While the role of the public intellectual is often defined by Edward Said’s now clichéd aphorism ‘speaking truth to power’, Noam Chomsky has rejected this as a pious phrase because, he argues, power works to conceal truth and it is the people who are oppressed by those in power –not those in positions of power – who need the truth. Furthermore, Chomsky divides public intellectuals into two distinct categories: conformist public intellectuals and dissident ones. For Chomsky, the dissident public intellectuals are important precisely for their dissension. While historically, conformist public intellectuals are:

respected and honoured … [they can] publish in the press and journals … they can shape and in fact design public policy. They can try to manipulate the public into accepting it, as this is a part of their role. The only way [dissident public intellectuals] can shape government policy is by addressing the population and the population can then, one way or another, affect public policy. (Atherton, In So Many Words, 94)

In this way, hibakusha poets form part of the dissident public intellectual minority in Japan, because they have had to act from the margins and are not favoured in the media for their dissenting views. Indeed, hibakusha were originally silenced by the censorship enforced by the Allied Occupation of Japan and then by discrimination in their own country, where they were considered ineligible for work and marriage due to their exposure to radiation. In this way, many hibakusha remained silent to avoid discrimination. Under American Occupation censorship, it was dangerous to write. Some hibakusha poets found ways to address the Japanese population with their activist poetry through independent printing and dissemination of their poems, often risking persecution and death. Writing subversively was an important part of finding a readership at a time when Japan’s publishing industry was controlled by the allied forces. Indeed, all publishing houses in Japan between October 1945 and November 1949, had to lodge two copies of every proposed publication to the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD) for review. If any part of a publication was deemed to contravene the Code, it was marked and publishing instructions were sent to the publisher with the returned manuscript. The second copy of the manuscript was kept as a record of the required changes:

Censorship action included deletions, complete suppression, publishing delays and other changes. No indication of censorship could appear in publications, such as blackening out of text or use of ellipses. Type had to be reset or spaces left by the deletions had to be filled with new material. (University of Maryland, N. pag.)

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Jay Rubin argues, ‘The literature that poured out after 1945 marked the beginning of a new age, an expressive explosion’ (71). Indeed, there was so much material being submitted that over six thousand people had to be employed by the CCD, to read the pre-publication material submitted. Most significantly, under these censorship laws, ‘The effects of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were effectively extracted, and thus quieted … [until] 1949 when formal restrictions on media about the bomb were finally lifted’ (Buono, n. Pag. The censorship has been called oversensitive and uneven in its application, but it was effective enough that ‘most Japanese, with the important exception of the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, encountered the atomic bomb experience for the “first time” in the final years of the Occupation’ (Selden xxxiii).

In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the silence stemmed from many hibakusha not wanting to speak about their experiences. As hibakusha, Matsumoto Tomiko, discussed in 2015:

There were many different kinds of discrimination. People said that girls who survived the bomb shouldn’t get married [due to the fear of birth defects, also called ‘monster children’]. Also they refused to hire the survivors, not only because of scars, but because they were so weak. Survivors did not have 100 per cent energy … I was shocked because I was discriminated against by Hiroshima people. We lived together in the same place and Hiroshima people knew what happened but they discriminated against each other. I was shocked. (qtd in Sara, N. pag).

These are fears that have re-surfaced in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Hibakusha poets such as Kurihara Sadako and Shōda Shinoe found ways to write about the atomic bomb during the Allied Occupation. Shōda ‘secretly published’ 150 copies of her poetry anthology in Hiroshima prison, which she handed out to friends and relatives. Kurihara published 3,000 copies of her book of poetry, Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs) in 1946. Poems such as ‘What is War?’, and three other poems, in their entirety, were withheld from publication for their descriptions of rape and war atrocities:

In fields where the grain rustles in the breeze,
sex-starved soldiers chase the women,
like demons on the loose.
At home they are good fathers, good brothers, good sons,
but in the hell of battle,
they lose all humanity
and rampage like wild beasts.

However, other poems, less overt, using metaphors and more subversive language, such as the famous “Let Us be Midwives! An Untold Story of the Atomic Bombing”, remained uncensored.

Hibakusha writers, as survivors of trauma, face the compulsion towards silence:

Writers of atrocity –and I will focus on the atrocity of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima –overcome the powerful urge of silence; they are, in the words of Minako Goto ‘reopening the grave’ which they have ‘tried to cover for good’. (Dougherty 2)

In this way, the silence of many hibakusha is a result of censorship, discrimination and the experience of trauma. Hibakusha poets who can be identified as public intellectuals had to find ways to reach a large public and this was difficult, dangerous, confronting, and often a slow process. For example, it took almost 50 years after the bombing of Hiroshima for Kurihara’s Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs) to be translated into English and reach an international public:

the real human experience of the atomic bombing was not made visible until so-called ‘atomic bomb literature’ came to be translated after a certain period of silence, and after historical facts were examined and knowledge accumulated’ (Hayakawa 111)