The Voyage Of The Lucky Dragon

The family of fourteen-year-old Quan escapes from the aftermath of the war in Vietnam and with the aid of a sailor set sail in search of a new home.

On March 1, 1954, the U.S. exploded a hydrogen bomb at Bikini in the South Pacific. The fifteen-megaton bomb was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, and its fallout spread far beyond the official “no-sail” zone the U.S. had designated. Fishing just outside the zone at the time of the blast, the Lucky Dragon #5 was showered with radioactive ash. Making the difficult voyage back to their home port of Yaizu, twenty-year-old Oishi Matashichi and his shipmates became ill from maladies they could not comprehend. They were all hospitalized with radiation sickness, and one man died within a few months. The Lucky Dragon #5 became the focus of a major international incident, but many years passed before the truth behind U.S. nuclear testing in the Pacific emerged. Late in his life, overcoming social and political pressures to remain silent, Oishi began to speak about his experience and what he had since learned about Bikini. His primary audience was schoolchildren; his primary forum, the museum in Tokyo built around the salvaged hull of the Lucky Dragon #5. Oishi’s advocacy has helped keep the Lucky Dragon #5 incident in Japan’s national consciousness. Oishi relates the horrors he and the others underwent following Bikini: the months in hospital; the death of their crew mate; the accusations by the U.S. and even some Japanese that the Lucky Dragon #5 had been spying for the Soviets; the long campaign to win government funding for medical treatment; the enduring stigma of exposure to radiation. The Day the Sun Rose in the West stands as a powerful statement about the Cold War and the U.S.–Japan relationship as it impacted the lives of a handful of fishermen and ultimately all of us who live in the post-nuclear age.

This book explores how Japanese views of nuclear power were influenced not only by Hiroshima and Nagasaki but by government, business and media efforts to actively promote how it was a safe and integral part of Japan’s future. The idea of “atoms for peace” and the importance of US-Japan relations were emphasized in exhibitions and in films. Despite the emergence of an anti-nuclear movement, the dream of civilian nuclear power and the “good atom” nevertheless prevailed and became more accepted. By the late 1950s, a school trip to see a reactor was becoming a reality for young Japanese, and major events such as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and 1970 Osaka Expo seemed to reinforce the narrative that the Japanese people were destined for a future led by science and technology that was powered by the atom, a dream that was left in disarray after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.

This book provides a detailed examination of Japan's diplomatic relations in the 1950s, an important decade in international affairs when new structures and systems emerged, and when Japan established patterns in its international relationships which continue today. It examines the process of Japan's attempts to rehabilitate itself and reintegrate into a changing world, and the degree of success to which Japan achieved its goals in the political, economic and security spheres. The book is divided into three parts, each containing three chapters: Part I looks at Japan in the eyes of the Anglo-American powers; Part II at Japanese efforts to gain membership of newly forming regional and international organizations; and Part III considers the role of domestic factors in Japanese foreign policy making. Important issues are considered including Japanese rearmament and the struggle to gain entry into the United Nations. In contrast to much of the academic literature on post-war Japanese diplomacy, generally presenting Japan as a passive actor of little relevance or importance, this book shows that Japan did not simply sit passively by, but formed and attempted to instigate its own visions into the evolving regional and global structures. It also shows that whilst Japan did not always figure as highly as its politicians and policy makers may have liked in the foreign policy considerations of other nation states, many countries and organizations did attach a great deal of importance to re-building relations with Japan throughout this period of re-adjustment and transformation.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist exposes the sixty-seven US nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands that decimated a people and their land. The most important place in American nuclear history are the Marshall Islands—an idyllic Pacific paradise that served as the staging ground for over sixty US nuclear tests. It was here, from 1946 to 1958, that America perfected the weapon that preserved the peace of the post-war years. It was here—with the 1954 Castle Bravo test over Bikini Atoll—that America executed its largest nuclear detonation, a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. And it was here that a native people became unwilling test subjects in the first large scale study of nuclear radiation fallout when the ashes rained down on powerless villagers, contaminating the land they loved and forever changing a way of life. In Blown to Hell, Pulitzer Prize–winnng journalist Walter Pincus tells for the first time the tragic story of the Marshallese people caught in the crosshairs of American nuclear testing. From John Anjain, a local magistrate of Rongelap Atoll who loses more than most; to the radiation-exposed crew of the Japanese fishing boat the Lucky Dragon; to Dr. Robert Conard, a Navy physician who realized the dangers facing the islanders and attempted to help them; to the Washington power brokers trying to keep the unthinkable fallout from public view . . . Blown to Hell tells the human story of America’s nuclear testing program. Displaced from the only homes they had known, the native tribes that inhabited the serene Pacific atolls for millennia before they became ground zero for America’s first thermonuclear detonations returned to homes despoiled by radiation—if they were lucky enough to return at all. Others were ripped from their ancestral lands and shuttled to new islands with little regard for how the new environment supported their way of life and little acknowledgement of all they left behind. But not even the disruptive relocations allowed the islanders to escape the fallout. Praise for Blown to Hell “A shocking account of the destruction wrought by atomic bomb testing in the Marshall Islands from 1946 to 1958 . . . . Pincus makes a persuasive case that in “seeking a more powerful weapon for warfare, the U.S. unleashed death in several forms on peaceful Marshall Island people.” Readers will be appalled.” —Publishers Weekly “For more than half a century, Walter Pincus has been among our greatest reporters and most persistent truth-tellers. Blown to Hell is a story worthy of his talents—infuriating, heart-breaking, and utterly riveting.” —Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Liberation Trilogy

Modernity is made and unmade by the anecdotal. Conceived as a literary genre, a narrative element of criticism, and, most crucially, a mode of historiography, the anecdote illuminates the convergences as well as the fault lines cutting across modern practices of knowledge production. The volume explores uses of the anecdotal in exemplary case studies from the threshold of the early modern to the present.