The warlike nations do not inherit the earth.
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion
The first point I wish to make is that the history of Hiroshima does not begin in 1945, or in 1952 when U.S. Occupation and censorship ended and Japan regained self-rule, but in 1954. A pronounced silence, voluntary or enforced, in Japan on Hiroshima during the first ten years contrasts sharply with the immediate interest in the Westbeginning with works such as John Hershey's 1946 classic Hiroshimathat seemed to emanate from a rather self-centered attitude of "what have we wrought?" While Westerners and the world at large contemplated the implications of this new weapon, Japanese at the time were mostly concerned with the more mundane problems of finding enough food to eat or trying to piece their families and communities back together.
Even as Hiroshima was being claimed by the world (while still waiting to be discovered in Japan), the foundations for how Hiroshima would be later contextualized were being built by Yoshida Shigeru, the U.S. Occupation's choice for prime minister of Japan. Yoshida's influence was determinant in shaping the conditions for peace in postwar Japanese politics. As Japan's prime minister for most of the period from 1946 to 1954, Yoshida was almost singularly responsible for gaining Japanese acquiescence to, if not acceptance of, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which was coupled with the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 as the precondition for the return of Japanese autonomy. The treaty was controversial among many critics of Yoshida on the left for establishing a "one-sided" peace rather than a "multi-sided" peace, that is, for ending the war with the United States under American conditions rather than with all powers hostile to Japan, most notably the Soviet Union. It was, then, within this context of Japanese dependency on the United States, that the "Peace Problem" began to take shape in postwar Japan.

If Japan becomes a colony of the United States, it will also eventually become the stronger.
Yoshida Shigeru, cited by John Dower in
Empire and Aftermath
Yet almost from its inception, the peace movement in Japan was seriously compromised as a viable source of political criticism. The Yoshida Doctrine held that Japan should eschew political and military commitments, remain as lightly armed as possible, and focus its energies and resources on economic affairs. In this context, the postwar Constitution and its controversial Article 9, which abolished war as a sovereign right of the Japanese state, were essential ingredients to a newly defined sense of national identity. Peace was attractive to conservatives like Yoshida, and more than fifty distinguished intellectuals rallied together in 1948 to form the Peace Problem Symposium, giving the symposium a character that Kataoka Tetsuya has described in The Price of a Constitution as "weighted in favor of the political center and center Right." A brief interregnum in Yoshida's hold on power occurred in 1948, when the socialist Ashida Hitoshi served as prime minister under U.S. Occupation, and many socialists found it advantageous not to risk offending the United States, on whom they relied for Japan's security when push came to shove.
But with Yoshida back in office and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, positions on peace began to shift again. Now, the socialists supported "peace" as a way of criticizing the United States, and Yoshida grew increasingly intolerant of attacks on his government, which came just as Japan was benefiting from the economic effects of the Korean War. Yet Yoshida resisted John Foster Dulles when he visited Tokyo three times between June 1950 and January 1951 in an effort to get Japan to rearm. Finally, when Yoshida sent an emissary to Socialist Party leaders Suzuki Mosaburo and Katsumada Seiichi to request a staging of antirearmament demonstrations, the limitations of "peace" as a leftist position became clear. Socialists were encouraged to do their thing with peace simply because it would serve the interests of the conservative government. To those Japanese frustrated by the interlocked nature of left and right positions on peace, Yasuda Yojuro, a cultural conservative who had advocated ethnic nationalism in the wartime years, offered his fellow Japanese a third choice to what he considered the false alternatives of the American or Soviet camps. Against this modern way, Yasuda proposed a third way: the defense of Article 9 as the only means for Japanese to survive as a nation. Although Yasuda was a firm believer in Japanese nationalism, he also identified this "third way" as that of "Asia as eternal peace," thus proposing a concept that would soon gather momentum among Japanese peace advocates and intellectuals and further complicate political distinctions of left and right, progressive and conservative, in postwar Japan.
Against this background of the complexity of peace in postwar Japanese politics, the atomic issue emerged in 1954. The immediate reason was the third instance of Japanese suffering the effects of atomic weapons at the hands of the United States. When the United States exploded a hydrogen bomb on Bikini atoll in March, a Japanese fishing vessel, the Fukuryu Maru, was fishing in the vicinity and members of the crew fell ill from the effects of the radiation. Six months later, one crew member, Aikichi Kuboyama, died. Within a month after the incident occurred, the boat's home port, Yaizu, passed a resolution denouncing nuclear bombs, and the antinuclear movement swept through Japan. On August 6, 1955, the tenth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs convened in Hiroshima. The coalition of movements behind the Japan Council was a complicated one. Some were against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, while others sought to preserve the postwar Japanese Constitution as an antiwar Constitution. Initially, the Japan Communist Party (which was closely allied with the Soviet Union) was cool to the antinuclear movement, because the Soviets had the most to gain at the time from nuclear testing. Yet when it was clear that the movement had popular support (more than 20 million signatures were obtained in a nationwide petition drive), all political parties began competing for influence over the movement.
The timing of the formation of the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs is crucial, because it occurred just as the major political parties were moving toward consolidation. In late 1955, the two conservative parties, Yoshida's Liberal Party and Hatoyama's Democratic Party, merged into the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to avoid a takeover by the newly consolidated Japan Socialist Party, which had just brought together its right and left wings in a fragile balance. Significantly, this meant that under the "1955 System" one could find defenders of the "peace constitution" in Yoshida's faction of the conservatives and in the left wing of the Socialist Party.
The next important moment in the development of Hiroshima as national emblem was the 1960 mass riots over the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Those who opposed the revision included activists on the left (anticapitalist camp) and those on the right (anti-Japanese dependency on a foreign state camp), as well as a broad spectrum of ordinary citizens. Significantly, most classic works in Japanese on Hiroshima were written in the years following the Security Treaty riots, especially after Prime Minister Ikeda began implementing his policy of "income doubling" as economic growth increasingly substituted for political struggle. In 1965, Ibuse Masuji started serializing his classic novel, Black Rain (not the Michael Douglas movie!), in a leading journal, and this year's Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo published his Hiroshima Notes.
These very different works, however, must also be seen within the context of changes in the politics of Hiroshima in Japan. In the aftermath of LDP support for the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs was increasingly coming under the control of the Japan Communist Party. So in 1961 the LDP aligned itself with a new group, the Council for Peace and Against Nuclear Weapons, and began to formulate its party's opposition to nuclear weapons. This policy was given unequivocal expression in December 1967, when LDP Prime Minister Sato Eisaku announced his party's "three non-nuclear principles," further contributing to the view that the LDP was merely an extension of the entire Japanese nation's aversion to nuclear weapons that stemmed from Hiroshima.

Japan, be a state!
Shimizu Ikutaro, inShokun, July 1980
As John Dower has pointed out in "Peace and Democracy in Two Systems," the LDP was able to coopt the antinuclear movement partly because of "an insular strain in the movement itself." That is, while foreigners in Japan were often taken in by the "global peace" interpretation of Hiroshima, in Japan itself nationalism often was deeply involved in the peace movement. Indeed, even as late as the 1980s, the nation remained the battleground over attitudes toward nuclear weapons in Japan. The decade opened with Shimizu Ikutaro urging his fellow citizens to grow up and exercise the nuclear option: "If nuclear arms are important, and if Japan has a special status as the first nuclear victim," Shimizu argued in his provocative essay "The Nuclear Option: Japan, Be a State," "Japan should indeed have the right to make and maintain nuclear weapons before anyone else." And he added, "Is this not common sense?" But the Yoshida faction of the LDP government quickly rebutted Shimizu's views. The very next year Nagai Yonosuke proposed a view of Japan as a "moratorium state," thus suggesting that Japan's authorized suspension of its right to wage war was legitimate and did not require a rethinking of the foundations of the postwar "peace state." Peace was, in fact, serving the national interests just fine.