in other places is trying to use the terms people use at a time in this particular culture and trying to not come from outside and put our categories into other times and other cultures, but trying to work with the term that was used at a time by the survivors, by the professionals that they have themselves and trying to work from this up. Okay, I'm going to finish now. Thank you very much for listening to me. And now we're going to have a short Q&A section, I think. Yeah, about two minutes short, but again, thank you very much. And thank you very much. And yeah, I'm looking forward to questions and answers. Thank you. So, there are questions in the chat. Yeah. Okay. So, there are no questions. Anybody want to come up and ask questions? If not, there's a couple of questions from the organizers here. Okay. So, the first question is, when did PTSD gain acceptance in Japan? What situation regards to nuclear trauma today? So, as I said, there's still an ongoing struggle by people who suffer from PTSD, again, to gain recognition, full recognition, full recognition from the government as a hibakusha, as a survivor, as people who suffer from radiation damage as well. I wouldn't say it's acceptance of PTSD, but it's much better than it used to be before. This has a lot to do with both 985 earthquake in Kobe and Fukushima. Fukushima is very important because it really led to people recognizing the long-term anxiety people suffer from radiation, and also the connection to the trauma from the tsunami and the nuclear disaster. Later on, there is a Japanese term for it now, kokoronakizu, wounds of the heart. There is much more established care system, and people know the term. But still, I would say people don't really talk about it too much openly because in Japan, mental issues are something that are considered much more clinical than in American context. So, a lot of people that talk to social psychiatrists and social workers and the like say that throughout most of this history, if people had mental issues, they were put in a hospital, and usually they never leave. That's a big problem in Japanese psychiatry. Hospitalization rates are pretty high, and there's not much work on clinics, outside clinics and community care, as much as there is in other places. So, it's still a work in progress so far. All right, second question. Can you explain the role of race and gender in history of PTSD in Hiroshima? Well, I don't know if you know this, but almost all people that I talked to so far were male, and 90% of people I spoke to so far were male, and most of them were white. And of course, this had a big impact on the way biases worked to inhibit research. Throughout most of this history, research was done by men while care was done by women. There is a genderization, is it even a word? Gender played a big role in who gets to do what, and while the men debated what exactly happened with trauma, people had to deal with the day-to-day care of survivors or women, either women in the community or social workers. 95% of social workers that I dealt with, maybe one or two, were male, but most of them were women. Most of them are the ones who came up with protocols of care, the ones who came up with their own ideas. They didn't really have much help from male professionals. In terms of race, it was a problem for Japanese. And I refer back to the quote I had with objectivity. They had to be more objective than their white counterparts. They're operating in a white world where the real scientific, real objective knowledge comes from America or Europe towards them. So they have to be more objective in a way, be more scientific, more precise, and more cautious. And I would argue that this had an impact of them actually contributing more to the now than others because they didn't have the privilege to rebel, or they didn't have the privilege to come up and say you are wrong because, again, they come from a different place. The power relations here are different. So in a way, the racial straitjacket that was put on them by the establishment did not allow them to rebel and be non-conformist the way that someone who was an insider like Robert Lifton could. The last question is about military and civilian psychiatry. And that's something that I thought a lot about because throughout all this, there's a big difference between veterans and civilians. And the veterans get the most attention, organized, institutionalized attention. And it's because they are, I mean, America have VA hospitals and you have military psychiatry. There's a big difference in level of resources given to them. And even though civilians were subject to really, really severe bombing, not even talking about the A-bomb, throughout all of Europe and Japan, there's almost no work done on the experience afterwards, which is kind of amazing if you think about how much work is done on the veterans. Right. And I think I just maybe started to look at what was the situation here, but it was doing much, much more work on what happened to civilians and how relationship between research on civilian victims. And the only one I can think of that got a lot of attention are maybe earthquake survivors and Holocaust survivors. Or Holocaust survivors more than others. And what happened with veterans and how the relationship between them. I tried it a little bit in a book, but they need to do much more work. All right. Any questions? Comments? I would love to hear them. If not, I guess we can finish. I don't see anything in the chat. Okay. So thank you very much for listening to me today. And I really want to thank the organizers for this opportunity to talk about my research. Thank you.

PTSD

atomic bombings

psychological consequences

Japanese psychiatric establishment

American psychiatric establishment

anti-nuclear movement

radiation effects

survivors

social workers

gender and race