Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Depiction, Public Response and Censorship

Depiction, Public Response and Censorship

During the war "annihilationist and exterminationalist rhetoric" was tolerated at all levels of US society; according to the UK embassy in Washington the Americans regarded the Japanese as "a nameless mass of vermin". Caricatures depicting Japanese as less than human, e.g. monkeys, were common. A 1944 opinion poll that asked what should be done with Japan found that 13% of the US public were in favor of "killing off" all Japanese: men, women, and children.

News of the atomic bombing was greeted enthusiastically in the US; a poll in Fortune magazine in late 1945 showed a significant minority of Americans wishing that more atomic bombs could have been dropped on Japan. The initial positive response was supported by the imagery presented to the public (mainly the powerful mushroom cloud) and the censorship of photographs that showed corpses of people incinerated by the blast as well as photos of maimed survivors. Wilfred Burchett was the first journalist to visit Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped, arriving alone by train from Tokyo on 2 September, the day of the formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri. His Morse code dispatch was printed by the Daily Express newspaper in London on 5 September 1945, entitled "The Atomic Plague", the first public report to mention the effects of radiation and nuclear fallout. His report is more fully recorded in his book, Shadow of Hiroshima.

Burchett's reporting was unpopular with the U.S. military. U.S. censors suppressed a supporting story submitted by George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, and accused Burchett of being under the sway of Japanese propaganda. William L. Laurence of The New York Times dismissed the reports on radiation sickness as Japanese efforts to undermine American morale, ignoring his own account of Hiroshima's radiation sickness published one week earlier. During the U.S. occupation of Japan, and under General MacArthur's orders, Burchett was for a time barred entrance to Japan. A member of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, Lieutenant Daniel McGovern, used a film crew to document the results. The film crew's work resulted in a three-hour documentary entitled The Effects of the Atomic Bombs Against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The documentary included images from hospitals showing the human effects of the bomb; it showed burned out buildings and cars, and rows of skulls and bones on the ground. When sent to the US, it was mentioned widely in the US press, then quietly suppressed and never shown. It was classified "top secret" for the next 22 years. During this time in America, it was a common practice for editors to keep graphic images of death out of films, magazines, and newspapers. The total of 90,000 feet (27,000 m) of footage filmed by Lieutenant Daniel McGovern's cameramen had not been fully aired As of 2009. However, according to Greg Mitchell, with the 2004 documentary film Original Child Bomb, a small part of that footage managed to reach part of the American public "in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended".

Imagery of the atomic bombings was suppressed in Japan during the occupation although some Japanese magazines had managed to publish images before the Allied occupation troops took control. The Allied occupation forces enforced censorship on anything "that might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility", and pictures of the effects on people on the ground were deemed inflammatory. A likely reason for the banning was that the images depicting burn victims and funeral pyres were similar to the widely circulated images taken in liberated Nazi concentration camps.

Motion picture company Nippon Eigasha started sending cameramen to Nagasaki and Hiroshima in September 1945. On 24 October 1945 a US military policeman stopped a Nippon Eigasha cameraman from continuing to film in Nagasaki. All Nippon Eigasha's reels were then confiscated by the American authorities. These reels were in turn requested by the Japanese government, declassified, and saved from oblivion. Some black-and-white motion pictures were released and shown for the first time to Japanese and American audiences in the years from 1968 to 1970.