[Special Feature: Passing Down the War] Ken Arisue: Learning and Passing Down the "History of Hibakusha Surveys" — Keio University and Hibakusha Surveys

Image: November 23, 1943, "After the Send-off Ceremony for Keio students Departing for the Front," Keio students leaving Mita through the Main Gate (Maboroshi no Mon)

In this special feature on "Passing Down the War," the atomic bombing experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are indispensable. However, when considering Keio University and "Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) surveys," the phrase "learning and passing down" came to mind rather than simply "passing down the story." I have continued my surveys and research from the perspective of sociology, and this field of the "history of Hibakusha surveys" is an area that is still being "learned and passed down" at Keio University today. As shown in the photo, it was 12 years ago in 2013 that we published "Reading Hibakusha Surveys: The Succession of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (Keio University Press), edited by Hideo Hama, Ken Arisue, and Hideki Takemura. The book's belly band reads, "Can we, who are not Hibakusha, inherit the memory of the atomic bombing?" This was precisely the starting point for "passing down memories of the war."

Before entering the "history of Hibakusha surveys," something that must be mentioned regarding "the Atomic Bomb and Keio University" is the poet Tamiki Hara and the presence of Isamu Noguchi, who was involved in the design of the monument in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Of course, among the many nameless Keio students and Keio University alumni, there must be victims from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Regarding this point, please refer to the "List of War Dead Related to Keio University in the Asia-Pacific War," created with the cooperation of Professor Atsushi Shirai of the Faculty of Economics and the Shirai Seminar. It is well known that Tamiki Hara, a poet of "Mita Bungaku," was a writer who wrote collections of atomic bomb poems, with "Summer Flowers" being his representative work. However, it is surprisingly little known that Isamu Noguchi worked with Kenzo Tange on the design of the monument for the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and that blueprints had been drawn, but the plan was withdrawn due to criticism against Noguchi for holding citizenship in the United States, the country that dropped the atomic bomb.

Next, I would like to look at the history of "Hibakusha surveys" from a social science perspective.

Slightly before the Ministry of Health and Welfare survey in 1965 (Showa 40), Keizo Yoneyama, a researcher of sociology and mass communication at the Keio University Faculty of Law, published "Social Change as Seen in the Atomic-Bombed City of Hiroshima" (Journal of Law, Politics, and Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 12, 1964). Keizo Yoneyama was a sociologist who entered the field through political psychology and took up public opinion polls and research early on, nurturing researchers such as Masaki Ikuta, Itsushu Totoki, and Takao Kawai in the Department of Political Science. In the Graduate School of Human Relations, he was an old acquaintance of Masami Chubachi, who studied "Theory of Living Structure" in the Faculty of Economics, but they were by no means in a cooperative relationship regarding the "Hiroshima Hibakusha Survey." Yoneyama's "social change approach" used American concepts of social disorganization and social change, but it did not involve entering the specific social survey of the bombed areas. Yoneyama's students, such as Takao Kawai, Katsuhiro Harada, and Shigeko Sato, entered the field in Hiroshima, but Masami Chubachi's "living structure" approach was subsequently adopted. In that sense, while Yoneyama's social change approach was quick to address the bombed city of Hiroshima, it did not reach the stage of a concrete social survey.

The Public Health Bureau of the Ministry of Health and Welfare embarked on the "1965 Survey on the Actual Status of Atomic Bomb Survivors" (hereafter abbreviated as the "1965 Survey") in November 1965. This was 20 years after the bombing, and the purpose was to investigate the health and living conditions of Hibakusha as data for national survivor support and to establish future support measures. In this "1965 Survey," two surveys were conducted in November 1965: a "Basic Survey" targeting all surviving Hibakusha nationwide, and a "Health and Living Survey" based on extracted samples. Subsequently, in March 1966, a "Special Survey" headed by Masami Chubachi and others was conducted. This project, which became the first interview survey on the "actual living conditions of atomic bomb survivors," included three researchers: Masami Chubachi (then Professor at Keio University), Mikio Sumiya (then Professor at the University of Tokyo), and Tadashi Ishida (then Professor at Hitotsubashi University), who were members (temporary committee members) of the Ministry of Health and Welfare's Atomic Bomb Medical Council. Chubachi's Keio team and Sumiya's Todai team (the actual work from preparation to implementation of the field survey was carried out by Hidemi Shimodaira, then an assistant at the University of Tokyo Faculty of Economics) led their respective graduate and undergraduate students in mutual cooperation to handle the Hiroshima area field. Meanwhile, Ishida's Hitotsubashi team formed a similar survey group to handle the Nagasaki area. Those who participated in this "1966 Case Study" were Takao Kawai, Shigeko Sato, and Katsuhiro Harada from the Chubachi team, and Hidemi Shimodaira from the Sumiya team. Since Mikio Sumiya, Masami Chubachi, and Tadashi Ishida were all major members of the Japan Association for Social Policy, it is thought that the Ministry of Health and Welfare requested them to play the leading roles in the "1965 Survey."

The conclusion of the Ministry of Health and Welfare's "1965 Survey" itself was that "there was no significant disparity between atomic bomb survivors and other general citizens in terms of the degree of calamity and damage caused by the war." However, the perception of the government differed from that of Masami Chubachi and Tadashi Ishida, who were actually in charge of the survey, as well as the assistants, young researchers, and graduate students. This is precisely one of the reasons why Hibakusha surveys continue to be passed down.

Chubachi and others continued to conduct "Hibakusha status surveys" thereafter. This was a life history survey in 1966 that followed 47 traceable cases through detailed interviews. This "1975 (Showa 50) Survey" was originally a continuation of the Ministry of Health and Welfare survey, but those who participated in the Keio team's survey included Masami Chubachi, Takao Kawai, Shigeko Sato, Katsuhiro Harada, Ryuji Komatsu, and Kiyoshi Nakagawa. These unpublished materials, including personal notes, were formerly stored in the Keio University Library as the so-called "Masami Chubachi Atomic Bomb Materials Collection." This collection, kept in cardboard boxes, was placed in the library by disciples such as Kiyoshi Nakagawa and Koji Terade when Chubachi retired from the Faculty of Economics in 1986. However, the boxes were not opened for 25 years until the "History of Hibakusha Surveys Study Group" (2013) led by Hideo Hama and others. The contents of the boxes were listed by study group members Ken Arisue, Hideki Takemura, Yasushi Ogura, and Koichiro Matsuo, and they were able to read the contents of the "personal notes" from the 1975 interview survey. However, it was impossible to obtain consent from the interviewees at that time, so the materials could not be made public. Nevertheless, the four of us were able to learn about the lives of the Hiroshima atomic bomb victims at that time and glimpse the thoughts of the surveyors. It was truly an act of "learning and passing down." Currently, the "Masami Chubachi Atomic Bomb Materials Collection" has been sent from the Keio library to the Center for Peace at Hiroshima University.

Hideo Hama of the Major in Sociology in the Faculty of Letters moved from the University of Tsukuba in 1998 as the successor to Ken Yamagishi. His specialties include sociological theory and the history of sociology, such as M. Weber, A. Schütz, and H. Garfinkel. On the other hand, during his time at the University of Tsukuba, his research themes also included the sociology of folklore and memory, such as the "Tsuchiura Air Group," "Yokaren (Naval Preparatory Flight Corps)," and "Gama no Abura (Toad Oil)." In "Sociology" (Yuhikaku, 2007 [New Edition: 2019]) by Koichi Hasegawa, Hideo Hama, Masayuki Fujimura, and Takashi Machimura, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is also described in the chapter on "History and Memory." Against this background, graduate students such as Yoshihiro Yagi, Shin Takayama, and Yutaka Kimura began to study professionally under Hama about the war and Hibakusha from their Master's programs. While Hama's research topics were in history and global points such as sites of memory and "theories of time and space," he was also interested in World War II and postwar Japan (see Hideo Hama, "Postwar Japanese Society: The Postwar of the 'Rokuko' Generation," Yuhikaku, 2023). "Previous research" is indispensable in the guidance of graduate students' theses, and I was also invited to join a study group with the aim of researching by holding a group called "Reading the History of Hibakusha Surveys." I invited Hideki Takemura, Koichiro Matsuo, and Yasushi Ogura, who were students of Kawai, to participate in the study group.

In "Reading Hibakusha Surveys," Hideo Hama, in the "Introduction," compares the radioactive contamination accident at the "Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant" caused by the "Great East Japan Earthquake" that occurred two years earlier and the evacuation zones with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Chapter 1 is Ken Arisue's "History of Social Surveys in Postwar Hibakusha Surveys," and Chapter 2 is Hideki Takemura's "Development of Masami Chubachi's 'Theory of Living Structure' and Two 'Hibakusha Life History Surveys'." Takemura scrutinizes and discusses the aforementioned "Hibakusha surveys" by Chubachi. Chapter 3 is "Memory Circuits Surrounding 'Nagasaki'" by Shin Takayama. In this paper, Takayama deals with Hidemi Shimodaira's "Corporations and the Atomic Bomb: From the Survey of Atomic Bomb Deaths at Mitsubishi Nagasaki Steel Works," but later published his own doctoral dissertation based on his interviews and Hibakusha surveys as "Becoming a 'Hibakusha': Life Story Interviews of the Transforming 'Self'" (Serica Shobo, 2016: this book received the 1st Toshihiko Izutsu Award from the Juku Faculty of Letters). Chapter 4 is Koichiro Matsuo's "The Community Depicted by the Hypocenter Restoration Survey: Minoru Yuzaki and the Group Participation Evaluation Method." The author of Chapter 5, Naohiro Fukaya, was enrolled in the Graduate School of Sociology at Hosei University, but joined our study group after his supervisor, Tomoyuki Suzuki, spoke to Hama. Since his field is Nagasaki, he wrote "Atomic Bomb Disaster Restoration Survey as an Act of Memorialization." His doctoral dissertation was also published as Naohiro Fukaya's "Practices of Inheriting Memories of the Atomic Bomb: A Sociological Study of the Preservation of Atomic Bomb Ruins and Peace Activities in Nagasaki" (Shinshosha, 2018). In Chapter 6, Yoshihiro Yagi takes up R. J. Lifton's "Death in Life" and writes "Possibilities of Research on Atomic Bomb Issues and the Lives of Hibakusha." In the next chapter, Yutaka Kimura, whose research theme was the "Great Tokyo Air Raid" and was later summarized in a doctoral dissertation, completed "'The Living and the Dead' in the Hiroshima Shudo University 'Atomic Bomb Experience' Survey" for this study group. The final chapter is Yasushi Ogura's "Survey Expression and Positionality Surrounding the Atomic Bomb Experience." Ogura examines the life history surveys and qualitative surveys of Lifton, Ishida, and others, and considers reflective survey methods and the positionality of the surveyor. The examination in "Reading Hibakusha Surveys" progresses from surveys of the actual living conditions of Hibakusha to life history surveys, theories of memory of experiences, sites and representations of memory, and succession by the post-experience generation. And now in 2025, a new generation of researchers is emerging.